DLP Dispatch #13
Hello, and welcome to the 13th edition of the Data Liberation Project’s newsletter. Inside: TSA complaint data liberated, EPA RMP data updated, AHCAH charts, new requests, new appeals, and other news from the data-FOIA-sphere.
Liberated: TSA complaint data
In its FOIA Electronic Reading Room, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) publishes semi-regular reports on the monthly numbers of traveler complaints by airport, category, and subcategory.
Unfortunately, the TSA posts these data only as PDFs (e.g.), rather than as machine-readable data files, posing substantial barriers to further analysis.
It’s an approach to “transparency” that leaves much to be desired.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that the Data Liberation Project has just published a data pipeline that converts those PDFs into CSV files. You can now access the complaint counts as tidy, standardized, machine-readable, spreadsheet-able data.
The records currently cover complaints at 440+ airports from January 2015 through January 2024 — and we plan to keep it updated.
Many thanks to DLP summer intern Jake Zucker and to volunteers Rob Reid, Emily Keller-O’Donnell, and Asako Mikami for their substantial contributions to the effort.
Updated: EPA Risk Management Program data
In response to our latest FOIA request for the EPA's Risk Management Program (RMP) database, the agency has provided an updated set of records, covering submissions through late January 2024. They're now reflected in the raw data available via DLP’s documentation, in the simplified spreadsheets, and in the online facility/submission viewer.
This release also demonstrates — in a small but powerful way — the value of the FOIA → public data → feedback → data improvement cycle. In December, a member of the public contacted the Data Liberation Project, observing something strange in the RMP data: The PHA_Date and PHACompletionDate fields (in the tblS7PreventionProgram3 table) seemed to be flipped, so that the former’s value was assigned to the latter (and vice versa). I reached out to the EPA; their team quickly looked into the issue, confirmed it, and then fixed it. 🙌
AHCAH charts
You might recognize that acronym from DLP Dispatch #10 and DLP Dispatch 12, when we liberated (and then updated) the first-ever public data from the federal government’s Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver program.
Fall intern Mackenzie Peluso has compiled an illuminating set of charts showing the program’s rapid growth and geographic distribution. They provide great context for the data release, and are also fascinating in their own right. Many thanks to Mackenzie.
New requests
Since the last dispatch, the Data Liberation Project has filed two new FOIA requests:
- Data on closed investigations conducted by the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, a collaboration with Sayli Benadikar
- Complaint and investigation data from the USDA’s National Organics Program, a collaboration with Molly Longman
New appeals
The DLP has also been busy filing FOIA appeals, in cases where agencies initially denied (or substantially withheld) access to the requested records. These appeals seek:
- Documentation of the USDA’s food-purchase tracking systems, with help from the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic
- Data on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's enforcement outcomes
- Data the Postal Service uses in determining compensation for rural mail carriers
- More-detailed data on notices of “upcoming collective bargaining” submitted to the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service
You can find the appeal letters in the “Updates” section of each of the request pages linked above.
Other news from the data-FOIA-sphere
- The Dati Bene Comune campaign’s latest initiative, Liberiamoli tutti! (Let’s free them all!), aims to improve the availability of Italian government data. They say, very kindly, that it’s inspired by the Data Liberation Project.
- “I Filed 136 Public Records Requests With Police and Learned Why Our System Is Broken,” by journalist Aaron Gordon
- MuckRock and the Project on Government Oversight partnered to rescue and publish 33,000+ records from the federal government's now-decommissioned FOIAonline platform.
- The Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service has provided PDF’ed data representing Animal Welfare Act–related complaints, in response to a FOIA request by Ben Welsh.
That’s all for now! Thank you for reading, and don’t hesitate to reply. Alternatively, fill out the volunteer form and/or suggestion form.
— Jeremy