#muckrock — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #muckrock, aggregated by home.social.
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The #Foilies2026
Established in 2015, The #Foilies are an annual project by the #ElectronicFrontierFoundation & #MuckRock to recognize the agencies, officials & contractors that thwart the public's #right to know. We give out these tongue-in-cheek "awards" during #SunshineWeek (March 15-21), a collective effort by media & advocacy organizations to highlight the importance of open government.
This year, we've got a few "winners" whose behavior defies belief.
#eff -
Michael Nedd’s BLM Calendar, From Election Day 2016 through the Inaugural Period
Back in 2019, I made a Freedom of Information Act request for the work calendar of Michael Nedd, a longtime Bureau of Land Management official, for the months following the 2016 election through the inaugural period. The documents were released just the other day, six years and four months after I submitted the FOIA request.
Nedd had been promoted from Executive Director, Energy Minerals and Management to Deputy Director at the Bureau of Land Management in March of 2017, just a couple of months after Trump took office. He would have been privy, I imagined, to any discussions of Twin Metals’ canceled mineral leases and the full-court-press flurry to renew them. I thought his work calendar might help me fill out the Timeline I made of that coordinated effort or help me reconstruct what was happening behind closed doors at BLM.
Upon review, these documents do not seem all that helpful in that regard. For example, the Timeline indicates that on February 7, 2017, Nedd forwards a briefing paper on land withdrawals to his colleagues; no surprise, his calendar for that day shows a “Land Withdrawal Proposal Discussion.” In my view, all this does is drive home a point I’ve made many times, that reversing land withdrawals was a priority for the incoming administration. And we already have Nedd’s calendar for April of 2017, when he met with then-solicitor Daniel Jorjani and other officials to discuss “Mining in Minnesota.” Or at least we had that calendar, but the link (to a domain called altgov2) has now gone dead. Well, not exactly dead: it’s a tarted-up 404 Page, occupied by “affiliate marketers.” I’m not going to bother linking to it, but if you want to see what I’m talking about, just go to the entry for April 10th on the Twin Metals Timeline and click the link to Nedd’s calendar.) It’s been a while, and, contrary to popular wisdom, the Internet is not forever.
So why put these documents up now? Circumstances have changed. The threat to the Boundary Waters looks even more menacing than it did during Trump’s first term, and we should be paying attention to what’s going on now, not what happened eight or more years ago, right?
What’s more, Michael Nedd was frog marched out of BLM’s office back in May, 2025, for telling employees to ignore a DOGE directive. (Politico has the details here; the Washington Post also has a story; I’ll note in passing that it’s classic Politico to report Nedd’s ouster, which is part of the clumsily executed destruction of modern American government that we’re witnessing, as a threat to Trump’s fossil fuel agenda.) Though Nedd is still listed on the BLM website as Deputy Director, Greenwire reports that Joe Stout has now replaced him as Acting Deputy Director. Things are unclear: there may be litigation underway or some reinstatement in the works. (After all, the DC kleptocrats wouldn’t want to do anything to threaten that fossil fuel agenda).
Anyway, I put these records up now because a) they arrived, so I might as well acknowledge the response; b) they help fill out the public record for a critical period; c) someone else might find these records useful; and d) I have a chance to test out Muckrock’s DocumentCloud plugin for WordPress — which I have not used until now.
In order to upload the 2000-plus-page calendar to documentcloud.org, I had to break it into two parts.
Part 1.
Part 2.
Postscript 30 August 2025: Results from the plugin experiment are mixed. Right now, it looks as if the documentcloud server is returning a 500 error. The docs, if you want them, are here.
Postcript 2, 9 Sept 2025. 1) It turns out the 500 error only shows up when I try to view the documents on Chrome, on my laptop. The plugin works just fine on Safari and Firefox. And when I emailed Sanjin Ibrahimovic at Muckrock to ask about all this, he said he could not replicate the 500 error, even when viewing the post in Chrome. So, who knows? I speculated that it might be an extension I’m running on Chrome. As long as people can access the documents, all is well, I guess. 2) On Chris D’Amico‘s suggestion, I tried looking at the post in an incognito window. And I can see the docs just fine.
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🙏🏻Newmarket Journalism School Research Center
https://bsky.app/profile/newmarkjresearch.bsky.social/post/3lgvvedozkl2j -
🔍 If you're digging into a story and need public records, #MuckRock simplifies the FOIA/FOIL process.
Worth checking out for journalists looking to go deeper:
https://www.muckrock.com/
#investigative #journalism #foia #foil
https://bsky.app/profile/newmarkjresearch.bsky.social/post/3lgvvedozkl2j -
Five revelations about St. Louis’ history with radioactive waste
By: Allison Kite - July 12, 2023
"The #MissouriIndependent and #MuckRock spent months scouring thousands of pages of government records about St. Louis’ involvement in the race to build an #AtomicBomb during World War II and decades of #environmental #contamination that followed.
"Journalists sought to lay bare the degree to which government officials knew of the spreading contamination and the danger it posed to St. Louis County residents.
"While the contamination at the #WestLakeLandfill and in #ColdwaterCreek has been covered extensively for decades, documents obtained by the newsrooms revealed the way federal officials failed to take stronger measures to protect the health of St. Louis-area residents."
Read more:
https://missouriindependent.com/2023/07/12/five-revelations-about-st-louis-history-with-radioactive-waste/
#RadioactiveContamination #ColdWar #SaintLouisMissouri