Is There Anyone Who Can Respond to My FOIA Requests? Anyone?
Asking the federal government for public records didn’t always feel like a shell game. But bounced emails and broken portals seem like the new normal.ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story first ran in Dispatches, our weekly newsletter from our reporters about their recent investigations. Sign up to receive stories like this one in your inbox every Saturday.I file a lot of Freedom of Information Act requests. I’ve been requesting staff lists from both Trump administrations, and I have tracked thousands of federal political appointees in order to publish financial disclosures in searchable databases. Much of that data was sourced from the Office of Personnel Management, which maintains a trove of information about who works in the federal government. But that agency’s FOIA department was thrown into chaos as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency fanned out across federal agencies to cut employees in early 2025.Getting records from the agency has since become an increasingly Kafkaesque process, one that in early July of this year bounced me between three different seemingly abandoned email inboxes and two web portals. Aside from the fact that my once-routine requests now languish for months, just asking for documents has become its own kind of shell game.“They just let the whole Privacy team go,” a now-former FOIA specialist at OPM told me by email in February 2025, referring to public records office staff. The specialist was cut the next day.Here’s how the process worked at most agencies before the Trump administration and DOGE destroyed the offices that managed these requests: You would send a simple email with a text description of the documents you want. That’s it. It didn’t mean you would get the records in the most timely manner, or would get the records you wanted at all. But it was a simple process, and it often worked. According to OPM data, more than 600 government information specialists (staffers who administer FOIA and the Privacy Act) have resigned or been fired since the start of the second Trump administration. Within OPM itself, 12 information specialists left, seven of whom were laid off. (There was one new hire in that time period.) Reached by phone, the former FOIA specialist told me the cuts made the office less efficient, less able to perform its function and threatened the statutory laws they are required to fulfill. At the end of the 2025 fiscal year, over 1,600 FOIA requests were still in OPM’s backlog, seven times more than at the end of fiscal year 2024. The average processing time for a simple request at the agency slipped to over 84 days — twice as long as the year before.Indeed, I noticed my records requests were taking longer, and they were increasingly steered toward web portals. Such was the case in early July, when I attempted to submit a request to OPM for human resources data. When I clicked “log in,” I was confronted with a message reading, “Something went wrong while processing your action. Please contact [email protected] for assistance if the problem persists.”I emailed the address, but the message bounced back to me. AINS, it turned out, was no longer the name of the company — it is now known as Opexus. Opexus has received more than $50 million in federal contracts, according to a Bloomberg report, and has come under fire for lax cybersecurity standards after two of its employees were indicted for deleting and compromising government data. (One pleaded guilty in April, and the other was convicted in May). On its website, Opexus claims to process FOIA requests for 80% of federal institutions.OPM’s website still listed contact information for a FOIA public liaison, someone who is supposed to help the public understand the records process and assist with requests. When I emailed the address, I got an automated response reading, “I am no longer at OPM. If you need assistance with a FOIA matter, please contact [email protected].”So I did. I immediately got another automated message. This one told me to submit my request to the National FOIA Portal, a cross-government site that allows you to submit a FOIA request to any agency. So I did that, too. Afterward, I finally got a response that acknowledged my request — from the same OPM portal that was throwing an error any time I tried to use it.Stymied by the lack of response from the agency itself, I reached out to Opexus support, explaining that I was a FOIA requester and that the OPM site wasn’t working. I got a response from someone named Stephen, saying, “I have escalated this issue to our engineering team.” When I followed up a few days later, Stephen said, “I have identified the root cause of the issue and am currently working with the OPM administrator to implement the necessary fix.” Further questions on the support ticket thread weren’t answered.On July 23, 13 days after I had filed the support ticket with Opexus, I got another response asking me again what error I was getting. I told them I was still getting the same message. A few hours later, I tried logging back in. The site was fixed.In a statement, Opexus said it became aware of the issue on July 10 when a customer support case was opened. Incidentally, that was the day I had opened one. The statement noted access to the portal was restored on July 23, and that the issue did not prevent OPM from receiving FOIA requests through alternate submission methods. The company said that “there is no evidence that customer data was accessed, lost, or compromised” and that the issue was isolated to OPM’s portal. The statement added that Opexus recognizes “how important uninterrupted access to FOIA request systems is for the public.”OPM did not respond to a request for comment.I’m still waiting for the records.CorrectionsContributors
Al Shaw
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Al Shaw is a Senior News Application Developer at ProPublica.
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Al Shaw is a Senior News Application Developer at ProPublica.Republish This Story for FreeCreative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
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