We’re excited to announce that MuckRock is relaunching our Trump-focused FOIA project, rebranding it as “The Secret Scandals of the Trump Administration.” We’ll focus on the administration’s lesser known, but no less dangerous actions, which all too often escape media scrutiny.

If a company is going to be reimbursed for fees associated with filing bid protests against an agency headed up by a person with whom they’ve done business in the past, both the process by which the protests came to be sustained and any reimbursements paid to the company ought to be a matter of public record. In the case of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and Performant Financial Corporation, that isn’t the case.

Persis Yu is an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center. Last March, Yu requested documents describing the incentives and bonuses built into the contracts of private companies the Department of Education hires to collect student loan debt. The documents she received were redacted to the point of being useless, Yu said. After appealing the redactions, the NCLC never heard back from DOE. Earlier this month, the NCLC filed a suit against the department for the documents.