These Federal Officers Wield the Power of Transparency

Hello, I'm Michelle Hussain, and for more than 20 years, I was at the BBC. Military withdrawal from Afghanistan. But all the time I was delivering the headlines, I wanted to go further than the news of the day, to spend more time with the people shaping our world. And that's what I'm doing here on this podcast. Speaking to people from Nigel Farage... Russia needs to be taught a lesson. ...to tech journalist Cara Swisher. And the tech industry is running wild. You know, they've gotten what they wanted and they've seen a huge run up in their stock prices. This will be a place where every weekend you can count on one essential conversation to help make sense of the world. So please join me, listen and subscribe to The Michelle Hussain Show from Bloomberg Weekend, wherever you get your podcasts. You certainly ask interesting questions. 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 saddle. Others, the yellow, don't tread on any flag. It's like a scene out of high noon. Cowboy hats, cowboy boots, jeans, shirts on the back of horses. Michael Sarich is working for the Bureau of Land Management at the time. The 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 and 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. and 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 had paid fees to the federal government. 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 him. That he had an ancestral right to the land because his Mormon descendants had it before the federal government. The money's not the deal, the cows are not the deal. It's 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 and arresting Bundy's son. Then the situation escalates. Another one of Bundy's sons kicks a police dog. Rangers tase him, 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 here, you coward! A real Wild West showdown. How cows in our militia and Fox News turned 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, D.C. 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, a recent law school grad and fellow at the BLM. I was very happily working as a realty 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. Come down here and help us out. So he does, but he has his work cut out for him. There was 300-plus media requests, tons of citizen interest. the office is chaos and mike dives right in fielding request after request even the odder 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 human skin and our response at the foyer shop we were like well yes we've been covering up this secret forever and all the Presidents are just human skin covered reptiles that are from outer space. And we know it here at the Bureau of Land Management, the small component of the Department of Interior. And now that you've submitted this FOIA request, here's the record you got us. As 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 part to Mr. Bundy and the great cattle trespass gatherer of 2014. Hit it! I'm investigative journalist Jason Leopold. I spend most of my days getting documents from the government. I'm attorney Matt Topic, and I fight them in court to open their files when they don't want to. From Bloomberg and No Smiling, this is Disclosure, a podcast about buying 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 posts at four 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 has 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 is that sign? It's kind of lurking out. Oh, oh, sure, sure. So, peace, love, and FOIA. Is that what it says? Yeah, it says peace, love, and FOIA. And it's just a nod to the fact that FOIA became operative in 1967, the summer of love. And so, peace, love, and 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. We need to have FOIA stock. 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 detailed to FOIA, they've sometimes looked at it as like, this is a punishment if you're detailed 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 stationed 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 Land 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 Land Management feel the need to protect, in this case, this endangered species? The land was being preserved for the desert tortoise and why we needed to take this action. And also in this case, in the cow standoff, to really demonstrate the years and years and years of work that the Bureau of Land Management engaged in 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 leaseholders. 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 is what got the most attention. So I need to ask this question. And then, Matt, I'm 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, what happened there? Like, what was that like? Because I've always thought about, gee, what would happen if I was a FOIA officer and suddenly I get to see all of these emails unredacted. You're getting full access, Mike. No B5s, right? No B6s. No B5, No B7A. 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 very unlikely to become one. But I imagine it's similar in that the first couple of weeks are probably intoxicatingly fun. Like, oh my gosh, I know everything. And then by week three or four, you're just worried about communicating this parishioner's needs upstairs and moving on to the next center, if you will, and finding resolution that way. It is a fantastic and sacred obligation and trust that you're given. Make no mistake about it. Foy 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 laws, all the regulations. But it's pretty fun. There's no two ways about it. It's pretty fun for sure. I mean, I've done like hundreds of FOIA lawsuits, including, I think, maybe some against agencies you've been at. But I don't think our paths have crossed before, have they? I think I've tiptoed through the lightning and been able to avoid that. So, no, 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 have filed 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, Greenwald, all of the. Oh, Greenwald. Is that John Greenwald? Yeah, John Greenwald. So John Greenwald is another frequent FOIA filer. And just a quick backstory, John and I had filed numerous FOIA requests and sometimes they are identical. And years ago, I obtained some documents from the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy, right? That's the shop that handles, oversees 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 referred to us as a FOIA posse. Oh, that's the FOIA posse. That's the FOIA posse. And they said, some other Justice Department attorney said, oh, that should be their band name. They were kind of criticizing us because they thought that we were sort of conspiring not to pay fees. I think it was the FOIA Tang Clan or something like that. It was a... I like that. FOIA Tang Clan. Oh, that's good. FTC. FTC. You know me. So I filed a FOIA request and I'm sure I did because of the 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, you know, printed out and framed. Yeah, that's what I was hoping you'd say. At my last duty station, we did 120,000 FOIAs that year. So sadly sometimes the you know I hear you lost in a sea of incredible requests But yeah Yeah Very tactful So let get back to Bundy because you got a lot of requests right Were there any that did stand out Because I think there was some kind of wacky stuff going on Oh, yeah. You take the good with the bad and the funny with the serious. And we had a lot of requests along those lines. And, you know, you get a whole mix of public comment disguised as foia sometimes. In this case, the land was protected for the desperate quarters. Sometimes 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. And was it what was it like all documents showing whether the president's an alien or how did they how did they structure those? Yeah, you would be surprised at how sophisticated a request like that could could be where they want all. Well, I'm not surprised, Mike. This doesn't surprise me at all. Continue. You know, all emails, limericks 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. OK. Oh, yeah. I mean, the president couldn't exist on his own as a reptile. He would need a whole 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 on FOIAs and note that this was longer than six years ago. So I can't attest to the fulsomeness of the search. I don't think that we went to 1600 Pennsylvania and asked the president to affirm his keepman status. 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 what to release or does that have to go up through like chains of command, you know, that 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 many organizations, if not all, that have a process to review and quality control things that are really important. The FOIA officer is not omniscient. The FOIA officer can't know all of the impacts for every record. So those types of reviews help ensure that information goes out in a fulsome way and that it is all the information 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 input is taken, but ultimately it's the FOIA officer's decision, the person who is signing that letter. I did notice in your answer you talked about a good FOIA office. So I got to ask. So, I mean, are there bad FOIA offices? You don't have to name anybody. There's a well-regarded phrase in FOIA, when in doubt, black it out. Oh, when in doubt, 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 blacking 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 in doubt, produce it. Like 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, you know, because FOIA is not, the exemptions are not meant to be there to protect agencies from embarrassment. But sometimes we see this when we sue, things were redacted, we win and redactions get lifted. And you kind of wonder, this really should not have ever been redacted. And I can see why they tried to get away with withholding it. 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 redactions get lifted like that, it's really just a training situation where a FOIA officer may be new. There's really high turnover in a lot of FOIA shops. Sometimes, as Jason pointed out, it's not considered the most incredible career move to be in that FOIA shop. So normally, I think that's a reflection of inconsistencies in training versus a situation where someone's maliciously going in and saying, oh, we're not going to give Leopold anything. That FOIA terrorist is not getting a 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 thes and ands will leave in there just to tease them. But yeah, I think in most cases, it's an issue where the FOIA officer isn't maybe very well trained or very confident in their training. If they're not confident, they're going to tend to over-redact. And if they're very confident and they can articulate the reasons behind why they're releasing or withholding, then they're in a much better spot. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. The time is approximately 11.15 a.m. About to start a consensual telephone call with Dr. Daiwa Zhang. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. I've never seen that much evidence in my entire career, and I don't think we'll ever see that much evidence again. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. And that's a unicorn. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau from Bloomberg Podcasts starting on February 13th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. over the years as i interacted with more foia officers matt and mike i definitely understand what goes on behind the scenes in the agencies much better as it relates to you know the processing i've definitely dealt with and you know this matt agencies they're just terrible with foia and And, you know, 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, you know, just trying to get through it. But for 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 requester, 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? I 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 Land Management, the Social Security Administration, VA, BHA, it doesn't matter. There's a good story to be told. Also trying to understand what the requester's point of view is. What is the requester 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 that they're looking for, a FOIA officer can often find it much faster than a requester can. 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 a timely response. So that's an area that I think breeds a little bit of animosity because the FOIA officer may feel like she's on a wild goose chase and the FOIA requester might 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 a 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 and 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. So we're talking about like a couple of months of time for the typical request to be processed and complied with. But if you look at OIP for, say, 2024 complex requests, that average response is 650 days. It's an order of magnitude larger than what the statute is calling for. This is what I find the most difficult to accept, and I'm interested in your views on it. 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 on 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 quibbling 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 aren't going to fill in the blanks of time. Absolutely. 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 interregnum 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% but OIP has got these massive backlogs still? The way that VHA first and then VA writ large was able to reduce our FOIA backlogs was 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 time 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. How long does it take an average veteran to get what she's requesting, what he'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 so passionate about technology Tools that largely borrowed from the e world that enable you to look at large swaths of documents get to the meat of the matter find out what protected and what not and then move forward. You know, 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, like that, 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 they have, right? Like there's no way that, you know, LBJ is on his ranch signing this and thinking that this is going to be anything, anything like this. Reluctantly signing it at that. Exactly. Exactly. On July 4th, though, we have an actual document signed on July 4th, which, you know, distinguishes it from the declaration. So that's a good deal, right? So 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, you know, millions of requests a year now. And so people want to move these requests as quickly as possible. And that's, you know, that's why you see the push to tech. You mentioned technology. Some agencies have maybe not quite state of the art, but pretty current systems that are used in litigation context for dealing with massive amounts of documents. I've seen other agencies with very archaic systems and understaffing and all that. So I've always wondered, like, are 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 that answer, I never seem to get documents or it ironically takes like years. but are 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 because it just means they'll be out of office by the time anything comes out you can see why they wouldn't have much incentive to try to fix the problem right there's there's a reason the 2016 foie amendments were signed at the end of an administration at the beginning of an administration like that's not a coincidence right like that is by design yeah and to be fair it doesn't matter if it's an R or a D, I would have expected the same outcome. Totally agree. Yeah. You know, that's just 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 statute. They would just be doing it. Right. So yeah, it is fascinating that some of the work that I'm doing right now on the consulting side is finding out the answer to this exact question. What is the total addressable 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 FOIA requests a year, got it, no problem. If you're over 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 to each other, B, has 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. The real challenge is 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, 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, e-discovery platforms, that can provide some kind of commonality for the FOIA officers. And moreover, 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 work in the FOIA space where there's a lot of nuance, to be able 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 upon thousands of pages a month and get these things done. Oh, yeah. By the way, Mike, that's, and Matt, wouldn't that be amazing? If the FBI were like, all right, we have 18 million pages and we could actually get thousands a month. I mean, that's like a cash machine. That's like an ATM, like every month. Every month I'm going to 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. It's documented. CDC's FOIA staff gone. And at other agencies, we've seen a reduction in the FOIA staff. When Matt and I were 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's comments to heart when he said that virtually all government records should be readily available. It should be only in very limited circumstances that anything gets withheld and you should barely even need to use FOIA. Because I think if your political philosophy is sort of distrust of government, distrust of agencies, and 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 offices. So, you know, I know Elon Musk didn't run for office, but the same idea that 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 and then they stick it on the next ones. And that's not unique to this administration. That's just the way it's been. 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 requests 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 to that? That's a great question. I well remember Elon saying exactly that, Matt. I clipped it, put it on LinkedIn, very robust conversation around it. And then Doge took zero FOIA requests and said that they're part of the presidential records act. So it's exactly right. And Jason, to your point, I think when the stats come out, presumably in March of 2026, which is when they generally government-wide 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. Right. There's a real concern in voice base in terms of whether, and that's part of my ongoing research now, is what is the true cost of transparency? What are we actually paying for contract support? What are we actually paying for e-discovery solutions? What are we actually paying for COTS products? 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 brand brand that you're talking about is going to be responsible for part of that. That good people have left solid programs and left good people behind as well. However, you need a certain mass, kind of Colin Powell's doctrine of overwhelming force. We don't have overwhelming force, and we do need force multipliers in the FOIA community. And I think technology will get us part of the way there, but you can't do it without people. You know, the best MRI is worthless if there's not a trained person to interpret it and provide advice related to it. April 29th and 30th, Bloomberg House arrives in Miami at the Formula One Grand Prix. Set against one of the world's most electrifying sporting events, Bloomberg House brings business, investment, and culture together. Powered by Bloomberg journalism, real-time data, and forward-looking conversations. From onstage discussions to exclusive networking with global leaders, this is where ideas connect. Bloomberg House Miami. Learn more at bloomberglive.com slash bloomberghousemiami. 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 of 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, FOIA components act 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 at 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, I think, be a long-term benefit for the federal government and transparency. However, when you look at places, most famously at OPM, where someone tried to put 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's role in the Trump administration, including his security clearance. That's not helpful. There has to be a human being there, a 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 will ensue. The fees will accrue. And the agency can find themselves paying multiple, multiple hundreds of thousands, if not into the millions of dollars in FOIA-related fees because judges will also lose their patience. I'm sure you've seen, Matt, in judges continuing to lose their patience with administrations that drag their heels consistently and say, we can't do this, we can't do that. then they look at the agency's headcount and they look at the agency's budget and say, well, that's your problem, not mine. 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. And 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 like you cannot just fire all the FOIA staff and then say we're not going to process requests. So they went so far that I think it has moved back. And my hope is that that momentum continues and we, you know, we continue to kind of put the emphasis on this that we should. There's another side to this coin 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 checks and some of those are not. So what you end up having is a lot of overworked, overstressed FOIA officers just kind of going, yep, 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 err 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 as fast as possible, it seems to me like what going to happen is they going to end up over redacting and over withholding those documents They not just going to say oh here you go Here a bunch of documents Because like I cool with that outcome I mean there are certain things I recognize agencies shouldn be releasing like people's 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 said it was dropped and the round killed a woman. And the gun was in possession of the legal immigrant at the time in 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? You don't 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 and really very, very bottom in terms of guns for officer lost the last, the last on there and able to put that in context. If more foyer shops would be more fulsome 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 on 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 they did that. Yeah. And that does a lot to turn the tide on, you know, the distrust of government in our country is I mean, it's just continues to mount. It 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. And it's 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 in the FOIA profession can be 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 down into the current technology and how it can impact FOIA operations. And it's gotten a lot of traction. We've done a few cool things. I can tell you that we've rewritten the DOJ FOIA guide, the thousand page tome 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 to go into this FOIA field. How can you be successful in this field? I do want to ask how I become a tenured professor at FOIA University. I'm looking for work after, you know, my journalism career. Well, so many are. And you'd be a very welcome adjunct professor initially at FOIA. Oh, only adjunct? No, I want tenure. Tenure, Mike. If you can bring more courses to the table like that, Professor Leopold, we'd be delighted to welcome you into 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 party FOIA is a real thing. And I think it's incredibly important. For example, at VHA, a woman called and she was the former wife of a service member who committed suicides. 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 stonewall 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 in this really traumatic 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 humans getting access to information that can help improve their lives. Any other examples you can share with us, whether it's like VA 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, they ask for your place of birth and that your parents made names. And so those are really important clues for people to look back and research and find where they have 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 first service, Camp Lejeune issues, folks that had served and had illnesses associated with water. My own uncle, who was at Camp Lejeune and had significant medical issues, able to get access to his records through the FOIA and qualify for earned benefits. And you see these in older veterans more than anyone else. And now you're seeing that cohort's your Vietnam era, some of your Korean, but more so your Vietnam era plus. But 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 veteran 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'll have access to better care, perhaps a nursing home that is for veterans or 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 touchpoint and a record that can help you achieve literally any goal that you're trying to accomplish. My favorite FOIA isn't even really a FOIA. The Wright brothers, when they were doing aeronautical experimentation in Ohio and then going to Kitty Hawk, they sent a request to the Smithsonian Institution, which you can do now, you can send a FOIA to the Smithsonian, 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'll be $2. The Wright brothers sent back two bucks and they got the pamphlet, right? So even a fee used 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. If you can do it better, go for it, right? Here you go. And so that freedom of information, that transparency, I feel like is really a fundamental bedrock to what our country is. And FOIA really enables that. Mike, in your experience, have you seen businesses using FOIA to help with their business operations or learn things that are good for their 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 FOIA 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 in the future. Ultimately, who benefits from that? The American taxpayer, because these businesses can come back with better honed projects and responses to the request for proposals. And ultimately, the American taxpayer should be getting a better price at the end of the day. Ultimately, a number of businesses use FOIA to gain information when they're developing products, when they're trying to bring something to market. And what this does, hopefully, is it speeds the development curve and enables the American consumer to have better products at 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, you know, 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 100% 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. Well, thank you for that, Mike. And thank you for the work you've done for our veterans. Thank you for your service as a 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 children and the Wicked playlist has been prevalent as we went and saw Wicked, just saw Wicked too. But yeah, my personal playlist is usually filled with the Doors and the Allman Brothers, Leonard Skinner and NWF. So it's a good mix. Oh, nice. That's a good mix. And on the Taylor Swift point, may you have good FOIA karma. I appreciate that. And thank you to Jason and everybody else for the work that you do on the requester side for helping keep the FOIA community so well engaged and informed of what's going on. What you'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 Freedom of Information Acts and indeed international Freedom of Information Acts that really help illuminate what's going on across the world. Well, thank you, Mike. This has been a wonderful discussion. Thank you, Mike. Stay tuned for next week. Is the season to be foiled? Why are you wearing an elf costume? Greetings. I request the first 25 pages you locate for the term, quote, Santa Claus. Oh my God. Despite what may be unauthorized violations of U.S. airspace, violations of eavesdropping and privacy laws involving minor children. Give me a second. and the opportunity to use his annual delivery run to distribute narcotics manufactured by his elves. From Bloomberg and No Smiling, this is Disclosure. The show is hosted by Matt Topic and me, Jason Leopold. It's produced by Heather Schroering and Sean Cannon for No Smiling. Our editor for Bloomberg is Jeff Brokott. Our executive producers for Bloomberg are Sage Bauman and me, Jason Leopold. And our executive producers for No Smiling are Sean Cannon, Heather Schroering, and Matt Topic. The Disclosure theme song is by Nick, with additional music by Nick and Epidemic Sound. Sound design and mixing is by Sean Cannon. Special thanks to Mike Sarich. For more transparency news and important document dumps, you can subscribe to my weekly FOIA Files newsletter at Bloomberg.com slash FOIA Files. That's F-O-I-A files. To get every episode early on Apple Podcasts, become a Bloomberg.com subscriber today. 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