Federal vendor with $50M in contracts leaves portal broken for a month
A ProPublica reporter's FOIA requests to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) have been stymied by a broken web portal and unresponsive staff, reflecting the chaos wrought by DOGE cuts. The portal, run by contractor Opexus (formerly AINS), was down for 13 days, and OPM's FOIA backlog has ballooned to 1,600 requests, with processing times doubling.
“They just let the whole Privacy team go,” a now-former FOIA specialist at OPM told me by email in February 2025, referring to public records office staff.