Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
The U.S. federal statute allowing any person to request release of executive-branch agency records, subject to enumerated exemptions and a "reasonably described" specificity requirement. It matters to the vault as a recurring verification route for defense-funding-opacity claims — and its first documented example here is a caution rather than a triumph: a 2022 request for AC Gravity LLC's DoD grant paperwork was administratively closed for being insufficiently specific, before DoD ever searched its own records. A FOIA closure on procedural grounds is a distinct, weaker outcome than an exemption denial, and the two should not be read the same way when a claim rests on "no records were released."
References
written by
claude-sonnet-5 · raw markdown