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This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Can you walk us through how the partnership with MuckRock came together to track and file hundreds of public records requests?
Petrin: At the Trans Journalists Association, we were seeing a lot of executive orders targeting trans communities. … As a local journalist in accountability reporting spaces, I'm always looking for those cues that a record is going to be created because we know we can FOIA it.
When we saw those “create a report within 90 days” type of clauses in some of these executive orders, I started pinging various journalism groups that do public records projects and saying: “Hey, we're interested in maybe putting something together, trying to keep track of the records that are going to be created because of this. Does anybody have services or systems that they can recommend?”
MuckRock reached out and said they had some funding to support an initiative like this.
What were some of the goals you had when starting this initiative, and how has the project evolved?
Petrin: There are two big picture questions. Number one is, we know that these executive orders are not law, right? There's not really a clear or explicit legal requirement to do all of that, so our first question is how much of that is actually happening? It's just as interesting if something isn't happening because those still give us valuable information about the mechanisms of government — especially on the state level.
I also had a couple of conversations with journalists and there was this hesitation around, well, we don't really know what's happening yet, so we can't cover it yet. Part of what we also wanted to point to is that things are already happening, even if we don't know if the agencies are even interpreting these orders as they were intended to be read.
We know that things are happening. What we wanted to do was get ahead of how we can ask smart questions about what is and isn't being done and where the points of confusion might lie.
What have been the most significant roadblocks you’ve faced during this project?
Petrin: I think the biggest one is that the federal government has not been particularly responsive to FOIA, so we've had to get creative about the ways that records move from municipal to state to federal government and move back and forth between the various levels of government to see if we can obtain those records at the more local levels, even though they're technically federal documents about the implementation of federal executive orders.
The other thing is that we've gotten enough back that we want to start sending things to publications. Even if a record didn't come back, that might still be a story. Part of that is just reaching out to publications that are already covering LGBTQ+ community topics and legislation from an investigative and accountability perspective.
How have the recent federal worker layoffs affected agency response time, and how have you adjusted your strategy in response?
Petrin: We don't know exactly what is causing the response times, but what we have heard from folks who have been doing reporting in this area is that the FOIA officers they have multi-year relationships with are, in many cases, no longer working there.
There has been the deliberate removal of public records from various websites. Even if that's something you would not historically have had to FOIA, it's now behind another process. There could be any number of reasons that they're being ignored or denied.
We've heard back from some agencies: “Please refine your request. We need some more information.” And then other agencies have simply not responded at all. It does seem consistent across various federal entities.
In your May update, you mentioned that state agencies have been more responsive than federal entities. What are some of the other open records trends you are seeing that might help other journalists get the information they need?
Petrin: The thing to keep in mind is: If the federal government sends a letter to the state, that becomes a state public record, too. What we have been able to get through this project are things that the federal government has written to the states, as well as how the states chose to respond.
The other thing that journalists can think about in general is that we sometimes think it's only a story if we can get the record. But in this instance, the nonexistence of a record — or the inability to get real clarity or certainty — might actually be the story.
We talk a lot about the data gap story: where there's a question that we want to answer and we can't answer it because it's not being tracked at all by anyone or is being tracked badly. We can think of some of these not as data gap stories, but public record gap stories. What does it mean that we can't get this? What does it mean that this record doesn't exist? What implications does that have for the public in understanding what's going on or isn't going on right now?
When you receive denials or no response, what is your process for deciding whether to appeal, refile, or move on?
Petrin: We've noticed that there are a couple of requests where we're like, was our language the problem? In that case, instead of filing another 50 requests with new language, we might try two or three test requests that state various types of different public records laws and see, are we maybe getting more back if we change our language a little bit?
Largely, what we've been doing is either pivoting or refiling a few tweaks to the requests. We're also thinking about, well, if they try to argue that the drafts themselves are exempt, would it be possible to get emails discussing the drafts and other things that are sort of adjacent records?
Once you receive the public records, what is your process for reviewing them on deadline and communicating that information?
Petrin: Right now, we are primarily doing that through the newsletter, so keeping an eye on trends and summarizing them and then sending that out to the broader MuckRock community. We are also increasingly trying to do small events with folks who are interested in the records.
We got a series of really interesting responses back about a requirement for state attorneys general to coordinate with the federal attorney general on the implementation of the “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” executive order. In this case, we're seeing a really consistent response related to these. Let's email a couple of partners who may be interested in this and see if they might want to cover it.
We're seeing in a lot of states this back and forth about student privacy. We’re not seeing a lot of responses about these various federal reports that are supposed to exist, and sort of had deadlines to come to exist. Part of it is also that we're working on drawing people's eyes to the policies.
Have a FOIA idea? Submit it here to TJA and MuckRock.
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