It seems that there’s no standard way for government agencies to maintain logs of correspondence.
I had sent a FOIA to the Small Business Administration offices in Washington D.C. for their logs of congressional correspondence. SBA forwarded the request to all of its regional offices and departments–they don’t maintain a central log of correspondence. So in […]

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Reading over the letter that Anu got back from Will Klammer of the Department of Defense’s Office of Freedom of Information, I’m beginning to get a sense that this project–obtaining logs of the correspondence that members of Congress send to all federal agencies–may be even more difficult than I originally thought. This sentence particularly jumps […]

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We received a reply from the Department of Defense’s Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff yesterday turning down the FOIA request we sent them for congressional correspondence logs. The reason given was that the “request as presently written, since it would appear to apply to all 535 Members of Congress, is much […]

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My first two weeks working on the real time project has involved sending out FOIA requests to as many as 80 federal agencies. We are asking for logs of correspondence between members of Congress and each agency. Most of them have been via e-mail or online forms and around 25 others via regular mail.
Since […]

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We’re launching a number of real time investigative projects at the Sunlight Foundation, and this blog is sort of a diary of the investigations, where you can follow, day by day, what my colleague, Investigative Writer Anupama Narayanswamy, and I are up to as we go about our business trying to make […]

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