These Federal Officers Wield the Power of Transparency

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It's April 2014, and hundreds of protesters are gathered near a dusty Nevada overpass about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Some wave American flags from their cell. Others, the yellow don't tread on me flag. It's like a scene behind me.

Cowboy hats, cowboy boots, jeans, shirts, on the back of horses. Michael Sarich is working for the Bureau of Land Management at the time. Very agency these protesters have come to stare down. By the afternoon, singing turns into something more serious. A man in a black ball cap in tactical vest is belly flat on the overpass.

The barrel of his military style rifle is threaded through a gap in the concrete barrier. He's looking down on BLM Rangers that had beads on essentially federal BLM officers. It's officially an armed standoff. In all of this, over some cows. The standoff started with Cliven Bundy, a rancher who was grazing cattle on government land.

He had used this land for decades and decades and decades. And it paid fees to the federal government. You're religiously for decades upon decades. But after some permit disputes in the early '90s, he decided that Washington no longer had the right to charge it. That he had an ancestral right to the land because his Mormon descendants had it before the federal government did.

The money's not to deal. The cows who not to deal is freedom and liberty and get rid of this abusive government. Over 20 years, Bundy ignored court orders to relocate his herd.

He racked up more than a million dollars in unpaid fees.

By April 2014, the Bureau of Land Management had come to collect. Rounding up nearly 400 of Bundy's cows in arresting Bundy's son. Then the situation escalates. Another one of Bundy's sons kicks the police dog. Rangers tazin, which riles Bundy supporters, who muster a full on militia to converge on the ranch and face off against the feds.

Men on horseback against men with earpieces. And then came the news trucks. Tensions reached the boiling point earlier this week. Get out of the tower! A real wild west showdown.

How cows in our militia and fox news turn one man into a modern folk hero. Huge media interest followed from that. People want answers. And more than 2,000 miles from Nevada at the Washington DC headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management. Questions start pouring in.

What's going on here in Nevada?

“Why are there armed agents here standing off with Americans also armed over some cows?”

These information requests are piling up at the Bureau of Land Management's Freedom of Information Act Office. The FOIA officers need help and they find Mike. The recent law school grad in fellow at the BLM. I was very happily working as a real two specialist. Working on high priority transmission lines as a presidential management fellow.

I had some FOIA experience. The FOIA shop was like many. Understaffed and they said, "Hey, Mike, we need a lawyer.

So he does.

But he has his work cut out for him.

There was 300 plus media. It requests tons of citizen interest. The office is chaos. And Mike dives right in, fielding request after request. Even the order ones from anti-government types who were galvanized by the event.

We get requests asking if the president at the time was really a space alien covered in humans again. And our response to the FOIA shop, we were like, "Well, yes, we've been covering up this secret forever. And all the presidents are just humans can covered reptiles that are from outer space. And we know it here at the Bureau of Land Management, a small component of the Department of Interior, and now as you submit this FOIA request, here's the record you got us.

Is Mike would learn over the next decade,

“fielding FOIA requests in several government agencies?”

That's all in a day's work for a public records officer. I owe my FOIA career in large parts of Mr. Bundy, and the great cattle trespass gather of 2014. Hit it! I'm investigative journalist Jason Leopold.

I spent most of my days getting documents from the government. I'm attorney Matt Tappin, and I fight them in court to open their files when they don't want to. From Bloomberg and No Spilot, this is Disclosure. A podcast about flying loose government secrets, the Freedom of Information Act, and the unexpected places that takes us.

Well, I don't often say this about government officials, but Michael Sarich is a FOIA warrior. He's a guy who, for a long time, was on the inside of federal government,

“yanking the curtains open, so we all could get a better view inside.”

For more than a decade, he worked his way up through FOIA post-IF4 agencies. From an officer at the Bureau of Land Management and the Social Security Administration to Director of the Veterans Health Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs. And that's a big deal, because the VA's FOIA program is the third largest in the entire federal government.

So, Mike is accomplished something really impressive. He's reduced the VA's FOIA backlog by 90%. Which basically means if you're trying to get your records from the VA,

Mike is the reason they show up in months instead of never.

Mike left the government in September, and now he's working on the outside on a new program dedicated to government transparency and training. Michael, welcome to the podcast. Very glad to have you here.

“Pleasure to be here and thanks for having me. I noticed behind you. What does that sign?”

It's kind of lurking out. Oh, oh, sure. Sure. So, peace loving FOIA. Is that what it says? Yes, it says peace loving FOIA. And it's just a nod to the fact that FOIA became operative in 1967, the summer of love. And so, peace loving FOIA is all about, you know, hey, we need to be peaceful with our requesters. Do this work in a sense of love and it's FOIA.

It's about the freedom of information and having that relationship with the American people who pay our salaries and you have FOIA stock. Yes, exactly. So, Mike, you didn't see the detail working on the FOIA as a step down. Because sometimes I will read that people who are details of FOIA, they've sometimes looked at it.

It's like, this is a punishment if you're detail to the FOIA. You've heard those stories before, right? Oh, yeah. For sure. In particular, State Department, where someone said it was akin to being station to Siberia. Yeah, why did they say that? I don't know to be honest, because when I got down to the FOIA shop, I saw an opportunity to tell the story that the agency was doing to the American people who were paying for that story.

The Bureau of Management, like all federal agencies, exist to serve the American people. And here in FOIA, you have this tremendous opportunity, indeed, obligation, to tell the story through records of what the agency is doing on behalf of the American people.

So, the way I saw this incredible opportunity to go down and work in the FOIA shop was to help tell the story of why did the Bureau of Management feel

the need to protect in this case, this endangered species. The land was being preserved for the devs or torsors, and why we needed to take this action. And also, in this case, in the cows standoff, to really demonstrate the years and years and years of work that the Bureau of Management engaged until it got to this point. Because, really, at this point, every reasonable step had been taken to effectuate court orders.

Every reasonable step had been taken to work with the lease holders. Every reasonable step had been taken to compensate folks for, you know, maybe lost revenue. And this was the final straw. This was the absolute last thing that the federal government could do in this instance. And this was what got the most attention. So, I need to ask this question, and then Madam, we're going to bump it over to you.

Okay, you get over to the Bureau of Land Management. You're working in the FOIA shop. You're bombarded with requests from the media, from the public when you start to see all the records you get access to.

Because I've always thought about, "Hey, what would happen if I was a FOIA officer?"

And suddenly, I get to see all of these emails unredacted. You get in full access, Mike. No B5s, right? No B6s, you get those all. No B5, no B7a. Yeah, just raw, naked documents, exactly. So, I liken this to being a parish priest.

“You get all of the parish's deepest, darkest secrets, right?”

Like, everybody comes in and tells you everything. And I've never been a priest nor a very unlikely to become one. But I imagine it's similar in that the first couple of weeks, or probably intoxicatingly fun, like, "Oh, my gosh, I know everything."

And then, by week three or four, you're just worried about communicating this parishioners' needs, upstairs,

and moving on to the next center, if you will. And finding a resolution that way. It is a fantastic and sacred obligation and trust that you're given. Make no mistake about it, FOIA officers must be some of the most trusted people in any organization, because exactly what you said, they have access, complete access, to literally every record that the agency has, and it is their obligation to provide as much of that,

like, literally everything that they can possibly provide to the requester while protecting the agency. And so, it's critically, critically important that they're well up to speed on all the exemptions, all the walls, all of the regulations, but it's pretty fun. There's no two ways about it, it's pretty fun for sure. I've done hundreds of FOIA lawsuits, including, I think, maybe some against agencies you've been at,

like, I don't think our paths have crossed before, have they? I think I've, uh, tipped through the lightning and been able to avoid that. So, um, but definitely well aware of your work, and appreciate the work that you're doing in the FOIA community, not just here on the disclosure podcast, but in the FOIA field. Thank you. Jason, are there any Bundy FOIAs in your archive?

Do you remember, were you making FOIAs through Bundy stuff?

“So, that's what I was thinking about, and I was searching, because one, I totally remember it.”

Two, it's definitely newsworthy, so I would have most certainly a FOIA, but I can't find it. Mike, do you remember, if I filed, do you remember? I do remember that you were one of the names on Greenwald, all of the, um, oh, Greenwald. Is that, is that John Greenwald? Yeah, John Greenwald. So, John Greenwald is another frequent FOIA fileer, and just a quick backstory.

John and I had filed numerous FOIA requests, and sometimes they are identical. And, uh, years ago, I obtained some documents from the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy, right? That's the shop that handles, uh, overseas the FOIA operations. And I think I asked for records on myself and anything related to FOIA. And I got this set of emails from the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy,

where they were talking about me and John Greenwald, and they refer to us as a FOIA policy. Oh, that's the FOIA policy. That's the FOIA policy, and they said, some other, uh, Justice Department attorneys said, oh, that should be their band name. They were, they were kind of criticizing us, because, like, they thought that we were sort of, uh, you know, conspiring not to pay fees. I think it was the FOIA tank plan or something like that.

Well, that's got FTC, FTC, you know, me. So I filed a FOIA request. And I'm sure I did because of the, you know, high profile nature of this topic, but does my FOIA request stand out? Was there anything special about it? You know, I would love to tell you that I have it, um, you know, printed out and, uh, framed.

“Yeah, that's what I was hoping you'd say.”

Um, at my last duty station, we did 120,000 FOIAs that year, so sadly, sometimes the, um, you know,

I hear you're lost in a sea of incredible requests, but yeah, yeah.

Very techful. So let's get back to Bundy, because you got a lot of requests, right? Were there any that did stand out? Cause I, I think there was some kind of wacky stuff going on. Oh, yeah, do you take the, um, the good with the bad and the funny with the, with the, with the serious. And, uh, we had a lot of requests along those lines, and, you know, you get a whole mix of, um, public comment disguises for us sometimes.

In this case, the land was protected for the desert quarters. Sometimes we, you would get things who would just say, I like turtle soup. People said, well, you know what I like to eat turtle soup, so there. I mean, were there for the turtle soup, and I guess for the space aliens? Were there actual requests or were people just, oh, yeah.

It was, what was it like, all document showing whether the president's an alien or how did they, how did they structure those? Yeah, you, you would be surprised at how sophisticated a request like that could, could be where they went all. Well, I'm not surprised, Mike, this doesn't surprise me at all.

You know, all email, the lyrics and assorted things that would shed light on the fact that the president is from outer space along with his cabinet. Oh, the cabinet too, okay.

He would need a whole, um, a whole colony of fellow reptiles too.

But wait, Mike, so here's a question. You get these requests. Sure. And you do what? Do you process the request? Oh, certainly. You don't necessarily have to do a full record, you know, exhaustive search. But you did a search.

Did you do a search? That's the question. I'm going to be very thankful for the six year record retention schedule employees. And note that this was longer than six years ago, so I can't attest to the full submissive search. I don't think that we went to 1600 Pennsylvania and asked the president to, um,

affirm his statement, um, that's hilarious.

“So I've always wondered this, Mike, is who gets to decide?”

Especially if it's something that's like kind of sensitive. Do the FOIA officers get to decide which release or does that have to go up through, like, chains of command, you know, then end with, like, political appointees, making those decisions? The FOIA officer has the delegated authority to make these decisions on behalf of the agency.

And it must always be this person with the delegated authority.

Now that said, there are certainly, um, many organizations that not all that have a process to review and quality control things that are really important. The FOIA officers not omniscient, the FOIAs are can't know all of the impacts for every record. So those types of reviews help ensure that information goes out in a full some way and that it is all the information that the, that can go out.

It's never the case in a good FOIA program where a political appointee who, you know, may not have that subject matter expertise is going to make that call. It's going to be the FOIA officer who signs the release saying, hey, this is my name on this release letter. It is my responsibility, my obligation, and my delegated authority to do so.

“Certainly, M. Kutta's taken, but ultimately the FOIA officer's decision, who's, the person who's signing that letter.”

I did notice in your answer you, you talked about a good FOIA officer. So I got to ask. So I mean, are there bad FOIA officers? You don't have to name anybody. There's a, what we've already phrased in FOIA and went and down, black it out.

Oh, went and down, black it out. Yeah, because if you don't have confidence, because you don't feel confident, then you end up doing things like, well, I don't know. So I won't get in trouble for blackening it out, but I will get in trouble for releasing it. So I'm in doubt, so I'm going to black it out.

What's so interesting about that, and I guess disappointing about that, is that's the exact opposite of how it's supposed to work. It's supposed to be if and doubt produce it. Like if, if you can't prove it's exempt, then it's got to be released. If the scope of the exemption is wishy-washy, well, you're supposed to interpret it in favor of disclosure.

So it's totally understandable why this happens. But like, are there some shops where it's the political appointees who are really, you know, have more control and what you're calling QC is really sort of like saving embarrassment. And because foie is not, the exemptors are not meant to be there to protect agencies from embarrassment. But sometimes we see this when we sue things where redacted, we win and reductions get lifted.

And you kind of wonder, this really should not have ever been redacted. And I could see why they tried to get away with, with holding up.

“But like, are there some shops where it's more, there's more political involvement in what gets released than others?”

You know, with 800 like individual reporting units. You know, they go up to DOJ in terms of reporting their metrics. It's certain that there's probably a reporting unit or two where maybe there is a little bit of a heavier hand or not. But I think what ultimately you see in those when reductions get lifted like that, it's really just a training situation where a foie officer may be new.

There's really high turnover and a lot of foie shops.

Sometimes it's Jason pointed out, it's not considered the most incredible career move to be in that foie shop.

So normally, I think that's a reflection of inconsistencies in training versus situation where someone's maliciously going in and saying, "Oh, we're not going to give Leopold anything." That foie terrace is not going to thing out of us. So if he prints this request, he's going to use all of his toner, right? Like, because it's just going to be black sheet after black sheet after black sheet.

And maybe a few dozen hands will leave in there just to tease him. But yeah, I think in most cases, it's an issue where the foie officer isn't maybe a very well trained or very confident in their training. So they're not confident, they're going to tend to overreact interesting. And if they're very confident and they can articulate the reasons behind why they're releasing overfolding, then they're in a much better spot. The news doesn't stop on the weekends.

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Over the years, as I interacted with more FOIA officers met, Mike, I definitely understand what goes on behind the scenes in the agencies much better. As it relates to the processing.

I've definitely dealt with, and you know this, Matt, agencies, they're just terrible with FOIA, and the first one that always comes to mind for me is the FBI.

I just think that their FOIA operations leave a lot to be desired. And then another agency is State Department. And that may be due to the fact that they are bombarded with requests, and they just have a massive backlog. And you know, just trying to get through it. But the most part, when I interact with FOIA officers, they absolutely are dedicated to the work passionate about it and want to get the records out. So I've always been curious about where's that hiccup, where the sort of adversarial relationship between requests or an agency or FOIA officer comes in.

“And that's actually, I want to segue to that question, Mike, because there is sort of this belief that FOIA officers and requesters have an adversarial relationship. Why do you think that is?”

Don't know, but I think it's grounded in why anyone has an adversarial relationship with anyone else, and that's communication and understanding of where the other person's coming from. I view FOIA's role as an opportunity to tell the agency's story, and I'm always happy to tell the agency's story at whatever agency I'm working at, whether that's the Bureau of Management, the Social Security Administration, BAHA, doesn't matter. There's a good story to be told. Also trying to understand what the requesters point of view is. What is the request you're trying to get at?

A lot of times, requesters will kind of bury their motive, like they won't really tell you why they're looking for something, and they don't have to. But if they do tell you what exactly they're looking for, the exact needle they're looking for, a FOIA officer can often find it much faster than a request request return. And so instead of asking for every record related to this, say, "Hey, I'm really interested in this piece if you know what you're interested in," and then the FOIA officer can take that targeted request and provide it timely response.

So that's an area that I think breeds a little bit of animosity, because FOIA officer may feel like she's on a wild goose chase, and the FOIA request for my feel like, "Well, why is this taking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of days when it's supposed to take 20?" Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the number of days. So I do want to talk about backlogs, because I noticed that one of the things you achieved at VA was like a 90% reduction in backlogs, right? Like that first thank you for that. I mean, that really is the service to our country to do that. Thank you, Mike.

So I'm looking at that, and I'm scratching my head and I'm wondering, we talked about the Office of Information Policy for a minute. So this is an office within the Justice Department. They process FOIA requests for the attorney general and some other kind of departments and divisions within the DOJ. If there's any agency that should have their FOIA house in order, I would contend it's OIP because they also have this sort of widespread federal leadership role, where they issue guidance and OIP is not getting it done, then all these other agencies can really easily say, "Well, we're no worse than OIP."

So every year, agencies have to report their backlogs in the average response times. And the statute requires 20 to 30 business days to issue a determination, and the courts say that typically the production of records should occur days or weeks, not months or years after that.

But if you look at OIP for, say, 20, 24 complex requests, that average response is 650 days. It's in order of magnitude larger than what the statute is calling for. This is what I find the most difficult to accept that I'm interested in your reason for expedited requests, ones in which the agency admits that there's an urgency to inform the public.

It's basically the same 600 days.

This is OIP saying we recognize that there's an urgency to inform the public, but we're going to take almost two years to respond to the request. Like, you could understand why people get really frustrated and say the government's not doing its job. So what's your reaction to that? So when my wife asks me for my phone, I hand it over to her, if we're in a trip or something like that, like right away, you know, like, hey, here you go, whatever you need.

“But if I told her it's going to be 200 business days and we're equivalent on fees, and it's a different conversation, right?”

That trust factor is going to go way down. So the faster that you can give people information, the more reliably they will trust you, because they then are going to fill in the blanks of time. Absolutely. Like, with like, why is this taking so long? Right. Well, this is just a memo. This is just a file. What is the deal here? You know, a reasonable and a right number is fine, but 600 days, 400 days for expedited requests, especially. It just doesn't make sense.

How were you able to reduce by 90 percent, but OIP has got these massive backlogs still?

The way that VHA first and then VA, right large, was able to reduce our FOIA backlogs, because the people that we have committed to the mission. I'm a veteran and there's a lot of veterans at VA and VHA, and it's very easy to get super motivated about that mission. Working largely for folks that are trying to get access to things like healthcare, home loans, student benefits, you name it. So really a huge credit to the 900 or so folks scattered across 12 times zones at the VA who made that happen. Wow, 900.

Amazing. A lot of requests at VA are driven by veterans seeking access to an earned benefit. So it's really easy to be motivated for that. There's a lot of ways to unpack how we got there. The really important metric in my view is average processing time. Yes, how long does it take an average veteran to get what she's requesting in order to obtain that earned benefit?

“That's what really matters to me. The most important thing here is that we're continuing to drive our average processing time down.”

To your point, FOIA should be about a month-long process, and this is why I'm so passionate about technology, tools that largely barred from the e-discovery world that enable you to look at large swastika documents,

get to the meat of the matter, find out what's first acted and what's not, and then move forward. You have FOIA requests that are toddlers.

Mine have master's degrees. I mean, would you agree with me that 600 plus days to respond to requests, especially urgent requests? This is not what Congress had in mind. Right. When the president signed this law in 1966 and it became operative in 1967, no one envisioned that the request would be like this, and how could it happen? There's no way that LBJs on his ranch signing this and thinking that this is going to be anything like this. You're reluctantly signing it at that. Exactly. We have an actual document signed on July 4th, which is distinguishes it from the declaration, so that's a good deal.

The idea that every single person in those FOIA shops virtually also want to get those FOIA requests out, not in 650 days, but they all want to get them out in 20 or 30 days. They want to get these things moving so they can move on to the next one, largely because there's no end in requests, millions of requests a year now.

“So people want to move these requests as quickly as possible, and that's why you see the push to tech.”

You mentioned technologies. Some agencies have maybe not quite stated the art, a pretty current systems they're used in litigation, context for dealing with massive amounts of documents. I've seen other agencies with very archaic systems in understanding and all that. So I've always wondered, like, our FOIA offices trying to get the money into their budgets to pay for these things, or are they like, whenever I try to FOIA my way into the answer, I never seem to get documents or it ironically takes like years.

But our agencies actually trying to get more money to comply or they just, because you could see how if you thought that the political heads were perfectly fine with long backlogs. 'Cause it just means they'll be out of office, but it's time anything comes out. You can see why they weren't in a hand-much incentive to try to fix the problem. Right. There's a reason the 2016 FOIA members were inside at the end of an administration, at the beginning of an administration. Like, that's not a coincidence, right? Like, that is, I've just signed.

Yeah, and to be fair, it doesn't matter if it's an R or D, that's the I would have expected the same outcome. Totally agree. Yeah, that's just the way the way it is. Right. A phrase that I throw around a lot, and please don't take this as disparagement. If government officials were inclined to be transparent, we wouldn't need a FOIA statue. They would just be doing it.

What is the total addressful market of FOIA? What are people using? And it is astonishing that people are proud to say that we use Adobe and the Microsoft suite of tools.

“And that's what they use. And it is impossible to imagine running any type of FOIA program with more than a few requests a year.”

So if you're the Truman Scholarship Foundation and you're getting 15 or FOIA requests, you're got it. Nope. No problem. If you're ever 50 or 100 requests and you're not using a tool purpose built for FOIA, then you're really missing out.

And I think that's part of the FOIA Advisory Committee's movement towards a common case platform where the entirety of the federal government could be on a system that, you know,

a talks through each other, be as a commonality of training so that if a FOIA officer works at agency A and they move to agency B, there's no learning curve. They're working in the same optimized system that is affordable across the federal government. Real challenges. If you FOIA the contracts for a department like HHS, where people are choosing different FOIA platforms, you'll see that they're paying different prices even if they're buying the same platform. You're saying inside of one department short, there are different technology stacks that are being used to process FOIA was within the same department.

Yep. Absolutely. And that's crazy. There's some great leadership going on at HHS and other places to move away from that. This is a current action in the FOIA world where people are looking to platforms. To platforms, it's got every platforms that can provide some kind of commonality for the FOIA officers and more over to provide quality control and oversight. We're in a world now where the tools have gotten better and better and better. And in fact, I think the real answer for FOIA is going to be small language models, not large language models, but the technology that's specifically trained in this area to be able to to work in the FOIA space where there's a lot of nuance to be able to

To move these cases much quicker, so not the 600 day cases, but the 20 or 30 day cases and get them out the door in a much much faster way. And so when you're litigating, you're not looking at 300 pages a month, you can genuinely and reasonably get thousands of thousands of pages a month and get these leads done.

Oh, yeah. Oh, by the way, Mike, that's a mat. Wouldn't that be amazing if the FBI were like, all right, we have 18 million pages and we can actually get thousands of months.

I mean, that's that's like a cash machine. That's how I can ATM like every month every month. I'm going and get thousands of pages. So, you know, you talked about HHS and like some of the good leadership going on there and the various technologies that are in place now. But there's also an elephant in the room here, which is FOIA offices have been decimated this year, right? They've just half is documented CDC's FOIA staff gone and at other agencies that we've seen a reduction in the FOIA staff. That night we're sort of discussing like, all right, what's FOIA going to look like in 2025? We actually thought, and I don't want to speak format, but I thought that it would more or less look the same as it did in years past.

Foolish me, I took with a grain of salt. I took Elon Musk comments to heart when he said that virtually all government records should be readily available.

“He only in very limited circumstances that anything gets withheld and you should barely even need to use FOIA.”

Like, because I think if you, if your political philosophy is sort of distrust of government, distrust of agencies in believing that we have too much unaccountable bureaucracy, well, FOIA is for you. I mean, right, that's what FOIA is for is to help us understand all these things. And, you know, of course, then they came in and decimated the FOIA office. So, you know, I don't Elon Musk didn't run for office, but the same idea. People run for office on these platforms that they're going to be transparent, and then they get in office and they're not, and they wait until the end of their term and then they stick it on the next ones. And that's not unique to this administration. That's just a way it's in. But I have never seen FOIA offices kind of caught up in the crossfire where now you have whole agencies FOIA offices that are just gone.

And so, I have request sitting out there to various agencies where there's either one person or there's no one there and wondering, you know, what happens with the FOIA, you know, with my FOIA request. So I'm just, Mike, I'm just wondering, what's the remedy that?

“That's a great question. I well remember Elon saying exactly that mad. I clipped it, put it on LinkedIn, very robust conversation around it, and then Josh took zero FOIA requests and said that they're part of the president's records.”

So it's exactly right. And Jason to your point, I think when the stats come out presumably in March or 2020, so it's just when they generally govern why statistics come out around sunshine week. I think you're going to be seeing just numbers that are bonkers. The increases in requests, processing time and the decreases in personnel provided the numbers are captured accurately.

Because the numbers I think are going to be really surprising once all this information is fully compiled. What is the true cost of transparency in the federal government? And it's clear that we're not getting the bang for the buck, and I think that the statistics in March are going to show a real year over year delta that's not good for transparency. And largely the brain drain that's shocking about is again, be responsible for part of that. That good people have left solid programs and left good people behind as well.

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So I said, you know, these offices have been kind of caught in the crossfire. Do you believe that as well?

“Or do you have a different take in terms of how these FOIA offices ended up being more or less shut down during the course of the purge?”

This year, a federal government workers. For some of the departments, and some of the agencies, the reorganization was very necessary. And will yield long-term dividends in many departments with components acted as if they're part of a confederation. They're kind of doing their own thing, and they're not. They don't have, you know, org line chart responsibility to maybe someone in the senior executive service,

like they do with the Department of Interior now. So there's not that kind of command and control that can get results. And so part of this is going to think be a long-term benefit for the federal government and transparency. Interesting. However, when you look at places, most famously, OPM, where someone tried to put it in a FOIA request,

“and the person on the phone said, "Hey, good luck. They just fired everybody."”

Good luck with that. They just fired the entire privacy team. Yeah, that actually happened to a CNN reporter earlier this year when he filed a request with the Office of Personnel Management. I believe there was a video of it. That's the email I got back when I filed a pretty routine records request. Asking for documents related to Elon Musk role in the Trump administration, including his security clearance.

That's not helpful. There has to be a human being there, and number of human beings there to provide that transparency, because the computers can't do it by themselves. And one person by themselves can only triage, maybe at best,

but they're never going to get to a response litigation won't sue.

The fees will accrue, and the agency can find themselves paying multiple multiple hundreds of thousands if not to the millions of dollars in FOIA related fees, because judges will also lose their patients. I'm sure you've seen Matt and judges continue to lose their patients with administrations that drag their heels consistently and say, "We can't do this. We can't do that."

Like, you need to be able to do this. I'm glad you brought that up. I mean, I think this year has been a tipping point. I think historically courts have been very reluctant to micromanage, you know, how much money, how many resources agencies are putting into FOIA. Instead, what they do, the further behind the agencies fall, the courts just lower the processing rates to accommodate.

I mean, it's not really fixing the problem at all. It's enabling the problem.

I think this year has been different, because when the answer is, "Oh, we fired all the FOIA people?"

They've gone so far now that courts are like, "I gave you some leeway, but you cannot just fire all the FOIA staff and then say, "We're not going to process requires." So they went so far that I think it has moved back. And my hope is that that momentum continues and we continue to kind of put the emphasis on this that we should. There's another side to this point that I think is really worth mentioning. There's some agencies where they've got a requirement for their FOIA officers to put through 10,000 pages a week.

And some of those are checked and some of those are not. So what you end up having is a lot of overwork, overstress FOIA officers just kind of going up. Yep, yep, yep, yep, to meet a number that they have to produce without spending the time,

“the line by line page by page analysis that FOIA by law says that you have to accomplish.”

Well, if a poorly trained FOIA officer isn't sure what to do, they're going to air on the side of withholding, right? Sure. So when you couple that with what you just said, if you're trying to just get them to pound through a bunch of documents, it's fast as possible.

It seems to me like what's going to happen is they're going to end up over redacting and over withholding those documents.

So not just going to say, "Oh, here you go. Here's a bunch of documents." Because like I'm cool with that outcome. I mean, there are certain things I recognize, Adam, she shouldn't be released. Like people social security numbers, but a whole lot of this stuff is very discretionary. And if they want to release it, they can't.

Right. And I've made so much of my career in terms of discretionary release. We had a situation in California at BLM where someone's pistol was stolen. And later the weapon that was set, it was dropped and around killed woman. And the gun was in possession of the LeMagrant at the time since San Francisco immigration, illegal immigration, a hot topic for sure in that community.

And so people look to the Bureau of Land Management and they're like, "Hey, how did this happen?

“Do you want to have any control over your weapons?"”

Then what we did is we showed our history of gun loss relative to the rest of the world. In terms of other law enforcement agencies, it really would be very, very bottom. In terms of guns for officer, the last, the last, the last on there, and able to put that in context. If more four workshops would be more full, some with their information and discretionary release

information to kind of put their story in context for what the person is looking for. A lot of things that may seem sensational become very reasonable in terms of what has happened. Because in the main, you have very good people in the federal side trying to do their best possible work. And if you give the full story, if you're able to actually provide all of that data on a discretionary basis, you end up with, you know, hey, that's, that's a human being trying to do a really hard job.

And this is what they chose with the information that they had. And things become more reasonable versus like, can't believe it at that. Yeah, and that does a lot to turn the tide on, you know, the distrust of government in our countries. I mean, it's just continues to mount the humanizes it. Yeah, exactly.

So anything FOIA officers can do to release more information. You are really helping to deal with that and to show people that they don't need to be so distrustful that they, it's, you know, the classic, the cover up is worse than the crime. So Mike, you're working now on something called FOIA University. Tell us more about that. We're launching that in January, full suite of FOIA trainings and tools for FOIA professionals.

The turnover and the FOIA profession can be, you know, 30, 40 percent in some shops.

And want to provide an outlet and an opportunity for people to get credentials and to get certifications in the core competencies of FOIA. So we've done things like we released our most recent white paper on small language models. We call it the slim solution to a fat problem FOIA processing and really dig out into the current technology and how it can impact where operations and it's got a lot of traction. We've done a few cool things.

I can tell you that we've rewritten the DOJ FOIA guide, the 1000 page tone filled with footnotes. It's under 200 pages. It's accessible. It's graphical. It has an opportunity to really get into it and learn.

So we're recording the videos that go along with that along with FOIA program management to help people that get tagged.

“You go into this FOIA field, how can you be successful in this field?”

I do want to ask how I become a 10 year professor at FOIA University. I'm looking for work after, you know, my journal is in print. Well, so many are. And you'd be very welcome. Adjunct professor.

Initially. Oh, the adjunct. No. I want 10 year. 10 year.

Am I. You can bring more courses to the table like that professor early.

We're welcome you into our. It's our university. I think I may. I think I may have to work on that. You know, we people think of FOIA is like journalists using it or maybe like companies using it.

But you know, you've talked just now about just individual people using their rights to records under FOIA to get any number of things.

“What are some other things you've seen of like just individual people using FOIA?”

Sure.

First probably FOIA is a real thing.

And I think it's incredibly important. For example, at VHA of woman called and she was the former wife of a service member. Who committed suicide and she was looking for his last medical records to see if there's anything in there that she could get some closure to because the veteran committed suicide a few days after a VHA appointment and got kind of had some stone wall in there had it like hey you're not. You were divorced from this service member, but she was working in concert with her former mother-in-law and she was right there with them.

We were able to get her access to those records. So those two women could have some closure and this really dramatic and horrible moment in their lives. And that's just one way how FOIA can impact people on a human level and help people cope in a really awful, awful situation. And that story is replicated 120,000 times a year, not exactly of course.

But like the story of human to getting access to information that can help improve their lives.

Any other examples you can share with us whether it's like the A or social security administration of people using FOIA for individual interesting things. Sure, social security administration, what you see time and time again are people really interested in you know where did I come from. Where is my family from and a great way that genealogists and other people that are really interested in finding their identity and figuring out where they come from are through social security records. Because when you get an original social security number, yes, for your place of birth and that your parents made names.

And so there's a really important clues for people to look back and research and find where they've come from. At the Veterans Health Administration, we saw countless times where people were trying to substantiate claims.

“Does my dad really need assistance here? Has my mom qualified for help by virtue of her service?”

Campus June issues folks that had served and had illnesses associated with water might my own uncle, who was at was at Campus June and had significant medical issues able to get access to his records through the FOIA. And qualify for earned benefits. Can you see these in older veterans more than anyone else? And you know now you're seeing that cohorts your Vietnam era some of your Korean, but more so you're Vietnam era plus. They maybe they don't have the facility with a computer to really get into these things to get into the records and kind of provide self service.

So the FOIA officers really help them and help walk them through that process to help either caregivers or the better in themselves. Get access to the documents that will substantiate their service to provide them with information that will enable them to really in many cases live a much higher quality of life where they will have access to better care. Perhaps a nursing home that is for veterans or you know any type of service along those lines that will provide them some comfort in their final years.

The federal government touches our lives in so many ways and there's an administration for that. If you're doing it there is someone in the federal government that has a touch point and a record that can help you achieve literally any goal that you're trying to accomplish. The FOIA isn't even really a FOIA, the right brothers when they were doing erinautical experimentation in Ohio and then going to Kitty Hawk. They sent a request to the Smithsonian institution so you can do now you can send a FOIA to the Smithsonian and it's no problem.

And they asked for all of the charts and every bit of information that they could have. And even though Samuel Langley who was the head of the Smithsonian at the time was also engaged in this very activity, he said send them everything. And he also said hey if you want my pamphlet it would be $2. The right brothers sent back two bucks and they got the pamphlet. So even even a fee use in that instance.

“And that's kind of part of our culture. I think that's ingrained in the American experience.”

We will share anything with you. You can do a better go for it, right? Here you go. And so that freedom of information that transparency I feel is really a fundamental better act to what our country is and FOIA really enables that. Mike, in your experience, if you have seen businesses using FOIA to help with with the business operations or learn learn things that are good for the businesses. Oh, absolutely not just good for the business but also good for the taxpayer. What you'll see frequently is five businesses or six businesses may bid for a project.

One will certainly get it. Oftentimes the other companies will make a four request for that contract and that will give them some insight in terms of pricing and services and other ways that they can strengthen their bids. And they can strengthen their bids in the future.

Ultimately, who benefits from that?

The American taxpayer, because these businesses can come back with better home projects and responses to their requests for proposals. And ultimately the American taxpayer should be getting a better price at the end of the day.

And what this does hopefully is it speeds the development curve and enables the American consumer to have better products of better prices. So you see a tremendous value in the FOIA for business information. And you see that all over the place with a number of companies that are making requests on behalf of say private equity or other companies in order to gain a competitive advantage.

Ultimately, that competitive advantage should be borne out in lower prices for American consumers.

“And I think what gets missed sometimes is that those types of requesters, they pay additional fees to help cover the cost of those requests.”

So this isn't just kind of the taxpayers subsidizing private businesses through getting them records. I mean, there's a process by which those costs are largely borne by those requesters, right? Which is it should be? Yeah, they pay a hundred percent full freight for search and review. And right now, we look at a very small percentage of the FOIA operations being recovered through this and they help make that happen.

And more to come on that for sure. But thank you for that Mike. And thank you for the work you've done for our veterans. Thank you for your services veteran.

I think it really helps people understand just how broad the statute is and the many things that it can accomplish.

It's not just for journalists. It's for everybody. And there's a lot of good that you can do. I have a final question. What's on your music playlist right now?

I have a lot of Taylor Swift lately because I have a children and the wicked playlist has been prevalent. As a quick defense, oh, wicked, just all wicked too. But yeah, my personal playlist is usually filled with the doors and the all-membrothers Leonard Skinner and WX. So it's a good mix. Oh, nice.

That's a good mix. And on the Taylor Swift point, I may you have good FOIA karma. I appreciate that. Thank you to Jason and everybody else for the work that you do on the requesters side for helping keep the FOIA community so well engaged and informed what's going on. We're doing to highlight the important work that goes on across the federal community is really important.

“And I think we're just hitting the tip of the iceberg because there's also state and local free of information acts and indeed international free of information acts that really help illuminate what's going on across the world.”

Well, thank you. This has been a wonderful discussion. Thank you, Mike. Stay tuned for next week. His the season to be FOIA.

Why are you wearing an elf costume? Greetings.

I request the first 25 pages you locate for the term quote Santa Claus.

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