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I file a lot of Freedom of Information Act requests. I’ve been requesting staff lists from both Trump administrations, and I have tracked thousands of federal political appointees in order to publish financial disclosures in searchable databases.
Much of that data was sourced from the Office of Personnel Management, which maintains a trove of information about who works in the federal government. But that agency’s FOIA department was thrown into chaos as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency fanned out across federal agencies to cut employees in early 2025.
Getting records from the agency has since become an increasingly Kafkaesque process, one that in early July of this year bounced me between three different seemingly abandoned email inboxes and two web portals. Aside from the fact that my once-routine requests now languish for months, just asking for documents has become its own kind of shell game.
“They just let the whole Privacy team go,” a now-former FOIA specialist at OPM told me by email in February 2025, referring to public records office staff. The specialist was cut the next day.
Here’s how the process worked at most agencies before the Trump administration and DOGE destroyed the offices that managed these requests: You would send a simple email with a text description of the documents you want. That’s it.
It didn’t mean you would get the records in the most timely manner, or would get the records you wanted at all. But it was a simple process, and it often worked.
According to OPM data, more than 600 government information specialists (staffers who administer FOIA and the Privacy Act) have resigned or been fired since the start of the second Trump administration. Within OPM itself, 12 information specialists left, seven of whom were laid off. (There was one new hire in that time period.)
Reached by phone, the former FOIA specialist told me the cuts made the office less efficient, less able to perform its function and threatened the statutory laws they are required to fulfill.
At the end of the 2025 fiscal year, over 1,600 FOIA requests were still in OPM’s backlog, seven times more than at the end of fiscal year 2024. The average processing time for a simple request at the agency slipped to over 84 days — twice as long as the year before.
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