One year and nearly 2,000 pages of documents later, a group suing to uncover what the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was doing at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says the agency has withheld relevant documents “in bad faith” and is asking a court to allow discovery and depositions to draw out the information.
“Thus far, the Defendant has sought to delay document production, and when pressed by this Court to act, Defendant has produced only sanitized email threads,” Arthur Belendiuk, attorney for advocacy group Frequency Forward and journalist Nina Burleigh, who together filed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for FCC documents, wrote in a new filing to the court. “The evidence clearly demonstrates that the FCC has acted in bad faith by withholding documents responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA request.”
Frequency Forward and Burleigh claim that the FCC has failed to produce documents that would have been responsive to their FOIA request, which was meant 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 Chair Brendan Carr’s visits to Musk-affiliated facilities, but in the filing, they say the agency failed to do so, even for trips that Carr had publicly posted about online. Frequency Forward identified eight posts Carr made on X within the period of their request for documents that show him visiting what appears to be either a SpaceX or Tesla facility. Yet, the group says, the agency didn’t produce any documents regarding Carr’s office planning the trips, or even a travel itinerary or calendar event.
“The evidence clearly demonstrates that the FCC has acted in bad faith”
Burleigh and Frequency Forward say it’s “critical” they get this information. “[T]he FCC has 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 FCC regulated entity,” Belendiuk writes in the filing. “Providing a detailed account of Musk, his companies and DOGE’s contacts 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 fully redacted, and is an apparent response to how the agency should respond to a variety of press requests, including one from The Verge about DOGE employees found in its staff directory. The FCC did not produce any text messages responsive to the FOIA request, or identify their existence with an explanation for why they couldn’t be made public, Frequency Forward says, 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 leaving out critical details about DOGE staffers’ onboarding at the agency. For example, Tarak Makecha, a DOGE detailee 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 staff 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’ to the Commission or cleared required security or ethics checks prior to receiving such information.” And though Makecha indicated on a public financial disclosure form that he held stock in Tesla, Disney, and a telecommunications portfolio, the agency didn’t produce any documents discussing his ethics approvals or agreements to recuse himself on certain matters.
“Who leaves a federal post almost as soon as it begins, after seeking sensitive agency data, and why is the paper trail so thin?” Belendiuk asks in a statement to The Verge. “If the Commission wants the public to believe this was routine, it should be able to produce routine onboarding, ethics, and clearance records. Instead, those records are missing or fragmented, and what we have seen raises more questions than it answers.”