FCC accused of withholding DOGE information ‘in bad faith’
A year and nearly 2,000 pages of documents later, a group suing to uncover what the Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE) was doing at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) claims the agency withheld relevant documents “in bad faith” and is asking a court to allow discovery and depositions to extract the information.
“Thus far, Defendant has sought to delay production of the documents, and when the Court has pressed Defendant to act, Defendant has produced only sanitized threads,” wrote Arthur Belendiuk, an attorney with the advocacy group Frequency Forward, and journalist Nina Burleigh, who together filed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) records request for the FCC documents, in a new court filing. “The evidence clearly demonstrates that the FCC acted in bad faith in refusing to release documents responding to plaintiffs’ FOIA request.”
Frequency Forward and Burleigh claim the FCC failed to produce documents that would have responded to their FOIA request, which sought to shed light on any potential conflict of interest between billionaire Elon Musk’s role as the public face of DOGE and the FCC, which regulates his company SpaceX. The group asked the FCC to produce documents related to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s visits to Musk-affiliated facilities, but in the filing they claim the agency failed to do so, even for trips Carr had publicly posted about online. Frequency Forward identified eight messages Carr posted on X during the period of their records request showing him visiting what appears to be a SpaceX or Tesla facility. Yet, the group claims, the agency produced no documents regarding Carr’s office planning the trips, or even a travel itinerary or calendar event.
“The evidence clearly demonstrates that the FCC acted in bad faith”
Burleigh and Frequency Forward say it is “critical” that they obtain this information. “[T]“The FCC refused to consider the conflict of interest created, on the one hand, by Musk’s role as a super contributor to the Republican Party, his role as head of DOGE, and, on the other hand, his control of SpaceX as an entity regulated by the FCC,” Belendiuk wrote in the filing. “Providing a detailed account of Musk, his companies, and DOGE’s contacts with the FCC will allow the public to better understand the issues raised by such a relationship.”
The only email from Carr himself in the entire production is fully redacted and is an apparent response to how the agency should respond to various press inquiries, including one from The edge about DOGE employees found in its staff directory. The FCC did not produce any text messages responding to the FOIA request, nor did it identify their existence by explaining why they could not be made public, says Frequency Forward, even though some of the emails made public reference text exchanges. The FCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the filing.
The group also accuses the FCC of omitting critical details about the integration of DOGE personnel into the agency. For example, Tarak Makecha, a DOGE member from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), apparently spent two weeks at the FCC and requested and sometimes received “a substantial amount of information from Commission personnel, including broadband mapping data and detailed personnel records regarding Commission employees,” according to the filing. “However, there is no evidence that Makecha was ever actually ‘onboarded’ into the Commission or that he passed the required security or ethics checks before receiving such information.” And although Makecha indicated on a public financial disclosure form that he held shares in Tesla, Disney and a telecommunications portfolio, the agency produced no documents discussing his ethics approvals or recusal agreements on certain issues.
“Who leaves a federal job almost as soon as they start, after seeking sensitive agency data, and why is the paper trail so thin?” Belendiuk asks in a statement The edge. “If the Commission wants the public to believe this is routine, it should be able to produce routine onboarding, ethics, and authorization records. Instead, these records are missing or fragmented, and what we have seen raises more questions than it answers.”
