Often times people ask to upload their existing FOIA requests to MuckRock or want to share an interesting cache of documents through the site. We’re always excited to see more people using public records, so we wanted to explain why we don’t accept these kinds of offers and suggest some alternatives.

We’re revising MuckRock plans to give our users more while also broadening them to support access to premium features on DocumentCloud. For newsrooms, we also have a limited-time opportunity to save up to 75% off or more on Pro and Organization accounts.

Earlier this week, we wrote about Brett Kavanaugh’s renewed Federal Bureau of Investigation background check and predicted that while the full investigation wouldn’t be public for years, likely some summary would be released. In light of reporting that the results of the background check will only be available to the Sentate Judiciary Committee, we wanted to address one of the lesser-known aspects of Freedom of Information Act: the broad exemption of the legislature.

Every year, literally hundreds of billions of tax dollars are spent on contracting agreements with private businesses. And all of them are subject - to some extent - to public records laws and inspections.