Government transparency advocates have a popular saying: “Information delayed is information denied.” Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral administration is now testing that proposition with a comprehensive policy of delay.
Beginning this spring, the New York City Mayor’s Office started assigning a roughly six-month response date to nearly every records request made under the state’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), without regard to the subject matter of any given request. The Manhattan Institute is asking a court to put an end to the practice.
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Our lawsuit was triggered by a narrow request we made about Ana Maria Archila, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs. In July, City Journal reported that she would meet with Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations. The report said that Archila had not informed Mayor Mamdani about the meeting and that it had been canceled after the administration learned of it.
The incident prompted clear questions: What other meetings have been organized by Archila or have taken place without the mayor’s knowledge? On July 9, we asked for a list of Archila’s appointments with people outside of city government since January 1.
Our request was not a wide net cast over the last several years of correspondence between multiple agencies; rather, it sought information on scheduling records for just one official over six months. Besides, City Journal had already seen her invitation to the Iran meeting; we knew there was at least one responsive document.
Four days later, on July 13, the Mayor’s Office notified us that we could expect the response around January 11, 2027. We immediately appealed this response as a refusal due to the unexplained six-month delay. On July 31, the Mayor’s Office denied our appeal. It cited the time and effort sometimes needed to review voluminous amounts of documents. The office did not specify how many records there were and why they were so difficult to go through.
The New York State Legislature hasn’t imposed an inflexible stopwatch on public record handling, but it does expect prompt disclosure. Under FOIL § 89(3)(a), an agency has five business days to disclose records, deny the request, or acknowledge receipt and provide an approximate response date that is reasonable under the circumstances. If an agency has records to disclose but circumstances prevent disclosure within 20 business days after acknowledgment, the agency must explain why in writing and provide a date certain within a reasonable period.
State regulations direct officials to consider request-specific factors, including volume, complexity, retrieval difficulty, necessary review, and the agency’s overall request load. The law allows additional time when justified. It does not create a universal six-month grace period.
The Mayor’s Office’s own data strongly suggest that the January date was not the product of an individualized assessment. We reviewed and downloaded entries in the city’s OpenRecords portal. From April 14 through July 30, 2025—during Mayor Eric Adams’s last year in office—only one of 104 Mayor’s Office requests received a response date roughly six months away.
The figures for 2026 (Mamdani took office on January 1) tell a different story. In that same window, 220 out of 248 requests, or 88.7 percent, were given the six-month treatment. The proportion climbed to 92.4 percent in the May to July quarter. One can hardly miss that all 169 open requests from those months bore an approximate six-month date.
Do not mistake this for a blanket FOIL policy being imposed on the city. Take the Mayor’s Office: between January and July 2025, only 1.7 percent of its requests were given a six-month deadline. By 2026, that had leapt to 43.4 percent, a change that took hold after April 14. Our review has turned up no other agency so at odds with its own recent habits.
To be sure, there is the matter of backlogs. But a first-in, first-out queue is no substitute for the approach to disclosure that FOIL demands. It is not reasonable under any circumstance to equate a request for one official’s calendar, on the one hand, with a trawl through years of correspondence by several custodians, on the other, and place them on the same timelines.
An office short on capacity should triage the easy work, put in place rolling productions, see to better recordkeeping, or put more people on it. It is not acceptable to address a management issue by effectively nullifying the public’s right to know.
Transparency is about timing as much as anything. When a controversy is in the making, records are what drive the reporting, oversight, and legislative debate. To be told in January that a decision on a July request is coming is to have the news after the story has run its course and the officials have moved on. Put off disclosure until the civic moment is over and you have denied it in all but name.
The administration understands this principle when transparency serves its agenda. In July, it launched a housing tracker and touted its “unprecedented public transparency.” New Yorkers should welcome proactive disclosure. But transparency is not limited to dashboards that City Hall chooses to publish. It also includes the calendars, communications, and facts informing decisions that the public chooses to examine.
Our lawsuit asks the court to declare the Mayor’s Office’s response unlawful, order it to produce the requested records within five days, and award the attorney’s fees and costs permitted by FOIL. More broadly, the case asks the court to enforce a modest rule: before City Hall makes a requester wait six months, it must have a request-specific reason for doing so.
Some large and complex FOIL requests will reasonably take months. Ours is not a claim that every request must be completed in 20 business days or that a six-month estimate can never be lawful. It is a challenge to an apparent policy under which the answer is “six months” before the office even looks at what is requested.
A statutory right of access cannot depend on whether an administration finds a request convenient. Nor should Mayor Mamdani be allowed to establish a playbook that future mayors can use to run out the clock on public scrutiny.
City Hall has turned FOIL into a six-month waiting room for everyone. That is why we are suing.