Agency Declarations


 * This article is part of a series on Litigation

Requirements
Agency declarations are often official written statements by agency FOIA officers or records management personnel in which the agency staff who conducted the search for responsive records will explain the nature and scope of their search parameters. In Shapiro v. United States Department of Justice, 944 F.3d 940, 943 (D.C. Cir. 2019), the judge reaffirmed that conclusory declarations explaining non-responsiveness determinations will not support summary judgment for the agency. Specifically, the court's holding in this case appears to pave the way for the argument that an agency must offer a non-conclusory explanation for situations in which there is a “hit” for a search term (e.g., a discrete keyword search) and the documents are later deemed to be non-responsive. See id.