FCC accused of withholding DOGE information ‘in bad faith’

One year and Nearly 2,000 pages of documents Later, a group that sued to expose what the FCC’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was doing said the agency withheld relevant documents “in bad faith” and is asking the court to allow discovery and debriefings.

“To date, the defendant has sought to delay the production of documents, and when this court has pressed him to act, the defendant has provided nothing more than a sanitized email chain,” Arthur Belendiuk, an attorney for the advocacy group Frequency Forward, and journalist Nina Burley, who together filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking the FCC documents, wrote in a letter. New court case. “The evidence clearly shows that the FCC acted in bad faith by withholding documents in response to Plaintiffs’ Freedom of Information Act request.”

Frequency Forward and Burleigh allege that the FCC failed to produce documents that would have responded to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which was intended to highlight any potential conflicts 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’s facilities, but in the filing, they say the agency failed to do so, even for trips that Carr publicly posted about online. Frequency Forward identified eight posts Carr made on X during the course of their request for documents that showed him visiting what appeared to be either a SpaceX or Tesla facility. However, the group says, the agency did not provide any documents related to Carr’s office planning the trips, or even an itinerary or calendar event.

Both Burleigh and Frequency Forward say it’s extremely important they have this information. “(T)he FCC has declined to consider conflicts of interest arising from, on the one hand, Musk’s role as a major contributor to the Republican Party, his role as Chairman of the DOGE, and, on the other hand, his control of SpaceX as an FCC-regulated entity,” Belendiuk wrote in the filing. “Providing a detailed account of Musk, his companies, and DOGE’s connections with the FCC will provide the public with a better understanding of the issues raised by such a relationship.”

The only email in the entire production from Carr himself is completely redacted, and is an apparent response to how the agency responded to a variety of press requests, including one from Edge on DOGE employees are found in its employee directory. The FCC did not release any text messages in response to a FOIA request, nor did it identify their existence with an explanation of why they could not be made public, Frequency Forward says, though some emails made the exchange of reference texts public. The FCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the filing.

The group also accuses the FCC of leaving out important details about the qualifications of DOGE employees at the agency. For example, Tarak Makecha, a DOGE staffer from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), apparently spent two weeks at the FCC, requesting and occasionally receiving “a significant amount of information from FCC staff including broadband mapping data and detailed personnel records relating to FCC staff,” according to the filing. “However, there is no evidence that Makecha was actually ‘attached’ to the Commission or obtained the required security or ethics checks before receiving this information.” Although Makecha indicated on his public financial disclosure form that he owns shares in Tesla, Disney and a telecommunications portfolio, the agency did not provide any documents discussing his ethics approvals or agreements to recuse himself in certain matters.

“Who leaves a federal position once they start, after searching for sensitive agency data, and why is the paper trail so thin?” Belendiuk asks in a statement Edge. “If the Commission wants the public to believe this was routine, it should be able to produce routine records of passenger reception, ethics, and clearance. Instead, these records are missing or fragmentary, and what we have seen raises more questions than it answers.”