For months, I’ve been in a high stakes battle with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Legal letters fired back and forth. The DEA refused to release records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Another part of the DEA intervened to get those documents published. For what, you ask? Some standard expenditure records on the DEA’s purchase of retirement medals and other awards.
That information, of course, is not actually that important. But the DEA’s initial refusal to fulfill my FOIA request, despite it being written with specific language I’ve used for years to successfully learn what the U.S. government spends its money on, shows that agencies sometimes put up a fight for even the most trivial records.
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