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.

Cowboy hats, cowboy boots, jeans, shirts on the back of forces.

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 concrete barrier.

He's looking down on the LM rangers that had beads on, essentially federal BLM officers.

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.

He had used this land for decades and decades and decades.

And had paid fees to the federal government.

In religiously for decades upon decades, but.

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.

The money's not to dale, the cows are not to dale his freedom and liberty and get rid of this amusing government.

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, 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.

Tensions reached the boiling point earlier this week a real Wild West Showdown.

How cows in our militia and Fox News turned one man into a modern folk hero.

Huge media interests followed from that.

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.

What's going on here in Nevada?

Why are there armed agents here standing off with with Americans also armed over some cows.

These information requests are piling up at the Bureau of Land Management's Freedom of Information Act office.

The foyer officers need help, and they find Mike, a recent law school grad and fellow at the BLM.

I was very happily working as a realty specialist working on high priority transmission lines.

As a presidential management 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.

So he does, but he has his work cut out for him.

There was three hundred plus media requests, tons of citizen interest.

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.

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.

And now that you've submitted this Foyer request, here's the record you got us.

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.

I owe my FOYA career in large part to mister Bundy and the great cattle Trespass Gather of twenty fourteen hit It.

I'm investigative journalist Jason Leopold.

I spent most of my days getting documents from the government.

I'm attorney Matt Tapik, and I fight them in court to open their files when they don't want to.

From Bloomberg and no Smiling, This is Disclosure, a podcast about buying loose government secrets, the Freedom of Information Act, and the unexpected places that takes.

Us well I don't often say this about government officials, but Michael 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 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 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 to the podcast.

Very glad to have you here.

Pleasure to be here, and thanks for having me.

I noticed behind you, what does that sign it's kind of lurking out.

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 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.

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 said it was a kin to being stationed to Siberia.

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 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 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 the federal government could do in this instance.

And this is what got the most attention.

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?

What was that like?

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?

Nont be five?

No B seven A yeah, just raw naked documents exactly.

So I liken this to being a parish priest.

You get all of the parish's deepest, darkest secrets, right like, everybody comes in and tells you everything.

And I've never been a priest, 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 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, 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.

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.

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?

Were you making foyas for Bundy stuff?

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?

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 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 us as a Foyer posse.

Oh, that's the Foya possey.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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, I mean, were there for the turtle soup?

And I guess for the space aliens?

Were there actual requests.

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.

Yeah, you would be surprised at how sophisticated a requests like that could could be where they want.

All.

Well, I'm not surprised, Mike, this doesn't surprise me at all.

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 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.

I don't think that we went to sixteen hundred Pennsylvania and asked the president to affirm his Keepman, that's hilarious.

So I've always wondered this, Mike, is who gets to decide, especially if it's something that's like kind of sensitive.

Do the 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.

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 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 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.

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.

There's a what regarded phrase and Floyd and went into out black it out.

Ooh, went in out black it out.

Yeah, Because if you don't have confidence, because you don't feel confident, then you end up doing things like, well, I don't know, so I won't get in trouble for blacking it out, but I will get in trouble for releasing it.

So I'm in doubt, I'm going to block it out.

What's so interesting about that, and I guess disappointing about that is that's the exact opposite of how it's supposed to work.

It's supposed to be if in doubt, produce it, Like if if you can't prove it's exempt, then it's got to be released.

If the scope of the exemption is wishy washy, well you're supposed to interpret it in favor of disclosure.

So it's totally understandable why this happens.

But like, are there some shops where it's the political appointees who are really, you know, have more control And what you're calling QC is really sort of like saving embarrassment and you know, because 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, 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.

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 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.

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 they're releasing overholding, then they're in a much better spot.

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, 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 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 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.

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, 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, 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 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.

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.

Thank you, Mike.

So I'm looking at that and I'm scratching my head and I'm wondering.

We talked about the Office of Information Policy for a minute so this is an office within the Justice Department.

They process 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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.

How were you able to reduce by ninety percent, but OIP has got these massive backlogs still.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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, 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.

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, 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 comes out, you could see why they wouldn't have much incentive to try to fix the problem.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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.

You're seeing inside of one department.

Sure there are different technology stacks that are being used to process fluyerws within the same department.

Yep.

Absolutely, and that's crazy.

There's some great leadership going on at HHS and other places to move away from that.

This is 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 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 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.

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.

I mean, that's it's like a cash machine.

That's like an ATM, Like every month, every month, I'm going to get thousands of pages.

So, you know, you talked about HHS and like some of the good leadership going on there and the various technologies that are in place now.

But there's also an elephant in the room here, which is FOYA offices have been decimated this year, right, 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.

Less look the same as it did in years past.

Foolish me, I took with a grain of salt.

I took Elon Musk's comments to heart when he said that virtually all government records should be readily available.

It should be only in very limited circumstances that anything gets withheld, and you should barely even need to use FOYA because I think if your political philosophy is sort of distrust 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 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.

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 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.

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 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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 just fired everybody.

Good luck with that.

They just fired the entire privacy team.

Yeah, that actually happened to a CNN reporter earlier this year when you filed a request with the Office of Personnel Management.

I believe there was a video of it.

That's the email I got back when I filed a pretty routine records request asking for documents related to Elon musk role in the Trump administration, including his security clearance.

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 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.

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 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, we continue to kind of put the emphasis on this that we should.

There's another side to this coin that I think is really worth mentioning.

There's some agencies where they've got a requirement for their 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 the time.

The line by line, page by page analysis that by law says that has that you have to accomplish well.

If a poorly trained FOY officer isn't sure what to do, they're going to err on the side of withholding, right.

Sure.

So when you couple that with what you just said, if you're trying to just get them to pound through a bunch of documents as fast as possible, it seems to me like what'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.

But a whole lot of this stuff is very discretionary and if they want to release it, they can't.

Right, And I've made so much of my career in terms of discretionary release.

We had a situation in California at BLM where someone's pistol was stolen and later the weapon that was said it was dropped and the round killed a woman and the gun was obsession with the leage immigrant at the time.

In San Francisco.

Immigration Illegal immigration a hot topic for sure in that community, and 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 fulsome with their information and discretionary release information to kind of put their story in context for what the person is looking for, a lot of things that may seem sensational become very reasonable in terms of what has happened, because in the main, you have very good people on the federal side trying to do their best possible work.

And if you give the full story, if you're able to actually provide all of that data on a discretionary basis, you end up with, you know, hey, that's that's a human being trying to do a really hard job, and this is what they chose with the information that they had, and things become more reasonable versus like, can't believe they did that?

Yeah, And that does a lot to turn the tide on, you know, the distrust of government in our countries.

I mean, it's just continues to mount.

It humanizes it.

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 more about that.

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.

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.

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?

I do want to ask how I become a tenured professor at Foya University.

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, I think I may have to work on that.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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?

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 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.

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, that competitive advantage should be born out in lower prices for American consumers.

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.

Costs are largely born by those requests.

Right which is it is?

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.

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?

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.

Oh nice, that's a good mix.

And on the Taylor's soit point, I may you have good foya karma.

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 that really help illuminate what's going on across the world.

Well, thank you, mag this has been a wonderful discussion.

Thank you, Mike.

Stay tuned for next week his the season to be foyed.

Why are you wearing an elf costume?

Greetings?

I request the first twenty five pages you.

Locate for the term quote Santa Claus.

Oh my god.

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.

From Bloomberg and No Smiling.

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I thought you said I was a right spidery.

You are a right spider