Federal Regulations

Agencies Race to Rewrite FOIA Rules Before Fall Ends

Within the same week, the State Department and the U.S. Access Board both finalized overhauls of their public records regulations, the latest sign that agencies are modernizing FOIA on their own timelines rather than waiting for Congress.

Federal Register, Sept. 21 & 23, 2026

On September 21, the State Department published a final rule titled “Public Access to Information”, revising the FOIA and public records procedures codified at 22 CFR Part 171. Two days later, on September 23, the U.S. Access Board finalized its own revised FOIA regulations, according to a separate Federal Register filing. The back-to-back publications mark two of several agency-level FOIA rule updates to clear the Federal Register this year.

Neither agency is rewriting its intake procedures in isolation. Other federal offices have moved on similar fronts this fall, continuing a broader push toward centralized, trackable FOIA intake across government (see Also This Week, below).

For FOIA offices, the practical effect of a finalized rule rarely stops at the regulation itself. New procedures typically mean updated request forms, revised response-time calculations, and new training for staff who have to explain the change to requesters used to the old process. Agencies that already run their caseload through a modern case management platform tend to absorb these updates as configuration changes. Agencies still tracking requests in spreadsheets and shared inboxes often have to rebuild parts of the process from scratch.

Armedia and ArkCase will keep tracking agency-level rule revisions as they move through the Federal Register, since these smaller, less-publicized changes often reshape day-to-day FOIA operations more than the headline-grabbing lawsuits do.