Milner v. Department of the Navy
The Supreme Court ruled that the Navy could not use the Freedom of Information Act's Exemption 2 -- meant to cover internal personnel matters like parking and sick leave -- to withhold maps and data showing the blast radius of explosives stored at a Puget Sound naval base.
The decision rejects a 30-year-old lower-court approach that let agencies withhold almost any internally used records if disclosure might let someone skirt the law, narrowing that exemption back to genuine human-resources material and pushing agencies toward other, more specific FOIA exemptions for security-sensitive information.
“An agency’s “personnel rules and practices” are its rules and practices dealing with employee relations or human resources.”
The Court's core definition narrowing what Exemption 2 actually covers.
How it got here: A federal trial court and the Ninth Circuit sided with the Navy under a broad reading of Exemption 2; the Supreme Court took the case to resolve a circuit split.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A Puget Sound resident asked the Navy for data used to plan how explosives are stored at a naval base on Indian Island, including maps showing the distances explosions could travel. The Navy refused, citing a fear that disclosure would help someone target the base, and invoked a Freedom of Information Act exemption meant for internal personnel matters.
The question before the Court
Could the Navy use a public-records law exemption for "internal personnel rules" to withhold maps showing how far explosions could travel at a weapons storage base?
Why it matters
Government agencies that had relied for decades on a broad reading of Exemption 2 to withhold sensitive but non-personnel records -- building blueprints, computer security plans, safety data -- must now find another legal basis, such as the classification or law-enforcement exemptions, or turn the records over. Reporters and citizens seeking such records gain a narrower set of agency excuses for withholding them.
What changes now
The case goes back to the lower courts, where the Navy can still argue that the maps and data qualify for withholding under a different FOIA exemption -- Exemption 7(F), covering law-enforcement-related records whose release could endanger someone's safety -- an argument the courts below never resolved. The ruling is final on the meaning of Exemption 2 but leaves the ultimate fate of these specific records open on remand.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether the Navy can still withhold the explosives data under a different exemption, such as the one for law-enforcement or safety-related records, or under classification rules. It left that question, and the broader question of whether Congress should create a new exemption, open.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Alito
Justice Alito agreed the 'High 2' reading of Exemption 2 cannot survive but wrote separately to explain why the Navy has a strong argument under a different provision, Exemption 7(F), on remand. He argued that 'law enforcement purposes' includes crime-prevention and security work, not just investigations and prosecutions, so records compiled to protect the base from attack could qualify even without an ongoing investigation.
Dissent — Justice Breyer
“Crooker’s analysis was careful and its holding reasonable.”Breyer's defense of the decades-old lower-court approach the majority rejected.
Justice Breyer argued the Court should have deferred to the D.C. Circuit's 30-year-old Crooker interpretation, which nearly every circuit had followed and which Congress implicitly acknowledged without correcting. He contended that interpretation sensibly balanced FOIA's disclosure goals against the government's practical need to protect sensitive internal information like blueprints, computer passwords, and security plans, and that overturning it now creates disruptive uncertainty with no clear substitute protection.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court focused on the actual wording of Exemption 2, which shields material 'related solely to the internal personnel rules and practices of an agency,' and asked what the word 'personnel' ordinarily means when used to describe rules and practices.
- Dictionary definitions and FOIA's own use of 'personnel' elsewhere (in the exemption covering personnel and medical files) showed that the term refers to human-resources matters -- hiring, pay, benefits, discipline -- not simply anything that involves employees doing their jobs.
- The Court rejected the lower courts' 'High 2' approach, developed in a D.C. Circuit case called Crooker, which had stretched the exemption to cover any predominantly internal material whose release might let someone dodge a law or regulation, because that approach abandoned the statute's actual text.
- The Court also rejected the Navy's fallback reading -- that the exemption covers any rule that helps personnel do their jobs -- because that would strip the word 'personnel' of any limiting effect and let the exemption swallow up the narrower, more specific exemptions Congress wrote for law enforcement and classified records.
- Applying the correct, narrower reading, the Court found that data and maps about explosive blast distances have nothing to do with personnel rules and practices, since they concern the physical handling of dangerous materials rather than workplace rules for employees.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Department of Air Force v. Rose (425 U.S. 352)
The Court relied on Rose's reasoning that Exemption 2 covers only routine internal matters like parking and sick leave.