Another week of paperwork, procurement failures, and government machinery doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is sometimes the most troubling outcome of all.
This week the site published across a wide front. From a Pentagon gas station losing money on every gallon, to a postal watchdog that can’t agree with the Postal Service on whether they even spoke last year, a nuclear bet that looks an awful lot like TVA’s last one, and an SEC access-control problem that sat unresolved for seven years. The Federal Register and Congressional Record watches covered a Senate debate on license plate readers and a House that took Wednesday off.
In the pipeline: a full week of scheduled articles running October 12 through 16, including an ICE detention expansion that spent billions without a written plan, a federal judiciary that exempted itself from its own accountability law, and a mica plant in North Carolina whose workers filed a union decertification petition that outlived the plant itself.
Below is what you were reading, what’s coming, and what we’ve been up to behind the scenes.
This Week’s Most-Read
The numbers are in. Here’s what you were reading this week:
- The Pentagon’s Own Gas Station Is Losing Money on Every Gallon
- Deja Vu on the Clinch River: TVA’s New Nuclear Bet Looks a Lot Like Its Last One
- SEC Flagged OTC Link’s Access-Control Problem in 2016. It Was Still There in 2023.
- The Postal Service and Its Watchdog Cannot Agree on Whether They Spoke in 2024
- One Email Can Still Turn the National Labor Relations Board Off
Coming Up Next Week
A look at what’s heading your way next week:
Nobody Asked How Many Beds Before Writing the Checks — ICE spent $45 billion expanding detention capacity with three different bed-count targets and no written plan. GAO’s fix arrives in 2027. Most of the money left in 2025.
The Third Branch Voted Itself Out of Its Own Law — The federal judiciary spends over a billion dollars a year in rent, has no occupancy data to show for it, and declined to collect any — because it hasn’t identified a “business need.” The USE IT Act it helped inspire doesn’t apply to courts.
The Petition That Outlived the Plant — Thirty-seven workers at a North Carolina mica plant filed a union decertification petition in October 2025. The NLRB’s blocking charge rule held it in abeyance. The plant closed in July 2026. The question they wanted answered is now moot in the most complete way a labor question can be.
From the Investigative Desk
When 45 Programs Become a Math Problem
Sometimes an investigation begins with a whistleblower, a court filing or an agency document that doesn’t quite add up.
This one began with the number 45.
While reviewing a recent GAO report this week, we followed a footnote backward into an older Government Accountability Office finding involving 45 federal programs spread across nine agencies with overlapping responsibilities.
That sounded interesting enough.
Then we asked the question that tends to cause trouble around here:
What happened to all 45 of them?
GAO had identified the overlap years ago and raised the possibility of consolidation. So we started reconstructing the original roster program by program to determine which still exist, which were renamed, which migrated elsewhere in the federal government, which disappeared, and — most importantly — how much taxpayers are spending on their descendants today.
That turned into considerably more work than typing 45 program names into a search box.
Federal programs have an unfortunate habit of changing names, moving between organizational structures, merging into larger accounts, surviving as activities inside successor programs or disappearing from budget documents without leaving a convenient tombstone saying, This program died here.
So we built a disposition matrix. Then we cleaned it. Then we audited it. Then we started following the money.
The financial reconstruction required separating genuinely comparable appropriations from broader accounts that merely contained the old program, identifying successor structures, and resisting the extremely tempting but analytically dangerous practice of adding every large number we encountered.
By the end of the week, the investigation had evolved from a simple historical question into something more useful: a normalized attempt to compare GAO’s original universe with the federal structure that exists in 2026.
We are not ready to tell you what the final number means yet. That’s important. A large modern spending figure does not, by itself, demonstrate that GAO’s original overlap problem became worse. Programs change missions. Congress creates new responsibilities. Inflation exists. Organizational charts mutate. And a program that technically survived may bear little resemblance to what GAO examined years ago.
The next pass is therefore about comparability rather than arithmetic. We want to know not merely whether Washington still spends money in these areas, but whether the duplication GAO identified was actually eliminated, reorganized, renamed — or simply allowed to grow old enough that everyone stopped calling it duplication.
There are easier ways to spend a week. Unfortunately, none of them answer the question.
What we’re trying to answer: Of the 45 overlapping federal programs GAO flagged, how many still exist in some form — and how much is the federal government spending on them today compared to when GAO first raised the alarm?
FOIA Watch
The records desk had a productive week. By “productive,” we mean several agencies confirmed that our requests have successfully entered buildings from which they may someday emerge.
DOE gets two investigations and three requests. On September 20, we filed a Department of Energy headquarters FOIA seeking records tied to nuclear-waste litigation and Judgment Fund payments. DOE acknowledged it September 21 as HQ-2026-02565-F, invoked “unusual circumstances,” and noted that its Office of General Counsel is not the only office with responsive records. Then, on September 22, we sent two more requests to DOE’s Environmental Management operation: one seeking records needed to reconcile the roughly 9,350-ton versus 9,700-ton contaminated-nickel inventory at Paducah, and another digging into the $55.57 million recyclable-material credit associated with the old BNFL East Tennessee Technology Park contract. Those two await tracking numbers.
CBP gets another pass. A revised FOIA stemming from our investigation into separated CBP contractors retaining system access was submitted September 20. CBP acknowledged it the following day as CBP-FO-2026-160474. This is the sharpened follow-up after the first round of CBP responses gave us enough information to ask better questions — one of FOIA’s lesser-advertised features.
VA OIG is now on the Dawson trail. On September 22, we filed a targeted request concerning the Zachary Hess Dawson VA-benefits fraud case. The request seeks records showing how investigators detected the alleged fraud, what VA and its inspector general knew about Dawson’s incarceration, the basis for the PTSD-related fraud determination, his benefit-payment history, and the eventual prosecution referral. FOIA.gov confirmation: 3197636. Agency tracking number pending.
SEC opens another file. Also September 22, we filed for records behind the SEC’s years-long Regulation SCI examination history involving OTC Link LLC/OTC Link ATS. The SEC acknowledged the request September 23 as 26-02954-FOIA, classified Bureaucracy Times as a media requester, and invoked a 10-day extension because responsive records may be geographically dispersed, voluminous, and require consultation among offices. In other words, we appear to have asked for something interesting.
NSF checks in from the Arctic. The National Science Foundation acknowledged our earlier U.S. Arctic Research Commission-related request on September 23 as 2026-FOI-00358 and placed it in the agency’s Complex processing track because of the work or time required. That joins the other USARC-related requests already moving through NSF, GSA, DOI and Interior’s payroll machinery.
Meanwhile, outside FOIA proper: the press-inquiry desk was nearly as busy. We sent questions to PBGC about its temporary attrition-event reporting waiver; CMS about its Marketplace agent/broker enforcement campaign; DoW OIG about its conspicuously quiet press-release page; SEC about the OTC Link chronology; and EPA, Treasury/IRS and DOJ about stolen used cooking oil, renewable-fuel compliance and tax-credit implications. SEC declined to go beyond its public filings, DOJ’s Southern District of Iowa said it was unable to answer our questions, and EPA acknowledged the inquiry with a substantive response expected September 30–October 2. CMS acknowledged its inquiry as FY26-44633 and said a press officer would follow up.
At least six significant FOIA actions moved this week across DOE, CBP, VA OIG, SEC and NSF, alongside a rather crowded slate of agency press inquiries. No major document production landed before deadline, but several requests now have tracking numbers and clocks attached to them.
The government has the questions. We have the tracking numbers. Now begins the traditional federal records ritual known as waiting politely while keeping receipts.
On Our Radar
A few things that haven’t become stories. Yet.
The judiciary is studying AI so judges don’t accidentally outsource judging to AI. A recent federal judiciary update described new AI-focused working groups while reiterating that AI should not be used to make judicial decisions. The principle is perfectly sensible. The fact that it apparently needs reiterating in 2026 caught our attention. We are preparing questions about what prompted the guidance, what uses have actually been observed, and where the judiciary believes the boundary should be drawn.
The Defense Department Inspector General’s press-release calendar has become suspiciously peaceful. The DoD OIG press-release page recently appeared to stop at July 30 despite continued audit and investigative activity elsewhere on the site. We reconstructed previous years to determine whether the gap was normal and then sent the Inspector General’s office a media inquiry asking whether publication practices, staffing, approval procedures or distribution channels changed. Sometimes the absence of a press release is merely the absence of a press release. Sometimes it tells you where to look next.
A State Department watchdog emailed us about a report we aren’t allowed to read. State OIG’s public newsletter recently directed subscribers to a report whose public landing page explains that the report is classified. That raises an oddly specific records question: what happens to classified Inspector General reports after publication, whether public versions are eventually produced, and how often those reports are later declassified. We are now watching the process. Government transparency occasionally arrives as an email announcing the existence of something you cannot see.
Stolen cooking oil is becoming a much stranger story than it started as. What began with federal criminal cases involving theft of used restaurant grease has turned into a regulatory question involving renewable-fuel credits, supply-chain documentation and federal tax incentives. EPA, Treasury and IRS now have questions from us about what happens when apparently legitimate fuel feedstock turns out to have been stolen somewhere upstream. We don’t yet know whether this becomes a regulatory story, a tax story, a criminal-enterprise story, or all three.
For now, it’s on the radar.
Until next week…
