Understanding FOIA Requests

In this episode of "Game Changers for Government Contractors," host Michael LeJeune delves into the intricacies of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Learn when and how to effectively use FOIA to obtain crucial government contracting information, the types of documents you can request, and the process involved. Michael also provides valuable tips on avoiding common pitfalls and explains why it's often best to have someone else submit the request on your behalf. Whether you're new to FOIA or looking to refine your strategy, this episode offers essential insights to help you navigate the FOIA process successfully.

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Read Transcript Here:

Michael LeJeune (00:03) Welcome to another episode of Game Changers for Government Contractors. I am your host, Michael LeJeune, and I'm going to be talking today about Freedom of Information requests. So, a FOIA, as it's often called, is something that will pop up from time to time where a government contractor says, "I need some information. I can't find the information. I've reached out to the contracting officers, and they won't give me the information. What do I do?"

And that is often a case where you would try to use a Freedom of Information Act request. Now, understand that this is a little bit of a lengthy process. There's not a lot of paperwork on it, but it's a little lengthy, mostly in the time. The government says that they will respond in a few months. Typically, it is like 120 days. Something along those lines is normally what the response date is.

I've seen it in as little as a month, and we are currently working with a client right now. We're in month seven and still don't have an answer from the government on this particular one. So it really just depends. And that Freedom of Information request is on a big multi-billion dollar IDIQ. It's likely taking time to navigate through all the channels, to talk to all the people because there are multiple contracts on the Freedom of Information request.

So it's not a simple, "Hey, I need a contract number. Hey, I'm looking for this RFP. Hey, I'm looking for whatever." It's a lot more information than you would typically ask for, probably why it's taken so long. So, the whole point of a Freedom of Information request is that the government, by law, is required to share certain things if they are asked to share those certain things with the public. We are taxpaying citizens. We pay their salaries. We deserve to know certain information. So, often a journalist will do a FOIA. They use those a lot of times to get information for an article they're writing, or those types of folks—students and different faculty of colleges will often do those to support a case or maybe they're writing a book or something along those lines. Government contractors can use them and should occasionally use them.

You just have to know when it's important enough to use it because a lot of times it's not. A lot of times it's not a silver bullet, but I needed to cover that today because we get a lot of questions about this. When should I use it? How should I use it? What should I do? We actually have a template inside of Federal Access. So if you go to federal-access.com, get signed up in either the Sales Pro or the Advisor level, you'll get access to our FOIA template.

Along with a document that shows you how to submit it and all that kind of stuff. But I'm going to give you the basic overview on it today for free in the podcast. So, as a general rule, agencies with legislative or judicial branches do not apply to this stuff. Documents that contain proprietary information are exempt. There's also, you know, the government's supposed to verify your request within 20 days. They don't always do that.

They're supposed to respond to it in total within 60 to 120 days. They don't always do it. There are certain agency exemptions and certain reasons for exemptions. So, like national security information, agency internal policies and personnel rules, practices, those kinds of things, trade secrets, all those things are exempt. So it's important to know what you can actually request.

So most of the common things that people are going to request are prior RFPs and solicitations, task and delivery orders, purchase orders, that sort of thing. That's typically what you're looking for because you're not going to get any information on what happened in source selection. You're not going to get performance reports. You're not going to get bid abstracts, proposals that people have written, those kinds of things. Unless they happen to be incorporated in the contract, you're not going to get access.

To any of that type of stuff. So it's just a very high level of information. Most of the time you can get this through searching sam.gov or a bid matching tool, or even just a simple Google search or reaching out to a contracting officer and saying, "Hey, can I have a copy of the previous RFP on this? Here's the number." And a lot of times you'll be able to get it those simple ways. It's not hard to get most of the information you need, but when you get pushback or,

Better yet, when somebody won't even return a phone call, won't return an email, sometimes you have to go this route. And so, this is just what you have to do to get the information sometimes. So it's really important that I note that we always suggest that you never submit these on your own. Submitting a FOIA on your own is something you can do, but we request you find a friend, a colleague, a relative.

Someone else, even if you have a separate DBA or something like that, submit it under that instead of your company. This is one of the things that don't fall under a contracting officer's normal work. It's extra. It's on top of all their stuff, and it must be done because it is a Freedom of Information Act request. It has to be complied with at some level. And because of that, it's annoying, and we don't want this annoying thing being tied to your company anyway.

So, find someone else to do it. If you are a coaching client with any one of our coaches on the team, we will submit this on your behalf under our company instead of yours. All you'll be required to do is supply any fees or anything like that that are associated with the FOIA request, because I'll get into that in a minute. Some of the websites request money upfront. Some of them will send you an invoice on the backend because guess what?

Time and energy goes into this, and you know the government. They're going to bill you for that. Some it's by page. I've seen them where it's a dollar per page or $2 per page, and they'll say, "What's your budget for this? Will you do up to $500?" And they'll cut you off at the $500 mark. Even if there are 600 more pages in your FOIA request. So you have to have a budget when you go into it, understand what you're willing to spend to get that information. And then those are the only costs you incur.

If we submit it for you, if you're a coaching client, we'll do this for you at no additional cost, just whatever the FOIA fees are. So those are a couple of tips there on this. You can go online and submit the FOIA. There is a centralized database on this. However, a lot of the agencies still do this through their own website. So what I recommend, instead of sending people to a URL, which people are going to migrate to a URL at some point,

But for now, I typically recommend, Josh typically recommends just Googling the agency and FOIA. That's all you have to do. And you'll be directed to how they want you to submit that FOIA. That's all you have to do. Just Google that and find that out. Other than that, there's not a whole lot to cover about FOIAs here. Again, there's a template that we have. It's very simple about what you're requesting.

You follow the rules that are on their website for submitting this, and that's really about all you need to know. When are you going to use this? You're typically going to use it if you're chasing a larger contract and you're trying to capture some information that you cannot find online. That's typically when you're going to use this. Nine times out of ten, that's it. That's the only time you're going to use it. Now, on the reverse side, what happens if you get.

a FOIA. Let's say the government has received a FOIA from another company, and they're requesting information. Part of that information is about the bids that were submitted, and they say, "Hey, we're not willing to give you pricing information, but we're willing to give this information." They send you a note. This happened to a client of mine a couple of weeks ago. They send you a note.

And they say, "Here is the information that you submitted." It was for an RFI, which I thought was really weird that somebody was FOIAing an RFI. They send you the information and say, "What of this needs to be redacted?" Now, you can't just redact the whole document. You've got to go through and look at it and say, "What is proprietary information? What is information that if a competitor had that in their hands, it would allow them a strategic advantage over you?"

You have to be very clear. You need to highlight the specific areas of whatever document it is, and you need to write up why that would cause harm to your business. And again, if you highlight the whole document, they're just going to reject that and give it all to somebody because they're going to say, "You can't highlight everything as business-sensitive information." There's a lot of it that is just not. So in that situation,

You'd be very specific about the things that matter most. So this client of mine came to me. It was a four-page document that he needed to redact. There were a total of about six lines in it where I was like, "This is really the only thing that is sensitive. It's based on your strategy. There's no intellectual property in here, but if someone saw this, they could understand what your strategy was. We want to highlight those."

and respond that this is sensitive information because it depicts your strategy. It could cause business harm. And we went down the path with that. So you've got to be very careful about what you try to redact in those because, again, it could upset that person. They could just say, "Well, we're just going to reject what you've said and just give them the whole thing." So be very careful about that.

That, in a nutshell, is most of what you need to know about FOIAs. If you have other questions about FOIAs, whether it is when and how to use them or, "Hey, I've got this specific case. Should I use it here?" just let us know. Again, a lot of times there are ways around submitting this because imagine you need information. You need the answer to a question in the next two weeks, 30 days, and you submit this and you pay.

And it takes them six months. That information is going to be useless to you. So let's first try to find a better way to get this information. And then, if that doesn't work, then we can use it for you. So I hope this episode was helpful to you. If you've got any questions at all, you know how to reach me. We'll see you next episode.

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