One thing I would like to say for people who aren’t familiar and won’t read the article:
Every federal agency has its own FOIA team, in this case the OPM FOIA team was slaughtered and flayed for sport. It’s possible other agency’s FOIA teams were removed, but also more likely that they still exist. This wasn’t a blanket death of all FOIA, just the death of arguably the most important FOIA team
OPM is the most important in the “keeps the gears of the government moving” sense. It’s basically the federal government’s HR department. Without OPM, no federal workers get hired, get paid, etc… It’s not glamorous or politically charged work, which is why you rarely hear about them. But they recently hit the news because Elon kicked their doors in and illegally installed his own servers to capture personal data about every single federal worker.
Intelligence Communities work with classified stuff more than anyone. You may only FOIA unclassified stuff so the information and documents you can FOIA is limited
OPM is the most important at the moment as they are the office primarily under attack and being abused by Elon Musk and DOGE. They are the vehicle that Musk is using and abusing to try and destroy all Federal workers across every agency.
FOIA requests of the intelligence community is still super important. We only learn about the illegal shit they do about 30 years later, but I would argue that’s extremely important for historians and preventing it from happening in the future
You hear about the illegal things federal agencies do almost entirely because there is a standard automatic declassification date that is about 25 years after report creation for most agencies. See Executive Order 13526 from Obama for more info as to why. Similar orders existed prior to Obama, but generally for longer time-frames than 25 years.
But understand that the actual spooky stuff gets reviewed at the end of those 25 years, and does not get declassified. It gets determined to be a “continuing threat to the safety of the United States”, and remains classified. This is the vehicle that a majority of JFK and MLK’s assassination files have been recurringly re-upped for over 50 years (up until Trump’s recent EO demanding the files get released [which is an absurdly terrible way to get these files declassified IMO but I guess we’ll see how it goes]). All it takes to justify making a report “not ready for declassification” is the agency director’s say-so, which can be for any reason including that it would foster a bad view on the federal government and/or it’s agencies from its citizens.
Anyways, this usually leads to FOIA requests on intelligence agencies (some agencies more than others) being nearly useless, because anything spicy will not be labeled unclassified and released to you. I think it’s still a good idea to submit FOIA’s to them anyway because it’s always fun to make the FOIA offices squirm with their 100th annual request for information on Bigfoot, and it’s not illegal (yet!) to do so.
One thing I would like to say for people who aren’t familiar and won’t read the article:
Every federal agency has its own FOIA team, in this case the OPM FOIA team was slaughtered and flayed for sport. It’s possible other agency’s FOIA teams were removed, but also more likely that they still exist. This wasn’t a blanket death of all FOIA, just the death of arguably the most important FOIA team
OPM is the most important? I don’t even know that acronym
I would argue FOIA requests on the intelligence community is the most important
OPM is the most important in the “keeps the gears of the government moving” sense. It’s basically the federal government’s HR department. Without OPM, no federal workers get hired, get paid, etc… It’s not glamorous or politically charged work, which is why you rarely hear about them. But they recently hit the news because Elon kicked their doors in and illegally installed his own servers to capture personal data about every single federal worker.
Intelligence Communities work with classified stuff more than anyone. You may only FOIA unclassified stuff so the information and documents you can FOIA is limited
OPM is the most important at the moment as they are the office primarily under attack and being abused by Elon Musk and DOGE. They are the vehicle that Musk is using and abusing to try and destroy all Federal workers across every agency.
FOIA requests of the intelligence community is still super important. We only learn about the illegal shit they do about 30 years later, but I would argue that’s extremely important for historians and preventing it from happening in the future
You hear about the illegal things federal agencies do almost entirely because there is a standard automatic declassification date that is about 25 years after report creation for most agencies. See Executive Order 13526 from Obama for more info as to why. Similar orders existed prior to Obama, but generally for longer time-frames than 25 years.
But understand that the actual spooky stuff gets reviewed at the end of those 25 years, and does not get declassified. It gets determined to be a “continuing threat to the safety of the United States”, and remains classified. This is the vehicle that a majority of JFK and MLK’s assassination files have been recurringly re-upped for over 50 years (up until Trump’s recent EO demanding the files get released [which is an absurdly terrible way to get these files declassified IMO but I guess we’ll see how it goes]). All it takes to justify making a report “not ready for declassification” is the agency director’s say-so, which can be for any reason including that it would foster a bad view on the federal government and/or it’s agencies from its citizens.
Anyways, this usually leads to FOIA requests on intelligence agencies (some agencies more than others) being nearly useless, because anything spicy will not be labeled unclassified and released to you. I think it’s still a good idea to submit FOIA’s to them anyway because it’s always fun to make the FOIA offices squirm with their 100th annual request for information on Bigfoot, and it’s not illegal (yet!) to do so.
Office of Personnel Management, basically oversees all US Gov employees.