DLP Dispatch #14
Hello, and welcome to the 14th edition of the Data Liberation Project’s newsletter. Inside: Two new datasets liberated, hazmat transportation incident data improved, new FOIAs, FOIA updates, and DLP in the news.
Liberated: National Water Use Inventory records
In March 2023, the Data Liberation Project filed a FOIA request to the US Geological Survey (USGS) for the most detailed data records the agency maintains in its Congressionally-mandated “comprehensive national water use inventory.”
On March 6, 2024, USGS provided a set of responsive records:
- 50 state/territory-specific spreadsheets, containing site-level water conveyance data, covering 49 states (minus New Jersey) and Puerto Rico
- 1 spreadsheet containing conveyance data for “multiple states for which there is only withdrawal information but no delivery information”
- 1 data dictionary spreadsheet
The conveyance spreadsheets contain 823,000+ rows, each representing a measured or estimated volume of water conveyed between two “sites” in a given year.
Unfortunately, USGS has redacted the majority of site identifiers (as well as many other details) under FOIA exemption 7. The DLP’s research also has also identified issues with incompleteness and duplication in the records.
Even so, we believe that the records are of substantial public value. This appears to be the first time that national, site-level conveyance data has been publicly available.
To get started with the records, please consult the DLP’s introductory documentation.
Thank you to DLP volunteers Kate Miller and Joerg Rings for their contributions to the documentation, and to Maddy Varner for co-filing the request.
Liberated: National Organic Program investigations
The US Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Program launched a new, compliance-focused database in early 2019, allowing the organization “to better track case progress and more quickly identify patterns and relationships across complaints.”
In December 2023, we filed a FOIA request seeking a comprehensive set of complaint, investigation, and outcome records from this database, as well as documentation concerning the database’s structure and interpretation.
On March 12, 2024, the agency sent its first interim response, providing a spreadsheet that appears to list all closed investigations in the database.
The spreadsheet contains 1,501 entries. Its twelve columns indicate the following information for each case:
- Case number
- NOP case number
- Subject/title
- Regulatory citations
- Account/company name
- Complaint type (“Uncertified Operation” being the most common, followed by “Fraud”, “Pesticide Residue”, “Labeling Error”, and several others)
- Complaint subtype
- Inquiry received date/time
- Case opened date/time
- Case closed date/time
- Outcomes (e.g., “Compliance”, “No Violation”, “No Investigation”, “Civil Penalty”, etc.)
- Collected amount (for civil penalty outcomes)
”[The USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service] will continue to process the remainder of your request and will forward any responsive records promptly upon completion of review,” according to the agency’s letter.
Thank you to DLP volunteer Molly Longman, who collaborated on the request and examined the responsive records.
Improved: Hazmat transportation incident data
Since last February, the DLP has been running a data pipeline to improve the accessibility of data on transportation incidents involving hazardous materials. As we wrote in DLP Dispatch #6:
Federal law requires the reporting of spills, explosions, and other safety-endangering incidents involving hazardous materials to the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).
The reports include details about the location of the incident, mode of transportation, parties involved, hazardous materials involved, causes of failure, fatalities, injuries, financial cost, and more.
PHSMA publishes the submitted reports through an online portal. But the portal is brittle and doesn’t provide a straightforward way to download the full set of submitted reports.
So our repository automates the downloading — and updating — of all data available through the portal.
We have a few major improvements to share, thanks to contributions from DLP volunteers:
- Kate Miller added substantial, helpful documentation explaining the data’s context and nitty-gritty details. Kate has also contributed Python code demonstrating ways to explore and use the data.
- Madeline Everett developed a filtered version of the dataset, which focuses just on incidents deemed to have “serious” effects. (Thanks to that contribution, you can also now keep tabs on those serious incidents via RSS.)
New FOIAs
Since the latest dispatch, we’ve filed three new requests. They seek:
- Data on all Medicare “Level 2” appeals, co-requested with Mike Gartner.
- Documentation of CMS’s Medicare Appeals System, co-requested with Mike Gartner.
- Airline disclosures to the Dept. of Transportation regarding credit they’ve extended to federal political candidates, co-requested with Urvashi Uberoy.
FOIA updates
- Thanks to a follow-up FOIA request, we have updated the EPA Risk Management Program (RMP) dataset and interfaces, which now cover RMP submissions through late March 2024.
- USPS partly granted our appeal seeking records from/about its Rural Route Evaluated Compensation System (RRECS), requiring the FOIA office to conduct a search for (only) the documentation records we sought.
- CBP denied our request for documentation of its Automated Targeting System.
- The DEA partly granted our appeal in our request for records from/about its Theft Loss Reporting system, remanding a search, which was then swiftly denied.
DLP in the news
It’s always nice to see folks using DLP-sourced data and citing us. Some recent examples:
- FedScoop’s Rebecca Heilweil reported on the TSA complaint counts we liberated, and quoted us about the problems with TSA publishing the records as PDFs.
- The Connecticut Post’s Richard Chumney credited the Data Liberation Project for flagging an inspection report about problems at Connecticut’s Beardsley Zoo, which we identified through our APHIS inspection data pipeline.
- Corin Faife wrote about his experience collaborating with the Data Liberation Project, and what he learned about FOIA’ing for data along the way.
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