The nonprofit Partnership for Public Service analyzed data from the Office of Personnel Management’s annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey to create an index ranking of which agencies are the best places to work, according to their employees. One of the most interesting ways to sort this ranking is the change from 2016 to 2017. In many cases, FOIA has given us clues about why certain agencies experienced big swings in employee satisfaction in the first year of the Trump administration. In other cases, this statistic can tell us which agencies - particularly smaller, seldom covered ones - warrant more FOIA scrutiny.

With mixed result, FOIA requesters have put a lot of effort into trying to track how Donald Trump is profiting from the presidency. This week, we’ll take a look at what FOIA has and hasn’t been able to reveal about Trump’s profits from foreign emoluments and government agencies’ use of his properties.

Trump has been in office for one year, which means some of his earliest appointees will soon be free of certain promises in their ethics agreements. This week, we take a look at how you can investigate Trump appointees’ ethical obligations using public records.

FOIA is most commonly considered a reporter’s and citizen’s tool for establishing hard facts: dates, dollar amounts, data, etc. But FOIA is also useful in the trickier area of narrative. This week, we take a look a some examples of how FOIA was used to challenge a prevailing narrative from press coverage of the administration or that the administration itself sought to advance.

In 2017, FOIA requests contributed valuable oversight to the Trump administration. If you’re wondering where to start this new year, imitating successful requests is an easy way to get the ball rolling. 2017 also yielded many repositories of calendars, travel records, ethics pledges, and other documents that you can mine for FOIA request ideas. For the first week of 2018, we rounded up resources that can springboard your efforts to FOIA the Trump administration.