Bureaucracy Times

A Note from the Editor

Wrapping up another long week, and I’m happy to be done with this one. Not because of the workload, which remains as constant as the government’s stupidity, but because of an illness. The biggest story we broke this week was one of a brain-melting 103 degree fever. (We didn’t actually write about it, but it was quite the event.)

Nevertheless, we trudged through the aches and pains, and we still maintained a pretty solid output. Sure, I may have been a little more lax with some agencies, like the SEC, as they release opinions and enforcement actions more than most other agencies I engage with. Usually, by the time I finish reading one SEC report, there are three more waiting in my inbox.

Speaking of inboxes, we are nearing the end of our migration to Proton mail. When we started Bureaucracy Times earlier this year, we opted for a free email provider because, well, we weren’t making any money. Today, we still aren’t making anything from our labor, but we’ve realized the importance of privacy and paying for a robust mailbox. It also comes with storage, which is great because we’ve accumulated countless Federal Registers, Congressional Records, and OIG reports. Not to mention, we save a copy of every article we’ve written, and not just the published ones.

Our move to Proton was prompted merely by observing the world around us. Bounce around social media long enough, and you’re bound to run across a citizen journalist who, during their investigations, has had an encounter with some level of government during their investigations. Since we report exclusively on the federal government, and usually not in a positive way, we opted for a mailbox that we felt would better protect our interests than the free-mail we were using.

In this edition of The Red Tape Roundup, we capture the somewhat exciting developments on our FOIA battlefield. We still haven’t received ANY records, but we have promises from the agencies, backed by the full faith and fidelity of the United States government, that at some point, maybe soon, we will have something responsive to our requests. They just keep asking for extensions and stuff.

I’m also still waiting for the FOIA rep from the Arctic Research Commission to call me back, but I’m not holding my breath. We had been in email contact in early September, and he even offered a telephone call where we could discuss my questions…but there was some big event happening in Alaska with nuclear reactors and baby seals or something, so he told me he’d contact me when he returned to DC. I’m still debating on when to send a follow up email.

The funnest event of the week was our interrogation and evaluation of America.gov, the federal government’s new front door staffed by an AI butler. We dug through some of our most recent articles, sifted out 15 facts that were provable based on the government’s very own agency reports, and then launched those questions at the bot. It didn’t do half bad, actually, so we wrote about it and gave credit where it was due.

The only thing we’re still trying to settle is what to name the bot…most of us feel we should call it Sam, but that’s probably cliche. The AI calls itself “America,” which we feel is a bit presumptuous. We’re not kidding…go ask it what its name is and it will say something like, “I am America.”

Even so, we, the people, are America—not the bot.

We are all, as imperfect and fallible as we are, the waters of this nation. We are the sea of freedom loving people, ebbing and flowing like mindless sheep during every election cycle.

This Week’s Top Five

1. “$308 Million to Keep the Lights On in a Building From 1945”
2. “The Room They Called ‘The Fishbowl’ for Six Years, and the Officer Whose Job Was Not to Notice”
3. “Cox Media Group Was Selling a Lie, and the FTC’s Price Tag Was $930,000”
4. “The 20-Minute War at 18,000 Feet: FedEx Flight 705 and the FBI Files”
5. “We Asked America.gov 15 Questions the Government Already Answered. It Did Surprisingly Well.”

FOIA Watch

Another week in the federal records system, where “we found 45 files” counts as both progress and a warning.

The LSC Files

LSC OIG found the records. Now comes the redaction machinery. The Legal Services Corporation Office of Inspector General issued its initial determination on our FOIA #26-10, saying it intends to comply with the request and has identified approximately 45 PDF files that may be responsive.

The catch, naturally, is that the records still have to be reviewed, redacted and assembled. LSC OIG expects portions may be withheld under Exemptions 4, 6 and 7(c). It also interpreted our request for investigative reports as excluding exhibits attached to those reports, while leaving us the option of requesting the exhibits after we see what the reports contain. That is almost certainly what will happen.

The first batch of records may therefore function less as the end of this request than as the table of contents for the next one.

The VA OIG Files

VA OIG gave us a useful denial. Our request concerning the Zachary Hess Dawson veterans-benefits fraud case was denied under FOIA Exemption 7(A), which protects law-enforcement records when disclosure could interfere with an ongoing proceeding.

The reason matters: VA OIG specifically tied the withholding to the still-pending federal criminal case in the Southern District of West Virginia.

In other words, the records exist, but the prosecution currently stands between us and them. The denial carries a 90-day appeal window. For now, we’re treating this less as a dead end than a marker telling us when the records may become substantially more interesting.

The Richmond VA Files

Richmond VA told us to FOIA it, so we did.

After we sent a media inquiry to the Central Virginia VA Health Care System about the policies and leadership issues raised by a recent VA Inspector General investigation, Public Affairs Officer Jeff Clements directed us to the facility’s FOIA office.

On October 1, we submitted the formal request for SOP 011-014 and related records. This is one of the more familiar federal transparency rituals: ask the press office a question, receive a records-request form, and begin again from the beginning.

The GAO Files, maybe

GAO assigned us a case number. Our attempt to obtain the restricted Government Accountability Office report GAO-26-107773SU, concerning HHS OIG fraud investigations, is now PRI-26-286.

GAO says it is processing the request under 4 C.F.R. Part 81, its public-records regulations. That distinction is important because GAO, despite having “Accountability” right there in the name, is part of the legislative branch and isn’t subject to FOIA.

We are therefore learning the parallel universe of GAO records access one regulation at a time.

The Used Cooking Oil (UCO) Files

The used-cooking-oil inquiry bought EPA a little more time.

EPA’s press office contacted us October 2 seeking an extension on our questions about stolen used cooking oil, Renewable Fuel Standard controls, and the integrity of feedstocks entering the RIN system. We agreed.

The new deadline is October 6 at 5 p.m. ET.

The Department of Treasury and IRS questions concerning the 45Z Clean Fuel Production Credit remain outstanding as well. Somewhere between a stolen restaurant grease tank and a federal renewable-fuel credit, this investigation became considerably less ridiculous than its raw material would suggest.

The USARC Files

The Arctic records continue their migration through government. NSF’s portion of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission investigation remains on the Complex track, while DOI request DOI-2026-009648 continues to seek the FY2024 and FY2025 Interior Business Center payroll and personnel-cost records needed to reconstruct what USARC actually costs beyond the figures visible in its own publications.

The SEC Files

Meanwhile, our SEC request for the underlying examination records involving OTC Link and Regulation SCI remains in processing after the Commission invoked its own 10-day extension for geographically dispersed records, potentially voluminous material and inter-office consultations.

FOIA Files “Pending”

The week’s lesson is that “pending” covers an impressive amount of territory. It can mean 45 PDFs waiting for redaction, records withheld behind an active prosecution, a request newly entering a VA queue, a GAO case governed by an entirely different disclosure regime, or EPA asking for four more days to explain the federal regulatory implications of stolen fryer grease.

The filing cabinets remain undefeated.

From the Investigative Desk

The Arctic Commission Is Becoming an Accounting Exercise

The U.S. Arctic Research Commission investigation began with what looked like a fairly modest question: What does this tiny federal commission actually do?

That question has proved surprisingly expensive to answer.

USARC is unusual enough that conventional agency accounting doesn’t tell the whole story. It is a small independent federal entity with commissioners, staff, outside support and administrative services that intersect with other parts of government. Its public-facing publications provide pieces of the picture, but not necessarily the complete cost of operating the institution.

So we have been reconstructing it from the outside in.

The investigation has now moved through the Commission’s statutory reporting obligations, its publication history, commissioner and staffing questions, contractor relationships, website development and acquisition records. That work has led increasingly toward the less glamorous but more consequential layer underneath all of it: payroll, administrative support and contracting.

One important piece sits with the Interior Business Center.

IBC provides payroll and other administrative services across the federal government, including services connected to USARC. We requested FY2024 and FY2025 records showing aggregate payroll, employer-paid personnel costs, employee counts, pay categories and any commissioner compensation processed through the system. DOI acknowledged that request as DOI-2026-009648.

NSF has another piece of the puzzle. Its related request is being processed on the Complex track.

Then there are the contractors.

We have been tracing historical contracting relationships associated with the Commission, including website and data work, while working through federal acquisition systems that were not designed with the apparent expectation that anyone might someday try to reconstruct a small agency’s contractor history across several years.

That distinction matters because this investigation is no longer simply about finding a budget number.

The question is becoming whether the figure a member of the public encounters when looking at USARC actually captures the full federal cost of maintaining USARC, including services performed or processed elsewhere in government.

We don’t have that answer yet.

And we are deliberately not forcing one.

The records still outstanding should allow us to distinguish direct Commission spending from payroll, interagency administrative services and contractor costs without counting the same dollar twice. Until those records arrive, any grand total would carry considerably more confidence than evidence.

For now, the spreadsheet continues to grow.

The Arctic, apparently, is easier to map than a federal commission.

On Our Radar

A few things that haven’t become stories. Yet.

A $55.6 million recycling credit is looking for an institutional home. Our continuing DOE records work has led back to the old BNFL contract associated with cleanup and recycling at the East Tennessee Technology Park. When we began asking about the contract and its recyclable-material credit, DOE’s Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center told us the matter was outside its purview.

That has started a jurisdictional search through DOE’s records apparatus to determine which office actually inherited responsibility for records from a decades-old cleanup contract. Before we can ask what happened to the money, apparently we must first determine which filing cabinet inherited the question.

America.gov says it can search roughly 29,000 federal websites. We have been asking it questions. The revived federal portal now includes an AI-powered search system with an extraordinarily broad advertised federal corpus.

Rather than simply accepting the sales pitch, we ran a controlled set of questions drawn from subjects we had already researched independently, giving us something unusually valuable when testing an AI search engine: known answers against which to compare its performance. We also sent GSA questions about indexing, coverage, models, providers, retention and whether search configurations are preserved. The public experiment produced an article. The underlying governance questions remain open.

Forty-five PDFs are waiting behind the LSC OIG door. The initial determination in FOIA #26-10 is notable beyond the FOIA desk because the forthcoming production could provide an unusually concentrated look at the Inspector General’s investigative work. LSC OIG has already warned that some material will be redacted and that appended exhibits aren’t currently included. Once the reports arrive, we’ll be looking not merely at individual cases but at patterns: what triggered investigations, how they were resolved, what consequences followed and what the public summaries left out.

And the tiny island of Vanuatu turned out to be considerably more interesting than its size suggests. A seemingly ordinary U.S. cooperation memorandum led us into a much larger geopolitical picture involving infrastructure, strategic geography and competing international interests in a Pacific island nation many Americans would struggle to locate on a map. We’ve published the first piece. The larger question now sitting on the desk is whether the agreement we found is an isolated development or one small move on a much larger board.

None of these is being promoted to a full investigation merely because it knows how to look intriguing.

But we’re watching.