Bureaucracy Times

All the news fit to be declassified.

Category: Red Tape Roundup

  • The Red Tape Roundup — October 11, 2026

    A Note from the Editor

    Social media has always befuddled me.

    The last social media platform that I really understood was MySpace, and I readily admit that I really don’t know why I got MySpace to begin with. I was a soldier at the time, so it may have been as simply as someone asking,

    “Are you on MySpace?”

    I didn’t do much with it though. I remember spending a great deal of time figuring out which song I wanted on my profile, and I settled on “So Cold” by Breaking Benjamin. That song defined my life at that time, and by many measures it still does.

    But beyond that song, I don’t remember “using” MySpace for anything.

    Now, Facebook was different. I used it for only two things: playing Farmville and birthday reminders. But as a social media platform, I didn’t see the point. I mean, people were posting pictures of themselves, or their food, or a restaurant they were about to eat at, or their feet. It all seemed so stupid to me, and I didn’t see the point of it all.

    Why would I want to “check in” at an Olive Garden? I didn’t really want anyone to know where I was, except for those people who were with me when I went somewhere. I also didn’t see the point of updating my status whenever I went or did something different than my last status update. It just seemed weird to me.

    I haven’t been on MySpace since I updated the song on my profile. And I left Facebook in 2018 after a dead friend of mine sent me a friend request.

    I hung out on Twitter for a while, before it was X, but it was just madness. I arrived on the tweeting scene in 2015 and was done with it by 2017. However, it was during that time when I learned about concepts like “posting into the void” and platform algorithms. I had no idea how easy it was to post every single day, spend hours crafting a post that someone might notice, only to go unnoticed in a sea of hundreds of thousands of users. Sure, I didn’t really know how to post things, or what hashtags were for, and when my teenagers would say “hashtag” anything I thought they sounded #stupid.

    I figured that maybe someone would be interested in what I was posting or commenting. But, alas, I received almost no responses, except for a bunch of beautiful people who had 0 followers and followed thousands of Tweeters, and who also had made no posts. I didn’t know what people meant by the word “bot”, and it is likely that I had 100% bots in my cozy little circle. So, I left Twitter behind.

    Now, you may be asking yourself, “what is the point of all this?” Why am I talking about something that you definitely know more about than I ever will? Well, I’ll tell you.

    When I first had the idea for what would become bureaucracy.news, I knew that I wanted to report on the bureaucracy, the machine, the leviathan. I saw that most people were believing and regurgitating whatever their preferred media channel told them to say, and it became easy to determine which talking heads whispered in their ears by the buzz words and phrases they repeated ad nauseum.

    Few people, it seemed to me at the time, were not looking for the answers to their questions, or worse, they weren’t asking any questions at all. They believed everything they heard from their trusted news sources, without question. And that bothered me. No longer did we discuss anything, we just yelled berating and unholy epithets at each other from across the social media universes.

    So, I decided to just report on the information that the government published about itself, regardless of who was in office, and I certainly don’t care if it’s about good or not so good things. If the government mucks something up, I say it. If they do something positive, I say it. But I wanted more than anything for the people to have the information that they were too lazy to verify. And I don’t mean that as an insult, but just the reality of life.

    To gain a wider reach for my articles and investigation, I knew that I would have to return to social media. Bureaucracy Times started with just a website and an X account.

    I learned quickly that gaining traction on X was like starting a diesel engine in the arctic…it takes time. And even after months passed, I had gained little forward momentum on X. So, I started looking for other platforms.

    I went to Bluesky because I read somewhere that most of the good journalists who left Twitter landed there. It took me a while to figure things out, but it only took a couple weeks before someone actually “liked” one of my posts. That was a good day.

    A couple months after landing on Bluesky, I decided to enter a platform at the opposite end of the political spectrum: Truth Social. I’ve been there for nearly two months now, and I still haven’t received one like. And the only upvotes I received were my own…I was just experimenting.

    But, I did get banned from Truth Social twice, and that was a hoot and a half! I wasn’t even mad because it gave me a sense of pride in some weird way. I mean, someone, or some bot, had to have read my articles, right? Why else would I get banned shortly after posting something? It doesn’t really matter. It’s just another platform that has a unique algorithm that scores accounts based on what they post, how they engage, and how often they’re on the platform after posting.

    So, to bring it full circle, social media is a necessary evil to my mind. I don’t care for it, but it really has become the replacement for the old public square where ideas were shared and debated. And if I’m being honest, I’d rather be in an actual town square surrounded by every type, kind, and age of person, and engage in discussion…in person.

    But I will say one thing. I have definitely seen an exponential increase in engagement with my writing over these last few months. When I first launched bureaucracy.news, I may have gotten 2 engagements per week. This past week, we had hundreds. So, there is something to say for being consistent and persistent.

    I started reading declassified files, OIG reports, and legislative nonsense simply to put the information out there. Most normal people won’t spend time digging through a Federal Register that consistently exceeds 600 pages, looking for anything interesting. Most Americans don’t subscribe to over 80 newsletters from government agencies, waiting for inspector general reports to tattle on the agencies they overwatch. But I do, and so does the small crew of editors and writers who support this site.

    We don’t do it for the money, primarily because we’re not making any. We have other jobs that pay us, which allows us to come together a couple times a week to read and discuss FOIA responses, decide which articles to write, and then edit whatever we can throw together. And all of this happens in our off time!

    We’re just happy readers are showing up!

    This Week’s Most-Read

    The numbers are in. Here’s what you were reading this week:

    1. USPS Said Its Lost-Mail Center Returned 39% of Packages. The Inspector General Found Less Than 1%
    2. The $21 Billion Contract That Was Worth $74 Million
    3. The IRS Lost $304 Billion to Fraud. Its Best Defense Was a Mission Statement.
    4. Pentagon Spent Decades and Billions Hardening GPS. The Military Still Isn’t Ready to Lose It.
    5. We Asked America.gov 15 Questions the Government Already Answered. It Did Surprisingly Well.

    Coming Up Next Week

    A look at what’s heading your way next week:

    An Electric Griddle Cost $54 Million, According to the Federal Government

    The Bureau of Prisons paid a price tag that would make any home cook weep, and the OIG wants to know how it happened.

    The Hospital Built on a Document That Never Existed

    A VA construction project moved forward on the authority of paperwork that auditors couldn’t find — because it was never created.

    America Runs on Stolen Cooking Oil. The Government Tracks the Fuel, But Who Tracks the Grease?

    Used cooking oil has become big money in the renewable fuel market, and someone figured out the oversight gaps before regulators did.

    From the Investigative Desk

    The Watchdog, the Chatbot, and the Question Nobody Seems to Be Asking

    The VA Office of Inspector General has quietly begun integrating AI tools into its investigative and audit workflows. We know this because the OIG said so — briefly, in budget justification language buried in appropriations documents most people never read.

    What they haven’t said is much else.

    They haven’t said which tools. They haven’t said what data those tools are accessing. They haven’t said whether veterans’ personally identifiable information (medical records, claims data, service histories) is being routed through third-party AI systems. And they haven’t said who approved any of it.

    This isn’t a story about AI being bad. It’s a story about a government watchdog adopting a powerful new capability with almost no public accounting for how it’s being used, what guardrails exist, and whether the people it’s supposed to protect have any say in the matter.

    We filed a FOIA request with the VA OIG asking for any policies, guidance documents, or memoranda governing the use of AI in audit and investigative work. The clock is running.

    In the meantime, we’ve been reviewing what AI governance frameworks exist across the federal government, from OMB’s guidance to agency-specific policies, and comparing them against what the OIG’s own budget language actually implies.

    The gap is significant.

    What we’re trying to answer: Does the VA OIG have written policies governing its use of AI tools in active investigations. And if so, why haven’t they been made public?

    FOIA Watch

    A status update on our active FOIA requests:

    GSA — AI Procurement Records: Filed September 22. Request covers procurement documents, vendor contracts, and internal communications related to GSA’s acquisition of AI tools for federal agency use. Acknowledged. Awaiting document review.

    VA OIG — AI Governance Policies: Filed October 3. Requesting any written policies, directives, or guidance documents governing the use of artificial intelligence in VA OIG audit and investigative operations. Acknowledged. No documents produced.

    Richmond VA Medical Center — Patient Safety Incident Reports: Filed September 28. Requesting incident reports and corrective action plans related to environment-of-care deficiencies cited in recent OIG inspection reports. Pending acknowledgment.

    DOE — Grid Modernization Contract Communications: Filed October 1. Requesting internal communications related to contract awards under the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program. Pending acknowledgment.

    The government runs on paperwork. So do we. The filing cabinets remain undefeated.

    On Our Radar

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

    DOT’s Airline Subsidy Math Doesn’t Add Up
    The Essential Air Service program subsidizes flights to remote communities. But a growing number of routes are subsidized at rates that exceed the cost of simply flying passengers first class on commercial carriers. Nobody in the department seems to think that’s a problem worth revisiting.

    The FTC’s Quiet Warning on Healthcare Pricing
    The Federal Trade Commission issued a report last month flagging anti-competitive pricing practices in hospital and pharmaceutical markets. It got almost no coverage. The practices it described are ongoing.

    America.gov: Still Worth Watching
    We tested it a few weeks ago and it performed better than expected. Since then, we’ve noticed the results getting less consistent. We’re not ready to call it a regression, but we are watching.

    Until next week —

    hannotek, Editor @ Bureaucracy.News

  • The Red Tape Roundup — October 4, 2026

    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.

  • The Red Tape Roundup — Week of September 28, 2026

    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:

    1. The Pentagon’s Own Gas Station Is Losing Money on Every Gallon
    2. Deja Vu on the Clinch River: TVA’s New Nuclear Bet Looks a Lot Like Its Last One
    3. SEC Flagged OTC Link’s Access-Control Problem in 2016. It Was Still There in 2023.
    4. The Postal Service and Its Watchdog Cannot Agree on Whether They Spoke in 2024
    5. 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…

  • The Red Tape Roundup — Week of September 13, 2026

    A Note from the Editor

    Welcome to the first edition of the Red Tape Roundup — a quick look back at the week that was, a peek at what’s coming, and a status check on our ongoing battle with the federal records system.

    This is a newsletter for people who believe that the most consequential information the government produces is also, somehow, the hardest to find. We are a team of writers and editors who have made it our mission to dig through the boring parts of the federal apparatus so you don’t have to — and occasionally to have a little fun with it when the government makes that too easy to resist.

    This week was a good one. Our most-read piece was an analysis of the Chemical Safety Board’s investigation files from a Shell plant explosion in June 2025. The CSB released the records; we read them and published. That one found a wide audience, including a particularly enthusiastic corner of Reddit. We’ll take it.

    The week’s other crowd favorite was entirely unplanned. A Department of Energy newsletter arrived in our inbox — as hundreds do each week — and this one contained no current news whatsoever. Just highlights from July and August. We debated for about thirty seconds whether to let it slide. We did not let it slide. Many of you appreciated the decision.

    This is what we do. We follow the paper trail, we ask uncomfortable questions, and occasionally we poke a little fun at a bureaucracy that has earned it. Thanks for being here. If you enjoy the Roundup, forward it to someone who’d appreciate it. We’re growing, and we’d love the company.

    This Week’s Most-Read

    The numbers are in. Here’s what you were reading this week:

    1. Eleven Safeguards, One Wrong Valve, and a $95 Million Explosion at Shell
    2. Energy Department Confirms July and August Successfully Occurred
    3. Forty Reports, Zero Referrals: The LSC Inspector General’s Quiet Six Months
    4. The Inspectors General Say They Returned $17 for Every $1 Spent. We Went Looking for the $17.
    5. The Calming Area

    Coming Up Next Week

    A look at what’s heading your way next week:

    • The $215 Million Quantum Race That Took Washington a Decade to Build — The Department of Energy just launched a major quantum computing competition. Part One of the Quantum Genesis Files traces how Washington got here — and why it took this long.
    • Déjà Vu on the Clinch River: TVA’s New Nuclear Bet Looks a Lot Like Its Last One — The Tennessee Valley Authority is making another big nuclear push on the Clinch River. The last time it tried this, it didn’t go especially well.

    From the Investigative Desk

    The Kennedy Center rabbit hole got considerably deeper this week.

    What began as a look at the Kennedy Center’s unusual federal structure has turned into something much larger.

    We have been working backward through the Center’s congressional history, including hearings and records from the 1960s and early 1970s, when Washington was still figuring out exactly what it had agreed to build, how much it would cost, and who would ultimately pay for it.

    One particularly interesting stop was a July 1969 Senate hearing involving legislation to increase federal appropriations for the project. By then, the authorized federal contribution was being pushed from $15.5 million to $23 million, while borrowing authority associated with the parking facility was proposed to rise from $15.4 million to $20.4 million.

    Among the problems confronting the project were increased construction costs, heavier-than-expected structural requirements and the rather inconvenient realization that a national performing arts center located near National Airport would need considerably more protection from jet noise.

    There was also another problem familiar to anyone who has watched a government construction project age in real time: leaving the unfinished building sitting there wasn’t free. Contemporary testimony warned that prolonged dormancy itself could cost millions.

    We are now consolidating the original congressional records, government documents and historical material into a dedicated investigative archive. Some of those records are wonderfully accessible. Others appear to have been digitized under the assumption that nobody would ever attempt to read them again.

    This one has grown beyond the scope of a normal Bureaucracy Times article. We’re going to keep pulling the thread.

    What we’re trying to answer: How did the Kennedy Center evolve from a federally authorized cultural project into the peculiar public-private institution that exists today, and what did that evolution actually cost taxpayers?

    FOIA Watch

    Another week, another round of politely asking the government to show us its homework.

    DOI puts the Arctic payroll request on the clock. The Department of the Interior formally acknowledged our request for Interior Business Center payroll and personnel-cost records connected to the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. The request, received September 9, is now DOI-2026-009648 and has been placed on the normal processing track. DOI also invoked a 10-workday extension. Translation: the request has successfully entered the federal digestive system.

    Virginia Elections came back empty-handed. The Virginia Department of Elections responded to our inquiry into voter-list activity involving the organizations named in our request. ELECT says it found no requests, purchases, subscriptions, or deliveries of its voter-list products involving those parties. That does not end the inquiry. It changes the question. We are now looking at where the voter data used in those outreach campaigns actually came from.

    CBP sent answers. Now we get to improve the questions. Responses arrived to our first three requests stemming from the investigation into separated CBP contractors retaining system access. Those responses are being reviewed against the agency’s own FOIA requirements before narrower follow-up requests are drafted. FOIA occasionally works best as reconnaissance for the next FOIA.

    CIGIE is getting the press-office treatment first. After our review of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency’s FY2025 reporting raised questions about how its monetary results were calculated, we submitted a targeted media inquiry. A planned FOIA request is temporarily on hold while we see what CIGIE answers voluntarily. No sense filing a records request asking a question the press office might answer for free. Yet.

    Still simmering. Requests involving USARC, NSF, GSA and other pieces of the Arctic Commission investigation remain in various stages of the federal records pipeline. The SEC request connected to the MMTLP investigation also remains active, as does our expedited Legal Services Corporation OIG request.

    The bottom line: This was more response week than filing week. One agency acknowledged a request, another found no responsive records, CBP gave us material to sharpen the next round, and CIGIE has been given an opportunity to answer before another FOIA joins the pile.

    The filing cabinets remain undefeated.

    On Our Radar

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

    Defense Regional Clocks. The DoD Inspector General published an audit in which all 10 recommendations are classified. We have been reconstructing what prompted an audit whose public version reveals considerably more about the existence of the audit than the audit itself.

    USARC’s “news.” While examining the U.S. Arctic Research Commission’s public output, we noticed that much of what appears on its news page points readers to reporting produced elsewhere. That’s now part of our broader examination of what the small federal commission produces, who does the work and what taxpayers are paying for it.

    Government websites versus researchers. OCR failures, inaccessible archival PDFs and anti-bot restrictions keep appearing in our research. We’re beginning to document those barriers systematically rather than merely swearing at them individually.

    Until next week —

    hannotek, Editor @ Bureaucracy.News