FDA FOIA Monitor
Why is the July issue published in August? FDA releases its monthly FOIA log several weeks after month-end. Each issue of FDA FOIA Monitor analyzes the most recent data available, this issue covers July 1 through July 31. New here? Start with the 2020–2026 Baseline Report for full historical context.
Five Things That Changed in July
- FDA closed 935 requests in July, up from June's 712, the first month-over-month increase since April.
- Median processing time held at 23 days for the second month running, exactly matching June. That's the "does the speedup hold" question from last issue answered, so far, yes.
- Release rate dropped to 64.3%, down almost 10 points from June's 74.0% and the lowest of the year, while withdrawals jumped from 31 to 205.
- Individual/citizen requesters extended their lead for a third straight month, now 37.1% of closings (up from 31.9% in June and 25.7% in May). This is starting to look structural, not seasonal.
- A 2016 Wall Street Journal request for Theranos Inc. records was released this month, 3,749 days after it was filed, in the middle of the scandal that ended the company. Full story below.
The Month in Numbers
| Metric | July 2026 | June 2026 | MoM |
|---|---|---|---|
| Requests Closed | 935 | 712 | +31.3% |
| Median Processing Time | 23 days | 23 days | Flat |
| Release Rate | 64.3% | 74.0% | −9.7 pts |
| Avg Processing Time | 150 days | 89 days | +69% |
| Withdrawals | 205 | 31 | +561% |
| Formal Denials | 0 | 0 | — |
Year-over-year: July 2026 closed 935 requests vs. July 2025's 856 (+9.2%), with a much faster median (23 days vs. 35) but a lower release rate (64.3% vs. 85.5%) and a much higher average (150 days vs. 97), the same median/average split described below shows up YoY too.
Median Processing Time, Month by Month
Bar length (in block characters) proportional to median days, scaled to February's 58.5-day high.
One takeaway: July held at the exact same 23-day median as June, the first time back-to-back months have landed on an identical number all year. Combined with May's 17 days, that's three straight months in the high-teens to low-twenties, a real change in pace from the January-to-March stretch, not a one-month blip.
Speed Held. Release Rate and Withdrawals Didn't.
July is the mirror image of June. Median processing time stayed exactly flat at 23 days, the closest thing to a confirmed trend this dataset has offered in 2026. But release rate fell almost 10 points to 64.3%, the weakest of the year, and withdrawals jumped more than sixfold, from 31 in June to 205 in July.
Last issue we wrote that withdrawal drops usually signal FDA working through backlog rather than requesters giving up. This month is a useful correction to that rule of thumb: the withdrawal spike is not a broad backlog story. Three identifiable clusters account for most of it. Zimmerman Reed LLP, a law firm, withdrew 21 510(k) requests that were all opened the same day back in February and pulled as a batch roughly five months later. The most likely explanation: FDA doesn't send a fee estimate until a request actually reaches the front of the queue, and for a commercial or litigation-use requester like a law firm, that estimate covers full search, review, and duplication, not just copying costs. A five-month wait from filing to withdrawal lines up with how long it typically takes FDA to reach a batch this size and come back with a number. 510(k) full-submission fee estimates commonly land anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per device depending on page count, since review time (redacting trade secrets line by line) is the real cost driver, not the per-page copying fee. Twenty-one separate devices at that rate adds up fast, and a firm that was casting a wide net rather than targeting specific devices may simply have decided the total bill wasn't worth it once the number arrived.
A commercial requester filing as Canary Data opened and withdrew 20 requests within days of each other in early July, probably due to reasons similar to Zimmerman Reed’s withdrawals. And three individual filers tied to Apotex withdrew 37 ANDA-related requests between them. Apotex was also July's single busiest company at 39 total closings, so a meaningful share of this month's volume and its withdrawal spike is really one company's FOIA program cycling through requests, not a market-wide signal.
The average-vs-median gap tells a related but separate story. July's average processing time jumped to 150 days even as the median held at 23, because 82 of the month's 935 closings had been open more than a year, and 35 had been open more than 1,000 days. FDA is working through genuinely old backlog alongside its current-month queue, and that backlog is what's pulling the average up, not a slowdown in how new requests are handled.
Individual Requesters, Three Months and Counting
Individual/citizen requesters extended their lead to 37.1% of July closings, the third consecutive month they've topped the list (25.7% in May, 31.9% in June). That's a real trend now, not a single data point. One caveat: about 6% of this category's July volume (20 of 347 closings) came from a single filer, Canary Data, whose batch of quick withdrawals is discussed above, so the underlying broad-based growth is slightly smaller than the headline number suggests, though still the largest share of any group.
Law Firm's share also rose, from 6.2% to 8.6%, almost entirely explained by Zimmerman Reed's 21-request withdrawal batch, which alone made up over a quarter of all law-firm closings this month.
| Requester Type | July 2026 | % of Month | June 2026 % |
|---|---|---|---|
| Individual / Citizen | 347 | 37.1% | 31.9% |
| Regulated Industry | 232 | 24.8% | 25.0% |
| Commercial FOIA Service | 212 | 22.7% | 25.1% |
| Law Firm | 80 | 8.6% | 6.2% |
| News / Media | 52 | 5.6% | 8.1% |
| Academic / Research | 8 | 0.9% | 2.9% |
| Advocacy / NGO | 4 | 0.4% | 0.7% |
A 2016 Request, Answered in the Middle of the Theranos Aftermath
Control #2016-3421 · Other · Theranos Inc. · 3,749 days waited
Requested: The Wall Street Journal's records request on Theranos Inc, filed in April 2016, just months after the paper's own reporting had begun unraveling the company's claims about its blood-testing technology.
Released: July 2026, over ten years and three months after the paper filed the request.
Why it matters: This is one of the oldest open requests we've seen close, and it was filed by the same newsroom whose reporting triggered Theranos's collapse and its founder's eventual conviction. By the time FDA released these records, the company had been dissolved for years and the story had already been told in books, a documentary, and a trial. It's a reminder that FOIA timelines can run so far behind the news cycle that the record arrives only for the historical account, not the breaking story.
Request this now: Search this record in the database.
More Notable Long-Waited Records
A running list of other interesting long-delayed releases surfacing in the log recently, not limited to July closings, but all recent enough to be fresh:
Control #2019-7857 · 2,485 days · CNBC
CNBC went after FDA's internal correspondence about Apple, its ECG feature, and atrial fibrillation, records that would show what the agency and the company were actually discussing behind the scenes as Apple built health-monitoring features into the Apple Watch. Filed in 2019, released this June, nearly six and a half years later.
Control #2019-4753 · 2,581 days · Informed Consent Action Network
A request for the underlying clinical trial reports FDA relied on when it approved Merck's MUMPSVAX mumps vaccine, the kind of foundational approval data that vaccine-transparency advocates have pushed FDA to release for years. Seven years from filing to release.
Control #2022-7119 · 1,363 days · The New York Times
Not the underlying incident data itself, but the record layout and field definitions needed to actually interpret it, the technical documentation a newsroom needs before it can turn a government database into a story. Three and a half years for the paper to get the map before it can read the territory.
483s' Share of FOIA Volume Keeps Shrinking. Three Months Running.
Form 483 inspection observation requests are still FDA FOIA's single largest doc type all-time, over 17,500 requests closed since 2015. Speed hasn't been the issue this year: July's 483s closed at a 15-day median, essentially flat with June's 14 and still one of the fastest tracks FDA offers.
What's changed is share of the total. 483s made up 46% of May's closings, 41% of June's, and just 32% of July's, three straight months of decline. That's now a real trend rather than a single-month wobble, and it lines up with the requester-mix shift described above: as individual/citizen filers keep growing as a share of total volume, and they file across a much wider range of doc types than industry and commercial FOIA services do, the 483 share of the pie shrinks even though 483 request counts and speed haven't materially changed.