Two letters members of Congress wrote to the Defense Contract Audit Agency reveal two cases of employees of government contractors who alleged wrongdoing by their companies.
We learned about the letters from our Freedom of Information request to the agency for congressional correspondence logs. We have received DCAA’s responses to both members of Congress, but not [...]

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While I wait for word from Fraiola & Associates on the Penguin PAC (see below), I thought I’d go through a five-inch tall stack of papers Anu got in response to a FOIA request for congressional correspondence logs from the National Endowment of for the Humanities. So far, what I’ve seen aren’t letters from members [...]

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Here are the two Federal Communications Commission spreadsheets, converted from PDF to excel. The first one is for January and February and the second for March.

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Luckily, Bill’s computer still has a floppy drive so we could read the word document sent to us on a 3.5-inch diskette by the Department of Transportation. Responses to our FOIA request for congressional correspondence logs from Transportation have been trickling in slowly because each agency within the department has been replying [...]

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Anupama’s on the phone with yet another FOIA officer clarifying the nature of our request for correspondence logs listing letters from and responses to members of Congress, in an electronic format. It’s amazing how many responses we’ve gotten that miss the mark of the request. Agencies send us actual letters rather than logs, or handwritten [...]

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We received a response from the Air Force yesterday for the congressional correspondence logs, both for our first request, for logs in January and February, and the second, for March.
After reading the list, I emailed the Air Force and asked for copies of some of the letters and responses for some [...]

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A couple of days ago I followed up with DOD about why they denied our FOIA for correspondence logs earlier. Their denial was based on the fact that the records were too large and they wanted us to narrow our request. On talking to them I figured that DOD officials had interpreted our FOIA to [...]

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Today, we received a reply to our correspondence logs FOIA from USAID as an excel spreadsheet. This is only the second time we have gotten a reply in a format that can be uploaded and used to fulfill our goal of making the logs searchable using keywords. Here are the two replies we have received [...]

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For the past couple of hours I have been trying to get my hands on a letter that Senator McCain wrote to Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne on April 4 about requesting documents related to the Combat Search and Rescue helicopter program.
According to a Reuters report, Senator McCain has questioned an Air Force decision [...]

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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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