December 9, 2025 • 48 mins
Ask the US government for public records, and your request will go to a federal employee who holds the keys to what gets released and what doesn’t. Jason and Matt get a rare look inside a government Freedom of Information Act operation from Michael Sarich, who worked his way up from a FOIA post at the Bureau of Land Management to FOIA director at the Department of Veterans Affairs. In this episode, they discuss weird requests, big backlogs and the latest challenges to government transparency.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
It's April twenty fourteen, and hundreds of protesters are gathered
near a dusty Nevada overpass about eighty miles northeast of
Las Vegas. Some wave American flags from their saddles. Others
the yellow don't tread on any flag. It's like a
scene out of High Noon.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Cowboy hats, cowboy boots, jeans, shirts on the back of forces.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Michael Serich 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
(00:43):
concrete barrier.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
He's looking down on the LM rangers that had beads on,
essentially federal BLM officers.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
He had used this land for decades and decades and decades.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
And had paid fees to the federal government.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
In religiously for decades upon decades, but.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
After some permit disputes in the early nineties, he decided
that Washington no longer had the right to charge him,
that he had an ancestral right to the land because
his Mormon ascendants had it before the federal government did.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
The money's not to dale, the cows are not to
dale his freedom and liberty and get rid of this
amusing government.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Over twenty years, Bundy ignored court orders to relocate his herd.
He racked up more than a million dollars in unpaid fees.
By April twenty fourteen, the Bureau of Land Management had
come to collect, rounding up nearly four hundred of Bundy's
cows in arresting Bundy's son. Then the situation escalates. Another
one of Bundy's sons kicks a police dog, rangers tays him,
(01:54):
which riles Bundy supporters, who muster a full on militia
to converge on the ranch in face off against the Feds.
Men on horseback against men with ear pieces, And then
came the news trucks.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Tensions reached the boiling point earlier this week a real
Wild West Showdown.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
How cows in our militia and Fox News turned one
man into a modern folk hero.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Huge media interests followed from that.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
People want answers, and more than two thousand miles from Nevada.
At the Washington, d C. Headquarters of the Bureau of
Land Management, questions start pouring in.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
What's going on here in Nevada? Why are there armed
agents here standing off with with Americans also armed over
some cows.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
These information requests are piling up at the Bureau of
Land Management's Freedom of Information Act office. The foyer officers
need help, and they find Mike, a recent law school
grad and fellow at the BLM.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
I was very happily working as a realty specialist working
on high priority transmission lines. As a presidential management they
had some FOI experience. The foyer shop was like many understaffed,
and they said, hey, Mike, we need a lawyer. Come
down here and help us out.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
So he does, but he has his work cut out
for him.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
There was three hundred plus media requests, tons of citizen interest.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
The office is chaos, and Mike dives right in fielding
request after request, even the odd ones from anti government
types who were galvanized by the event.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
We get requests asking if the president at the time
was really a space alien covered in human skin, and
our response to 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.
(03:52):
And now that you've submitted this Foyer request, here's the
record you got us.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
As Mike would learn over the next decade fielding Foyer
requests in several government agencies. That's all in a day's
work for a public records officer.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
I owe my FOYA career in large part to mister
Bundy and the great cattle Trespass Gather of twenty fourteen
hit It.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
I'm investigative journalist Jason Leopold. I spent most of my
days getting documents from the government.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
I'm attorney Matt Tapik, and I fight them in court
to open their files when they don't want to.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Us well I don't often say this about government officials,
but Michael Sirich is a FOYA 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
(04:53):
his way up through FOYA posts at four agencies, from
an officer at the Bureau of Land Management in 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 FOYA program is the third largest
in the entire federal government. So Mike has accomplished something
(05:14):
really impressive. He's reduced the VA's FOYA backlong by ninety percent,
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
(05:35):
to the podcast. Very glad to have you here.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Pleasure to be here, and thanks for having me.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
I noticed behind you, what does that sign it's kind
of lurking out.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Oh oh sure, sure. So peace love and Foya, that's
is what it says. Yeah, says peace love and FOYA.
And it's just a nod to the fact that FOYA
became operative in nineteen sixty seven, the summer of love
and so peace love and Foya is all about, ah,
you know, hey, we need to be peaceful with our requesters.
Do this work in a sense of love and it's
(06:03):
FOY it it's about the freedom information and having that
relationship with the American people who pair sellaries. You need
to have FOYA stock baxactly.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
So, Mike, you didn't see the detail working on the
FOYA as a step down, because sometimes I will read
that people who are detailed to FOYA, they've sometimes looked
at it as like this is a punishment if you're
detailed to the FOYA. You've heard those stories before, right,
Oh yeah, for sure, in particular State Department where someone
(06:32):
said it was a kin to being stationed to Siberia.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, why do they say that? I don't know, to
be honest, because when I got down to the Foyer 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 bureauland Management, like all federal agencies,
exist to serve the American people. And here in Foyer,
you have this tremendous opportunity, indeed obligation to tell the
story through records of what the agency is doing on
(06:56):
behalf of the American people. So the way I saw
this incredib opportunity to go down and work in the
Foya 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 towards and why we needed
to take this action, and also in this case in
the cat standoff, to really demonstrate the years and years
(07:20):
and years of work that the Bureau Land 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
(07:42):
the federal government could do in this instance. And this
is what got the most attention.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
So I need to ask this this question and then Matta,
I'm going to bump it over to you. Okay, you
get over to the Bureau of Land Management, you're working
in the FOYA 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?
Speaker 2 (08:06):
What was that like?
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Because I've always thought about, Gee, what would happen if
I was a FOI officer And suddenly I get to
see all of these emails unredacted, get full access, Mike,
No B five's right, nob six is get them?
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Nont be five?
Speaker 3 (08:21):
No B seven A yeah, just raw naked documents exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
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, or 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
(08:47):
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.
Boy 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,
(09:11):
and it is their obligation to provide as much of that,
like literally everything that they can possibly provide to the
request while protecting the agency. And so it's critically critically
important that they're well helps to speed on all the exemptions,
all the laws, all of the regulations. But it's pretty fun,
There's no two ways about it. It's pretty fun for sure.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
I may have done like hundreds of FOIL lawsuits, including
I think maybe some against agencies you've been at, but
I don't think our paths have crossed before, have they.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
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 boy community, not just here in the Disclosure podcast,
but in the FOIA field. Thank you. Jason. Are there
any Bundy foyas in your archive? Do you remember?
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Were you making foyas for Bundy stuff?
Speaker 3 (09:57):
So that's what I was thinking about it, and I was
so because one I totally remember it. Two it's definitely newsworthy,
so I would have most certainly have filed the Foyer,
but I can't find it. Mike, do you remember if
I filed? Do remember? I do remember that you were
one of the names Greenwald all of the Oh Greenwald?
(10:20):
Is that John Greenwald? Yeah, John Greenwald? So John Greenwald
is another frequent FOYA filer. And just a quick backstory,
John and I had filed numerous Foyer requests and sometimes
they are identical. And years ago I obtained some documents
(10:42):
from the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy, right, that's
the shop that handles oversees the Foyer operations, and I
think I asked for records on myself and anything related
to FOYA, 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
(11:04):
us as a Foyer posse.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Oh, that's the Foya possey.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
That's the Foyle Posse and they said some other Justice
Department attorney 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, you know, conspiring
not to pay fees.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
I think it was the Foya Tang clan or something
like that. It was I like that clan. Oh that's
ft FTC, FTC, you know me.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
So I filed a fouer request, and I'm sure I
did because of the you know, high profile nature of
this topic. But does my foyer request stand out? Was
there anything special about it?
Speaker 2 (11:43):
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 one hundred twenty thousand four years that year
or so. Sadly, sometimes the you know, I hear you
lost in the sea of incredible request.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
But yeah, yeah, very tactful. So let's get back to Bundy.
I mean, 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.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Oh yeah, you take the the good with the bad
and the funny with the with serious and we had
a lot, a lot of requests along those lines, and
you know, you get a whole mix of public comment
disguised as for you. Sometimes in this case, the land
was protected for the deaths records. 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,
(12:33):
I mean, were there for the turtle soup? And I
guess for the space aliens? Were there actual requests.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Or were people just yeah, and what was it like
all documents showing whether the president's an alien or how
did they how did they structure those.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Yeah, you would be surprised at how sophisticated a requests
like that could could be where they want.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
All.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Well, I'm not surprised, Mike, this doesn't surprise me at all.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
It would 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, okay, Oh yeah, I mean the president
couldn't exist on his own as a reptile. He would
need a whole colony of fellow reptiles too. But wait, Mike.
So here's a question. You get these requests, sure, and
(13:17):
you do what do you process the requests? 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 Foye's
and note that this was longer than six years ago.
So I can't attest to the fulsomeness of the search.
(13:39):
I don't think that we went to sixteen hundred Pennsylvania
and asked the president to affirm his Keepman, that's hilarious.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
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 FOYA officers get to decide what to release? Or
does that have to go up through like chains of
command you know, then end with like political appointees making
those decisions.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
The foy Offsker 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 FOY officers not omniscient. The foyofsker can't
know all of the impacts for every record. So those
(14:27):
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 FOYA 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 FOY officer
who signs the release saying, hey, this is my name
(14:49):
on this release letter. It is my responsibility, my obligation,
and my delegated authority to do so. Certainly input is taken,
but ultimately the FOY officer's decision. Who's the person who's
signing that lit.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
I did notice in your answer you talked about a
good FOYA office. So I got to ask, so, I mean,
are there bad FOY offices? You don't have to name anybody.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
There's a what regarded phrase and Floyd and went into
out black it out.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Ooh, went in out black it out.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
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, I'm going to block
it out.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
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 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.
(15:49):
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 is not. The exemptives 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,
(16:11):
this really should not have ever been redacted. And I
can see why they tried to get away with holding it.
But like, are there some shops where it's more there's
more political involvement in what gets released than others.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
You know with eight hundred like individual reporting units, you
know they go 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 reactions get lifted like that,
it's really just a training situation where a FOY officer
(16:45):
may be new, there's really high turnover and a lot
of Foyer shops. Sometimes, as Jason pointed out, it's not
considered the most incredible career move to be in that
Foya shop. So normally, I think that's a reflection of
inconsistencies in training versus situation where or someone's maliciously going
in and saying, hell, we're not going to give Leopold anything.
That Voyd terrorist is not getting a thing out of us.
(17:06):
So if he prints this request, he's gonna use all
of his toner right like, because it's just gonna be
black sheet after black sheet after black sheet, and maybe
if you does, and ads will leave in there just
to tease them. But yeah, I think in most cases
it's an issue where the FOY officer isn't maybe very
well trained or very confident in their training, so they're
not confident, they're gonna tend to overreact. And if they're
very confident and they can articulate the reasons behind why
(17:27):
they're releasing overholding, then they're in a much better spot.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Over the years, as I interacted with more FOYA officers,
Matt and Mike, I definitely understand what goes on behind
the scenes and the agencies much better as it relates
to the processing. I've definitely dealt with, and you know this, Matt,
agencies that are just terrible with FOYA. And you know,
(17:58):
the first one that always comes to mind for me
is the FBI. I just think that their FOYA 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 the most part, when I interact with
(18:18):
FOYA 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 request an agency or FOYA
(18:38):
officer comes in. And that's actually I want to segue
to that question, Mike, because there is sort of this
belief that FOYA officers and requests have an adversarial relationship.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Why do you think that is? I don't know, but
I think it's grounded in why anyone has an absurd
relationship with anyone else, And that's communication and understanding of
where the other person's coming from. I view foy's role
as an opportunity to tell the agency story. And I'm
always happy to tell the agency story at whatever agency
I'm working at. Whether that's the Bureau of my Management,
(19:10):
the Social Security Administration BAPHA, doesn't matter. There's a good
story to be told. Also, trying to understand what the
requests 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, then they don't have to.
But if they do tell you what exactly they're looking for,
(19:33):
the exact needle that they're looking for, A fuy officer
can often find it much faster than a request or 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 boy officer
can take that targeted request and provide a timely response.
So that's an area that I think reeds a little
(19:54):
bit of animosity because the fuy offser may feel like
she's on a wild goose chase and the play requestion.
I feel like, well, why is the staking hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of days when it's supposed to take twenty.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the number of days. So
I want, I do want to talk about backlogs because
you know, I noticed that one of the things you
achieved at VA was like a ninety percent reduction in backlogs,
right like that. First, thank you for that. I mean,
that really is a service to our country to do that.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Thank you, Mike.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
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 Feyer 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
FOYA house in order, I would contend it's OIP because
they also have this sort of widespread federal leadership role
(20:46):
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 op. So every year, agencies have
to report their backlogs in the average response times, and
the statue requires twenty to thirty business days to issue
a determination, and the courts say that typically the production
(21:06):
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 twenty twenty four complex requests, that average response
is six hundred and fifty days. It's in order of
(21:27):
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 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 six hundred days.
This is OIP saying, we recognize that there's an urgency
to inform of the public, but we're going to take
(21:47):
almost two years to respond to the requests. Like you
could understand why people get really frustrated and say, the
government's not doing its jobs.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
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, I hear you
go whatever you need. But if I told her it's
going to be two hundred 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
(22:17):
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 six hundred
days four hundred days for expierty requests especially, it just
doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
How were you able to reduce by ninety percent, but
OIP has got these massive backlogs still.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
The way that VHA first and then VA at large
was able to reduce our FOY 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 BHA,
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 a huge credit to the nine hundred
(23:02):
or so folks scattered across twelve time zones at the
VA who made that happen. Wow, nine hundred amazing. A
lot of requests that VA are driven by veterans seeking
access to an earned benefits, 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
(23:24):
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, FOYE should be about a
month long process. And this is why I'm so fashionate
about technology tools that largely barred from the discovery world,
that enable you to look at large spasset documents, get
(23:46):
to the meat of the matter, find out what's protected
and what's not, and then move move forward. You know,
you have FOY requests that are toddlers. Mine have master's degrees.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
I mean, would you agree with me that six hundred
plus days to respond to requests like that, especially urgent requests.
This is not what Congress had in mind.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Right when the President signed this law in nineteen sixty
six and it became operative in nineteen sixty seven. No
one envisioned that the request would be like this, And
how could they have, right, like, there's there's no way
that you know, Lbj's on his ranch signing this and
thinking that this is going to be anything anything like this,
reluctantly signing it at that Yeah, exactly, very exactly on
July fourth, though we have an actual document signed on
(24:27):
July fourth, which you know is distinguishes it from the declaration.
So that's a good deal, right. So the idea that
every single person in those toy shops virtually also want
to get those FOI requests out not in six hundred
and fifty days, but they all want to get them
out in twenty or thirty 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,
(24:47):
millions of requests a year now, and so people want
to move these requests as quickly as as possible. And
that's you know, that's why you see the push to attack.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
You mentioned technologies some agencies have maybe not quite stated
the are 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 understaffing and all that.
So I've always wondered, like our FOYA offices trying to
get the money into their budgets to pay for these things,
(25:18):
or are they like whenever I try to foile 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 office by the time anything
(25:40):
comes out, you could see why they wouldn't have much
incentive to try to fix the problem.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Right, There's a reason the twenty sixteen FOY amendments where
it'signed at the end of the administration, at the beginning
of an administration. Like, that's not a coincidence, right, Like
that is I design? Yeah, And to be fair, it
doesn't matter if it's an R or a D. This
I would have expected the same outcome. Totally agree. Yeah,
you know, that's just the way it is, right.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
A phrase that I throw around a lot in Please
don't take this as disparagement. If government officials were inclined
to be transparent, we wouldn't need a FOYA statue.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
They would just be doing it right. So, yeah, it
is fascinating. Some of the work that I'm doing right
now on the consulting side is finding out that the
answer to this exact question, what is a total addressable
market of FOYA? 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
(26:36):
type of FOYA program with more than a few requests
a year. So if you're the Truman Scholarship Foundation and
you're getting fifteen or FOY requests here, got it, no problem.
If you're over fifty or one hundred requests and you're
not using a tool purpose built for FOYA, then you're
really missing out. And I think that's part of the
FOY Advisory Committee's movement towards a common case platform where
(26:58):
the entirety of the federal government could be on on
a system that A talks to each other B has
a commonality of training, so that if a FOY officer
works at Agency A and they move to Agency B,
there's no learning curve. They are working in the same
optimized system that is affordable across the federal government. The
real challenges if you foid the contracts for a department
(27:19):
like HHS where people are choosing different FOYA platforms, you'll
see that they're paying different prices even if they're buying
the same platform.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
You're seeing inside of one department. Sure there are different
technology stacks that are being used to process fluyerws within
the same department.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
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 the current action in the foyer world where
people are looking to platforms, discovery platforms that can provide
some kind of commonality for the foy officers and moreover
to provide quality control and oversight. We're in a world
(27:57):
now where the tools have gotten better, better and better
and better. In fact, I think the real answer for
FOYA is going to be small language models, not large
language models. The technology that's specifically trained in this area
to be able to work in the foyer space where
there's a lot of nuance, to be able to move
these cases much quicker, So not the six hundred day cases,
but the twenty or thirty day cases and get them
(28:19):
out the door in a much much faster way. And
so when you're litigating, you're not looking at three hundred
pages a month. You can genuinely and reasonably get thousands
on thousands of pages a month and get these things done.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Oh yeah, by the way, Mike, that's and Matt, wouldn't
that be amazing if the FBI were like, all right,
we have eighteen million pages and we could actually get
thousands a month.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
I mean, that's it's like a cash machine.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
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 FOYA offices have been decimated this year, right,
(29:04):
they're just have It's documented CDC's FOYA staff gone, and
at other agencies that we've seen a reduction in the
FOYA staff. When Matt and I were sort of discussing, like,
all right, what's FOYA going to look like in twenty
twenty five, we actually thought, and I don't want to
speak format, but I thought that it would more or.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Less look the same as it did in years past.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
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 FOYA because
I think if your political philosophy is sort of distrust
(29:50):
of government, distrust of agencies, in believing that we have
too much unaccountable bureaucracy, well foya's for you. I mean, right,
that's what FOYA is four is to help us understand
all these things. And you know, of course, then they
came in and decimated the Foy offices. So you know,
I know Elon must didn't run for office, but the
(30:11):
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 and then they stick
it on the next ones.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
And that's not unique to this administration. That's just the
way it's been. But I have never seen Foyer offices
kind of caught up in the crossfire where now you
have whole agencies FOYA offices that are just gone. And
so I have request sitting out there to various agencies
(30:42):
where there's either one person or there's no one there
and wondering, you know, what happens with the Foyer, you know,
with my Foyer requests. So I'm just Mike, I'm just
wondering what's the remedy that.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
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 does took zero FOI 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 or
twenty twenty six, which is when they generally government wide
(31:15):
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
and 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?
(31:37):
What are we actually paying for the discovery solutions? What
are we actually paying for COPS 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.
(32:01):
And largely the brand DRAN that's shogging 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 colon piles doctrine
of overwhelming force. We don't have overwhelming force, and we
do need force multipliers in the Foyer community. And I
(32:21):
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 unprovide advice related to it.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
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 Foyer offices ended up being more or
less shut down during the course of the purge.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
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
with 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
(33:15):
maybe someone in the Senior Ejective Service like they'd 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 Plates's most famously at oh PM
where someone tried to put in a FOY request and
the person on the phone said, hey, good luck, they
(33:36):
just fired everybody.
Speaker 4 (33:37):
Good luck with that. They just fired the entire privacy team.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
Yeah, that actually happened to a CNN reporter earlier this
year when you filed a request with the Office of
Personnel Management.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
I believe there was a video of it.
Speaker 4 (33:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
That's not helpful. 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 can find
themselves paying multiple, multiple hundreds of thousands, if not to
(34:20):
the millions of dollars in FOY related fees. Because judges
will also lose their patients. I'm sure you've seen Mattin
and judges continuing to lose their patients with administrations that
drag their heels consistently and say we can't do this,
we can't do that. Then they look at the agencies
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.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
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 FOYA,
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 f the problem at all, it's it's
(35:01):
enabling the problem. I think this year has been different
because when when the answer is, oh, we fired all
the FOYA people, they've gone so far. Now the courts
are like, I gave you some leeway, but like you
cannot just fire all the FOY 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, you know,
(35:23):
we continue to kind of put the emphasis on this
that we should.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
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 FOY officers to put through ten thousand
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, over stressed foil officers
just kind of going yep yep, yep, yep yep to
meet a number that they have to produce without spending
(35:48):
the time. The line by line, page by page analysis
that by law says that has that you have to
accomplish well.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
If a poorly trained FOY officer isn't sure what to do,
they're going to err on the side of withholding, right.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
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's going to happen is they're going
to end up over redacting and over withholding those documents.
They're 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
agen she shouldn't be releasing, like people's social Security numbers.
(36:21):
But a whole lot of this stuff is very discretionary
and if they want to release it, they can't.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
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 obsession with the
leage immigrant at the time. In San Francisco. Immigration Illegal
immigration a hot topic for sure in that community, and
(36:48):
so people look to the bureauland management and they're like, hey,
how did this happen? If 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 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
(37:11):
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,
(37:34):
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?
Speaker 1 (37:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
It humanizes it.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Yeah, exactly. So anything Foyer 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 and it's you know, the
classic the cover up is worse than the crime. So, Mike,
you're working now on something called Foyer University. Tell us
(38:17):
more about that.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
We're launching that in January, full suite of FOYA trainings
and tools for FOYER professionals. The turnover and the FOYA
profession can be you know, thirty forty 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 FOYA. So we've done things like we've
released our most recent white paper on small language models.
(38:41):
We call it the slim Solution to a fat problem
of FEOYA processing and really dig down into the current
technology and how it can impact FOY 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
FOYA Guide, the one thousand page tome filled with footnotes.
It's under two hundred pages, it's accessible, it's graph it
has an opportunity to really get into it and learn.
(39:02):
So we're recording the videos that go along with that,
along with FOYA program management to help people that get
tagged to go into this FOYA field. How can you
be successful in this field?
Speaker 3 (39:12):
I do want to ask how I become a tenured
professor at Foya University.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
I'm looking for work after you know my my journalism
correct well, so many are and you'd be a very
welcome adjunct professor's initially at fly adjunc 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 into our university. I think I may,
(39:38):
I think I may have to work on that.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
You know, we people think of FOYA as 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 FOYA to get any number
of things. What are some other things you've seen of
like just individual people using FOYA.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Sure, First partly, FOYA 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've 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
(40:20):
kind of had to add 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,
and 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 FOYA can impact people on a
human level and help people cope in a really awful situation.
(40:44):
And that story is replicated one hundred and twenty thousand
times a year, not exactly, of course, but like the
story of humans getting access to information that can help
improve their lives.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
Any other examples you can share with us, whether it's
like VA or Social Security Administration, and you know people
using FOYA for individual interesting things.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
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? In 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
(41:25):
birth and that your parents made names and so there's
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 her service?
Camp La June issues? Folks that had served and had
(41:47):
illnesses associated with water. My own uncle who was at
Camp La June and had significant medical issues able to
get access to his records through the FOYA and qualify
for earned benefits. Then you see these in older vetter
is more than anyone else. And now you're seeing that
cohorts your Vietnam era some of your Korean but more
so your Vietnam Era. Plus that maybe they don't have
(42:09):
the facility with a computer to really get into these things,
to get into the records and kind of provide self service.
So the FOY officers really help them and help walk
them through that process to help either caregivers or the
better than themselves get access to the documents that will
substantiate their service, to provide them with information that will
(42:29):
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 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's someone in
(42:51):
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. My favorite FOY isn't even really
a FOI. The Right Brothers when they were doing or
an nautical 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 foid to the Smithsonian,
It's no problem. And they ask for all of the
(43:13):
charts and every bit of information that they could have.
And even though Samuel Langley, who was the head of
the SMITHSONI at the time, was also engaged in this
very activity, he said send them everything. Wow. And he
also said, hey, if you want my pamphlet, it will
be two dollars. The right brothers sent back two bucks
and they got the pamphlet. Right. So even even a
fee use in that instance, And that's kind of part
(43:34):
of our culture. I think that's ingrained in the 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 he is really a fundamental bedrock to
what our country is and FOYA really enables that.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
Mike, in your experience, have you seen businesses using FOYA
to you know, help with with their business operations or
learn learn things that are good for their businesses?
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Oh? Absolutely, not just good for the business, but also
good for the tax payer. What you'll see frequently is
five businesses or six businesses may bid for a project,
one will you know, certainly get it. Oftentimes the other
companies will make a FLOY 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
(44:21):
American tax payer, because these businesses can come back with
better honed projects and responses to the request for proposals,
and ultimately the American tax payer should be getting a
better price at the end of the day. Ultimately, a
number of businesses use FOYA to gain information when they're
developing products, when they're trying to bring something to market.
(44:42):
And what this does, hopefully is it speeds a development
curve and enables the American consumer to have better products
at better prices. So you see a tremendous value in
the foyer for business information, and you see that all
over the place with the number of companies that are
making requests on behalf of say private equity or other
com companies in order to gain a competitive advantage. Ultimately,
(45:03):
that competitive advantage should be born out in lower prices
for American consumers.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
And I think what gets missed sometimes is that those
types of requests, 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.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
Costs are largely born by those requests.
Speaker 1 (45:25):
Right which is it is?
Speaker 2 (45:26):
It should be? Yeah, they pay one hundred percent full
freight for search and review and right now we look
at a very small percentage of the FOYA operations being
recovered through this, and they help make that happen and
more to come on that for sure.
Speaker 1 (45:37):
Well, thank you for that, Mike, and thank you for
the work you've done for a veterans. Thank you for
your service as a veteran. I think it really helps
people to understand just how broad the statue is in
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?
Speaker 2 (45:56):
I have a lot of Taylor Swift lately because I
have a children, and the Wicked playlist has been prevalent
as we all wicked, just all Wicked too, but yeah,
my personal playlist is usually usually filled with the Doors
and the Allman Brothers, Leonard Skinner and NWS. So it's
a good mix.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
Oh nice, that's a good mix. And on the Taylor's
soit point, I may you have good foya karma.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
I appreciate that. And thank you to Jason and everybody
else for the work that you do on the request
side for helping keep the FOYD community so well engage
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 Information Acts and indeed international freedom Information Acts
(46:42):
that really help illuminate what's going on across the world.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Well, thank you, mag this has been a wonderful discussion.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
Thank you, Mike. Stay tuned for next week his the
season to be foyed. Why are you wearing an elf costume? Greetings?
Speaker 1 (46:58):
I request the first twenty five pages you.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
Locate for the term quote Santa Claus. Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
Despite what may be unauthorized violations of US airspace, violations
of eavesdropping and privacy laws involving minor children. A second,
and the opportunity to use his annual delivery run to
distribute narcotics manufactured by Zelms.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
From Bloomberg and No Smiling. This is Disclosure.
Speaker 3 (47:30):
The show is hosted by Matt Topic and me Jason Leopold.
It's produced by Heather Schroing and Sean Cannon for No Smiling.
Our editor for Bloomberg is Jeff Brocott. Our executive producers
for Bloomberg are Sage Bauman and me Jason Leopold, and
our executive producers for No Smiling are Sean Cannon, Heather
Schrowing and Matt Topic. The Disclosure theme song is by Nick,
(47:54):
with additional music by Nick an Epidemic Sound, sound design
and mixing by Sean Cannon.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
Special thanks to Mike Serich. For more transparency news and
important document thumps.
Speaker 3 (48:07):
You can subscribe to my Weeklyfoya Files newsletter at Bloomberg
dot com slash Boy of files. That's Foia Files. To
get every episode early on Apple Podcasts. Become a Bloomberg
dot com subscriber today. Check out our special intro offer
right now at Bloomberg dot com slash Podcast offer or
(48:27):
click the link In the show notes, you'll also unlock
deep reporting data and analysis from reporters around the world.
Speaker 2 (48:34):
We'll see you again next Tuesday. I thought you said
I was a right spidery. You are a right spider
It's April twenty fourteen, and hundreds of protesters are gathered
near a dusty Nevada overpass about eighty miles northeast of
Las Vegas. Some wave American flags from their saddles. Others
the yellow don't tread on any flag. It's like a
scene out of High Noon.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Cowboy hats, cowboy boots, jeans, shirts on the back of forces.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Michael Serich 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
(00:43):
concrete barrier.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
He's looking down on the LM rangers that had beads on,
essentially federal BLM officers.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
He had used this land for decades and decades and decades.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
And had paid fees to the federal government.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
In religiously for decades upon decades, but.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
After some permit disputes in the early nineties, he decided
that Washington no longer had the right to charge him,
that he had an ancestral right to the land because
his Mormon ascendants had it before the federal government did.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
The money's not to dale, the cows are not to
dale his freedom and liberty and get rid of this
amusing government.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Over twenty years, Bundy ignored court orders to relocate his herd.
He racked up more than a million dollars in unpaid fees.
By April twenty fourteen, the Bureau of Land Management had
come to collect, rounding up nearly four hundred of Bundy's
cows in arresting Bundy's son. Then the situation escalates. Another
one of Bundy's sons kicks a police dog, rangers tays him,
(01:54):
which riles Bundy supporters, who muster a full on militia
to converge on the ranch in face off against the Feds.
Men on horseback against men with ear pieces, And then
came the news trucks.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Tensions reached the boiling point earlier this week a real
Wild West Showdown.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
How cows in our militia and Fox News turned one
man into a modern folk hero.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Huge media interests followed from that.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
People want answers, and more than two thousand miles from Nevada.
At the Washington, d C. Headquarters of the Bureau of
Land Management, questions start pouring in.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
What's going on here in Nevada? Why are there armed
agents here standing off with with Americans also armed over
some cows.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
These information requests are piling up at the Bureau of
Land Management's Freedom of Information Act office. The foyer officers
need help, and they find Mike, a recent law school
grad and fellow at the BLM.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
I was very happily working as a realty specialist working
on high priority transmission lines. As a presidential management they
had some FOI experience. The foyer shop was like many understaffed,
and they said, hey, Mike, we need a lawyer. Come
down here and help us out.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
So he does, but he has his work cut out
for him.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
There was three hundred plus media requests, tons of citizen interest.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
The office is chaos, and Mike dives right in fielding
request after request, even the odd ones from anti government
types who were galvanized by the event.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
We get requests asking if the president at the time
was really a space alien covered in human skin, and
our response to 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.
(03:52):
And now that you've submitted this Foyer request, here's the
record you got us.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
As Mike would learn over the next decade fielding Foyer
requests in several government agencies. That's all in a day's
work for a public records officer.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
I owe my FOYA career in large part to mister
Bundy and the great cattle Trespass Gather of twenty fourteen
hit It.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
I'm investigative journalist Jason Leopold. I spent most of my
days getting documents from the government.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
I'm attorney Matt Tapik, and I fight them in court
to open their files when they don't want to.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Us well I don't often say this about government officials,
but Michael Sirich is a FOYA 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
(04:53):
his way up through FOYA posts at four agencies, from
an officer at the Bureau of Land Management in 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 FOYA program is the third largest
in the entire federal government. So Mike has accomplished something
(05:14):
really impressive. He's reduced the VA's FOYA backlong by ninety percent,
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
(05:35):
to the podcast. Very glad to have you here.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Pleasure to be here, and thanks for having me.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
I noticed behind you, what does that sign it's kind
of lurking out.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Oh oh sure, sure. So peace love and Foya, that's
is what it says. Yeah, says peace love and FOYA.
And it's just a nod to the fact that FOYA
became operative in nineteen sixty seven, the summer of love
and so peace love and Foya is all about, ah,
you know, hey, we need to be peaceful with our requesters.
Do this work in a sense of love and it's
(06:03):
FOY it it's about the freedom information and having that
relationship with the American people who pair sellaries. You need
to have FOYA stock baxactly.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
So, Mike, you didn't see the detail working on the
FOYA as a step down, because sometimes I will read
that people who are detailed to FOYA, they've sometimes looked
at it as like this is a punishment if you're
detailed to the FOYA. You've heard those stories before, right,
Oh yeah, for sure, in particular State Department where someone
(06:32):
said it was a kin to being stationed to Siberia.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, why do they say that? I don't know, to
be honest, because when I got down to the Foyer 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 bureauland Management, like all federal agencies,
exist to serve the American people. And here in Foyer,
you have this tremendous opportunity, indeed obligation to tell the
story through records of what the agency is doing on
(06:56):
behalf of the American people. So the way I saw
this incredib opportunity to go down and work in the
Foya 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 towards and why we needed
to take this action, and also in this case in
the cat standoff, to really demonstrate the years and years
(07:20):
and years of work that the Bureau Land 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
(07:42):
the federal government could do in this instance. And this
is what got the most attention.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
So I need to ask this this question and then Matta,
I'm going to bump it over to you. Okay, you
get over to the Bureau of Land Management, you're working
in the FOYA 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?
Speaker 2 (08:06):
What was that like?
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Because I've always thought about, Gee, what would happen if
I was a FOI officer And suddenly I get to
see all of these emails unredacted, get full access, Mike,
No B five's right, nob six is get them?
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Nont be five?
Speaker 3 (08:21):
No B seven A yeah, just raw naked documents exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
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, or 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
(08:47):
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.
Boy 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,
(09:11):
and it is their obligation to provide as much of that,
like literally everything that they can possibly provide to the
request while protecting the agency. And so it's critically critically
important that they're well helps to speed on all the exemptions,
all the laws, all of the regulations. But it's pretty fun,
There's no two ways about it. It's pretty fun for sure.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
I may have done like hundreds of FOIL lawsuits, including
I think maybe some against agencies you've been at, but
I don't think our paths have crossed before, have they.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
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 boy community, not just here in the Disclosure podcast,
but in the FOIA field. Thank you. Jason. Are there
any Bundy foyas in your archive? Do you remember?
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Were you making foyas for Bundy stuff?
Speaker 3 (09:57):
So that's what I was thinking about it, and I was
so because one I totally remember it. Two it's definitely newsworthy,
so I would have most certainly have filed the Foyer,
but I can't find it. Mike, do you remember if
I filed? Do remember? I do remember that you were
one of the names Greenwald all of the Oh Greenwald?
(10:20):
Is that John Greenwald? Yeah, John Greenwald? So John Greenwald
is another frequent FOYA filer. And just a quick backstory,
John and I had filed numerous Foyer requests and sometimes
they are identical. And years ago I obtained some documents
(10:42):
from the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy, right, that's
the shop that handles oversees the Foyer operations, and I
think I asked for records on myself and anything related
to FOYA, 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
(11:04):
us as a Foyer posse.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Oh, that's the Foya possey.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
That's the Foyle Posse and they said some other Justice
Department attorney 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, you know, conspiring
not to pay fees.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
I think it was the Foya Tang clan or something
like that. It was I like that clan. Oh that's
ft FTC, FTC, you know me.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
So I filed a fouer request, and I'm sure I
did because of the you know, high profile nature of
this topic. But does my foyer request stand out? Was
there anything special about it?
Speaker 2 (11:43):
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 one hundred twenty thousand four years that year
or so. Sadly, sometimes the you know, I hear you
lost in the sea of incredible request.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
But yeah, yeah, very tactful. So let's get back to Bundy.
I mean, 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.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Oh yeah, you take the the good with the bad
and the funny with the with serious and we had
a lot, a lot of requests along those lines, and
you know, you get a whole mix of public comment
disguised as for you. Sometimes in this case, the land
was protected for the deaths records. 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,
(12:33):
I mean, were there for the turtle soup? And I
guess for the space aliens? Were there actual requests.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Or were people just yeah, and what was it like
all documents showing whether the president's an alien or how
did they how did they structure those.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Yeah, you would be surprised at how sophisticated a requests
like that could could be where they want.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
All.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Well, I'm not surprised, Mike, this doesn't surprise me at all.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
It would 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, okay, Oh yeah, I mean the president
couldn't exist on his own as a reptile. He would
need a whole colony of fellow reptiles too. But wait, Mike.
So here's a question. You get these requests, sure, and
(13:17):
you do what do you process the requests? 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 Foye's
and note that this was longer than six years ago.
So I can't attest to the fulsomeness of the search.
(13:39):
I don't think that we went to sixteen hundred Pennsylvania
and asked the president to affirm his Keepman, that's hilarious.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
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 FOYA officers get to decide what to release? Or
does that have to go up through like chains of
command you know, then end with like political appointees making
those decisions.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
The foy Offsker 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 FOY officers not omniscient. The foyofsker can't
know all of the impacts for every record. So those
(14:27):
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 FOYA 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 FOY officer
who signs the release saying, hey, this is my name
(14:49):
on this release letter. It is my responsibility, my obligation,
and my delegated authority to do so. Certainly input is taken,
but ultimately the FOY officer's decision. Who's the person who's
signing that lit.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
I did notice in your answer you talked about a
good FOYA office. So I got to ask, so, I mean,
are there bad FOY offices? You don't have to name anybody.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
There's a what regarded phrase and Floyd and went into
out black it out.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Ooh, went in out black it out.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
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, I'm going to block
it out.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
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 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.
(15:49):
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 is not. The exemptives 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,
(16:11):
this really should not have ever been redacted. And I
can see why they tried to get away with holding it.
But like, are there some shops where it's more there's
more political involvement in what gets released than others.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
You know with eight hundred like individual reporting units, you
know they go 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 reactions get lifted like that,
it's really just a training situation where a FOY officer
(16:45):
may be new, there's really high turnover and a lot
of Foyer shops. Sometimes, as Jason pointed out, it's not
considered the most incredible career move to be in that
Foya shop. So normally, I think that's a reflection of
inconsistencies in training versus situation where or someone's maliciously going
in and saying, hell, we're not going to give Leopold anything.
That Voyd terrorist is not getting a thing out of us.
(17:06):
So if he prints this request, he's gonna use all
of his toner right like, because it's just gonna be
black sheet after black sheet after black sheet, and maybe
if you does, and ads will leave in there just
to tease them. But yeah, I think in most cases
it's an issue where the FOY officer isn't maybe very
well trained or very confident in their training, so they're
not confident, they're gonna tend to overreact. And if they're
very confident and they can articulate the reasons behind why
(17:27):
they're releasing overholding, then they're in a much better spot.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Over the years, as I interacted with more FOYA officers,
Matt and Mike, I definitely understand what goes on behind
the scenes and the agencies much better as it relates
to the processing. I've definitely dealt with, and you know this, Matt,
agencies that are just terrible with FOYA. And you know,
(17:58):
the first one that always comes to mind for me
is the FBI. I just think that their FOYA 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 the most part, when I interact with
(18:18):
FOYA 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 request an agency or FOYA
(18:38):
officer comes in. And that's actually I want to segue
to that question, Mike, because there is sort of this
belief that FOYA officers and requests have an adversarial relationship.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Why do you think that is? I don't know, but
I think it's grounded in why anyone has an absurd
relationship with anyone else, And that's communication and understanding of
where the other person's coming from. I view foy's role
as an opportunity to tell the agency story. And I'm
always happy to tell the agency story at whatever agency
I'm working at. Whether that's the Bureau of my Management,
(19:10):
the Social Security Administration BAPHA, doesn't matter. There's a good
story to be told. Also, trying to understand what the
requests 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, then they don't have to.
But if they do tell you what exactly they're looking for,
(19:33):
the exact needle that they're looking for, A fuy officer
can often find it much faster than a request or 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 boy officer
can take that targeted request and provide a timely response.
So that's an area that I think reeds a little
(19:54):
bit of animosity because the fuy offser may feel like
she's on a wild goose chase and the play requestion.
I feel like, well, why is the staking hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of days when it's supposed to take twenty.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the number of days. So
I want, I do want to talk about backlogs because
you know, I noticed that one of the things you
achieved at VA was like a ninety percent reduction in backlogs,
right like that. First, thank you for that. I mean,
that really is a service to our country to do that.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Thank you, Mike.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
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 Feyer 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
FOYA house in order, I would contend it's OIP because
they also have this sort of widespread federal leadership role
(20:46):
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 op. So every year, agencies have
to report their backlogs in the average response times, and
the statue requires twenty to thirty business days to issue
a determination, and the courts say that typically the production
(21:06):
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 twenty twenty four complex requests, that average response
is six hundred and fifty days. It's in order of
(21:27):
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 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 six hundred days.
This is OIP saying, we recognize that there's an urgency
to inform of the public, but we're going to take
(21:47):
almost two years to respond to the requests. Like you
could understand why people get really frustrated and say, the
government's not doing its jobs.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
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, I hear you
go whatever you need. But if I told her it's
going to be two hundred 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
(22:17):
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 six hundred
days four hundred days for expierty requests especially, it just
doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
How were you able to reduce by ninety percent, but
OIP has got these massive backlogs still.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
The way that VHA first and then VA at large
was able to reduce our FOY 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 BHA,
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 a huge credit to the nine hundred
(23:02):
or so folks scattered across twelve time zones at the
VA who made that happen. Wow, nine hundred amazing. A
lot of requests that VA are driven by veterans seeking
access to an earned benefits, 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
(23:24):
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, FOYE should be about a
month long process. And this is why I'm so fashionate
about technology tools that largely barred from the discovery world,
that enable you to look at large spasset documents, get
(23:46):
to the meat of the matter, find out what's protected
and what's not, and then move move forward. You know,
you have FOY requests that are toddlers. Mine have master's degrees.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
I mean, would you agree with me that six hundred
plus days to respond to requests like that, especially urgent requests.
This is not what Congress had in mind.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Right when the President signed this law in nineteen sixty
six and it became operative in nineteen sixty seven. No
one envisioned that the request would be like this, And
how could they have, right, like, there's there's no way
that you know, Lbj's on his ranch signing this and
thinking that this is going to be anything anything like this,
reluctantly signing it at that Yeah, exactly, very exactly on
July fourth, though we have an actual document signed on
(24:27):
July fourth, which you know is distinguishes it from the declaration.
So that's a good deal, right. So the idea that
every single person in those toy shops virtually also want
to get those FOI requests out not in six hundred
and fifty days, but they all want to get them
out in twenty or thirty 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,
(24:47):
millions of requests a year now, and so people want
to move these requests as quickly as as possible. And
that's you know, that's why you see the push to attack.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
You mentioned technologies some agencies have maybe not quite stated
the are 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 understaffing and all that.
So I've always wondered, like our FOYA offices trying to
get the money into their budgets to pay for these things,
(25:18):
or are they like whenever I try to foile 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 office by the time anything
(25:40):
comes out, you could see why they wouldn't have much
incentive to try to fix the problem.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Right, There's a reason the twenty sixteen FOY amendments where
it'signed at the end of the administration, at the beginning
of an administration. Like, that's not a coincidence, right, Like
that is I design? Yeah, And to be fair, it
doesn't matter if it's an R or a D. This
I would have expected the same outcome. Totally agree. Yeah,
you know, that's just the way it is, right.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
A phrase that I throw around a lot in Please
don't take this as disparagement. If government officials were inclined
to be transparent, we wouldn't need a FOYA statue.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
They would just be doing it right. So, yeah, it
is fascinating. Some of the work that I'm doing right
now on the consulting side is finding out that the
answer to this exact question, what is a total addressable
market of FOYA? 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
(26:36):
type of FOYA program with more than a few requests
a year. So if you're the Truman Scholarship Foundation and
you're getting fifteen or FOY requests here, got it, no problem.
If you're over fifty or one hundred requests and you're
not using a tool purpose built for FOYA, then you're
really missing out. And I think that's part of the
FOY Advisory Committee's movement towards a common case platform where
(26:58):
the entirety of the federal government could be on on
a system that A talks to each other B has
a commonality of training, so that if a FOY officer
works at Agency A and they move to Agency B,
there's no learning curve. They are working in the same
optimized system that is affordable across the federal government. The
real challenges if you foid the contracts for a department
(27:19):
like HHS where people are choosing different FOYA platforms, you'll
see that they're paying different prices even if they're buying
the same platform.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
You're seeing inside of one department. Sure there are different
technology stacks that are being used to process fluyerws within
the same department.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
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 the current action in the foyer world where
people are looking to platforms, discovery platforms that can provide
some kind of commonality for the foy officers and moreover
to provide quality control and oversight. We're in a world
(27:57):
now where the tools have gotten better, better and better
and better. In fact, I think the real answer for
FOYA is going to be small language models, not large
language models. The technology that's specifically trained in this area
to be able to work in the foyer space where
there's a lot of nuance, to be able to move
these cases much quicker, So not the six hundred day cases,
but the twenty or thirty day cases and get them
(28:19):
out the door in a much much faster way. And
so when you're litigating, you're not looking at three hundred
pages a month. You can genuinely and reasonably get thousands
on thousands of pages a month and get these things done.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Oh yeah, by the way, Mike, that's and Matt, wouldn't
that be amazing if the FBI were like, all right,
we have eighteen million pages and we could actually get
thousands a month.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
I mean, that's it's like a cash machine.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
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 FOYA offices have been decimated this year, right,
(29:04):
they're just have It's documented CDC's FOYA staff gone, and
at other agencies that we've seen a reduction in the
FOYA staff. When Matt and I were sort of discussing, like,
all right, what's FOYA going to look like in twenty
twenty five, we actually thought, and I don't want to
speak format, but I thought that it would more or.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Less look the same as it did in years past.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
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 FOYA because
I think if your political philosophy is sort of distrust
(29:50):
of government, distrust of agencies, in believing that we have
too much unaccountable bureaucracy, well foya's for you. I mean, right,
that's what FOYA is four is to help us understand
all these things. And you know, of course, then they
came in and decimated the Foy offices. So you know,
I know Elon must didn't run for office, but the
(30:11):
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 and then they stick
it on the next ones.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
And that's not unique to this administration. That's just the
way it's been. But I have never seen Foyer offices
kind of caught up in the crossfire where now you
have whole agencies FOYA offices that are just gone. And
so I have request sitting out there to various agencies
(30:42):
where there's either one person or there's no one there
and wondering, you know, what happens with the Foyer, you know,
with my Foyer requests. So I'm just Mike, I'm just
wondering what's the remedy that.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
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 does took zero FOI 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 or
twenty twenty six, which is when they generally government wide
(31:15):
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
and 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?
(31:37):
What are we actually paying for the discovery solutions? What
are we actually paying for COPS 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.
(32:01):
And largely the brand DRAN that's shogging 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 colon piles doctrine
of overwhelming force. We don't have overwhelming force, and we
do need force multipliers in the Foyer community. And I
(32:21):
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 unprovide advice related to it.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
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 Foyer offices ended up being more or
less shut down during the course of the purge.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
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
with 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
(33:15):
maybe someone in the Senior Ejective Service like they'd 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 Plates's most famously at oh PM
where someone tried to put in a FOY request and
the person on the phone said, hey, good luck, they
(33:36):
just fired everybody.
Speaker 4 (33:37):
Good luck with that. They just fired the entire privacy team.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
Yeah, that actually happened to a CNN reporter earlier this
year when you filed a request with the Office of
Personnel Management.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
I believe there was a video of it.
Speaker 4 (33:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
That's not helpful. 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 can find
themselves paying multiple, multiple hundreds of thousands, if not to
(34:20):
the millions of dollars in FOY related fees. Because judges
will also lose their patients. I'm sure you've seen Mattin
and judges continuing to lose their patients with administrations that
drag their heels consistently and say we can't do this,
we can't do that. Then they look at the agencies
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.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
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 FOYA,
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 f the problem at all, it's it's
(35:01):
enabling the problem. I think this year has been different
because when when the answer is, oh, we fired all
the FOYA people, they've gone so far. Now the courts
are like, I gave you some leeway, but like you
cannot just fire all the FOY 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, you know,
(35:23):
we continue to kind of put the emphasis on this
that we should.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
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 FOY officers to put through ten thousand
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, over stressed foil officers
just kind of going yep yep, yep, yep yep to
meet a number that they have to produce without spending
(35:48):
the time. The line by line, page by page analysis
that by law says that has that you have to
accomplish well.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
If a poorly trained FOY officer isn't sure what to do,
they're going to err on the side of withholding, right.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
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's going to happen is they're going
to end up over redacting and over withholding those documents.
They're 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
agen she shouldn't be releasing, like people's social Security numbers.
(36:21):
But a whole lot of this stuff is very discretionary
and if they want to release it, they can't.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
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 obsession with the
leage immigrant at the time. In San Francisco. Immigration Illegal
immigration a hot topic for sure in that community, and
(36:48):
so people look to the bureauland management and they're like, hey,
how did this happen? If 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 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
(37:11):
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,
(37:34):
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?
Speaker 1 (37:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
It humanizes it.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Yeah, exactly. So anything Foyer 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 and it's you know, the
classic the cover up is worse than the crime. So, Mike,
you're working now on something called Foyer University. Tell us
(38:17):
more about that.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
We're launching that in January, full suite of FOYA trainings
and tools for FOYER professionals. The turnover and the FOYA
profession can be you know, thirty forty 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 FOYA. So we've done things like we've
released our most recent white paper on small language models.
(38:41):
We call it the slim Solution to a fat problem
of FEOYA processing and really dig down into the current
technology and how it can impact FOY 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
FOYA Guide, the one thousand page tome filled with footnotes.
It's under two hundred pages, it's accessible, it's graph it
has an opportunity to really get into it and learn.
(39:02):
So we're recording the videos that go along with that,
along with FOYA program management to help people that get
tagged to go into this FOYA field. How can you
be successful in this field?
Speaker 3 (39:12):
I do want to ask how I become a tenured
professor at Foya University.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
I'm looking for work after you know my my journalism
correct well, so many are and you'd be a very
welcome adjunct professor's initially at fly adjunc 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 into our university. I think I may,
(39:38):
I think I may have to work on that.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
You know, we people think of FOYA as 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 FOYA to get any number
of things. What are some other things you've seen of
like just individual people using FOYA.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Sure, First partly, FOYA 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've 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
(40:20):
kind of had to add 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,
and 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 FOYA can impact people on a
human level and help people cope in a really awful situation.
(40:44):
And that story is replicated one hundred and twenty thousand
times a year, not exactly, of course, but like the
story of humans getting access to information that can help
improve their lives.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
Any other examples you can share with us, whether it's
like VA or Social Security Administration, and you know people
using FOYA for individual interesting things.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
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? In 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
(41:25):
birth and that your parents made names and so there's
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 her service?
Camp La June issues? Folks that had served and had
(41:47):
illnesses associated with water. My own uncle who was at
Camp La June and had significant medical issues able to
get access to his records through the FOYA and qualify
for earned benefits. Then you see these in older vetter
is more than anyone else. And now you're seeing that
cohorts your Vietnam era some of your Korean but more
so your Vietnam Era. Plus that maybe they don't have
(42:09):
the facility with a computer to really get into these things,
to get into the records and kind of provide self service.
So the FOY officers really help them and help walk
them through that process to help either caregivers or the
better than themselves get access to the documents that will
substantiate their service, to provide them with information that will
(42:29):
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 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's someone in
(42:51):
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. My favorite FOY isn't even really
a FOI. The Right Brothers when they were doing or
an nautical 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 foid to the Smithsonian,
It's no problem. And they ask for all of the
(43:13):
charts and every bit of information that they could have.
And even though Samuel Langley, who was the head of
the SMITHSONI at the time, was also engaged in this
very activity, he said send them everything. Wow. And he
also said, hey, if you want my pamphlet, it will
be two dollars. The right brothers sent back two bucks
and they got the pamphlet. Right. So even even a
fee use in that instance, And that's kind of part
(43:34):
of our culture. I think that's ingrained in the 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 he is really a fundamental bedrock to
what our country is and FOYA really enables that.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
Mike, in your experience, have you seen businesses using FOYA
to you know, help with with their business operations or
learn learn things that are good for their businesses?
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Oh? Absolutely, not just good for the business, but also
good for the tax payer. What you'll see frequently is
five businesses or six businesses may bid for a project,
one will you know, certainly get it. Oftentimes the other
companies will make a FLOY 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
(44:21):
American tax payer, because these businesses can come back with
better honed projects and responses to the request for proposals,
and ultimately the American tax payer should be getting a
better price at the end of the day. Ultimately, a
number of businesses use FOYA to gain information when they're
developing products, when they're trying to bring something to market.
(44:42):
And what this does, hopefully is it speeds a development
curve and enables the American consumer to have better products
at better prices. So you see a tremendous value in
the foyer for business information, and you see that all
over the place with the number of companies that are
making requests on behalf of say private equity or other
com companies in order to gain a competitive advantage. Ultimately,
(45:03):
that competitive advantage should be born out in lower prices
for American consumers.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
And I think what gets missed sometimes is that those
types of requests, 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.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
Costs are largely born by those requests.
Speaker 1 (45:25):
Right which is it is?
Speaker 2 (45:26):
It should be? Yeah, they pay one hundred percent full
freight for search and review and right now we look
at a very small percentage of the FOYA operations being
recovered through this, and they help make that happen and
more to come on that for sure.
Speaker 1 (45:37):
Well, thank you for that, Mike, and thank you for
the work you've done for a veterans. Thank you for
your service as a veteran. I think it really helps
people to understand just how broad the statue is in
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?
Speaker 2 (45:56):
I have a lot of Taylor Swift lately because I
have a children, and the Wicked playlist has been prevalent
as we all wicked, just all Wicked too, but yeah,
my personal playlist is usually usually filled with the Doors
and the Allman Brothers, Leonard Skinner and NWS. So it's
a good mix.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
Oh nice, that's a good mix. And on the Taylor's
soit point, I may you have good foya karma.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
I appreciate that. And thank you to Jason and everybody
else for the work that you do on the request
side for helping keep the FOYD community so well engage
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 Information Acts and indeed international freedom Information Acts
(46:42):
that really help illuminate what's going on across the world.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Well, thank you, mag this has been a wonderful discussion.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
Thank you, Mike. Stay tuned for next week his the
season to be foyed. Why are you wearing an elf costume? Greetings?
Speaker 1 (46:58):
I request the first twenty five pages you.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
Locate for the term quote Santa Claus. Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
Despite what may be unauthorized violations of US airspace, violations
of eavesdropping and privacy laws involving minor children. A second,
and the opportunity to use his annual delivery run to
distribute narcotics manufactured by Zelms.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
From Bloomberg and No Smiling. This is Disclosure.
Speaker 3 (47:30):
The show is hosted by Matt Topic and me Jason Leopold.
It's produced by Heather Schroing and Sean Cannon for No Smiling.
Our editor for Bloomberg is Jeff Brocott. Our executive producers
for Bloomberg are Sage Bauman and me Jason Leopold, and
our executive producers for No Smiling are Sean Cannon, Heather
Schrowing and Matt Topic. The Disclosure theme song is by Nick,
(47:54):
with additional music by Nick an Epidemic Sound, sound design
and mixing by Sean Cannon.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
Special thanks to Mike Serich. For more transparency news and
important document thumps.
Speaker 3 (48:07):
You can subscribe to my Weeklyfoya Files newsletter at Bloomberg
dot com slash Boy of files. That's Foia Files. To
get every episode early on Apple Podcasts. Become a Bloomberg
dot com subscriber today. Check out our special intro offer
right now at Bloomberg dot com slash Podcast offer or
(48:27):
click the link In the show notes, you'll also unlock
deep reporting data and analysis from reporters around the world.
Speaker 2 (48:34):
We'll see you again next Tuesday. I thought you said
I was a right spidery. You are a right spider
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