The Latest Requests Logged in FOIAengine
Questions about GLP-1 weight loss drugs, DOGE, cryptocurrencies, and the past conduct of Trump’s regulatory nominees are among those in newly available Freedom of Information Act requests filed by media organizations with the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
FOIA requests targeting those hot-button topics were among 339 queries filed by the news media in the past month with the three key regulators, as tracked in as close to real time as possible by PoliScio Analytics’ competitive-intelligence database FOIAengine. Highlights follow:
- GLP-1 Weight Loss Drugs: At least six media requests from Reuters and additional requests from Capitol Forum about tirzepatide, semaglutide, and the drugs’ name-brand makers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk reflected a significant turn in the ongoing regulatory and legal battles between the two drug makers and compounders who sell knock-offs of the popular weight-loss drugs. Among other things, both media requesters sought information about GLP-1 products being offered by high-flying telehealth company Hims & Hers (NYSE:HIMS).
When we last checked in on requests by or about the weight-loss drug makers, the FOIA surge resulted from the high-stakes economic, legal, and public-relations battles waged by compounders seeking to outflank the drugs’ brand-name patent holders, U.S.-based Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY) and Denmark’s Novo Nordisk (NYSE: NVO). See our January 8 story, “More Questions About Obesity Drug Makers.” More recently, as FDA actions have tilted the legal fight in favor of Lilly and Novo Nordisk, media companies are pushing to learn more about what the FDA knows about the safety of the generic versions, and how the FDA concluded the shortage was over. Reuters, for example, sought “all reports submitted by Hims & Hers Health to the FDA since October 2024 that related to the shortage of either semaglutide or tirzepatide.” Capitol Forum sought “the adverse events reported to the FDA by Hims & Hers Health for compounded semaglutide and/or tirzepatide injections between January 1, 2025 and March 19, 2025.”
Lilly’s GLP-1 products include Zepbound, Mounjaro, and Trulicity. Novo Nordisk’s competing products include Ozempic, Wegovy, Rybelsus, and Saxenda. The compounders, including wellness centers and medical spas, have been fighting to continue selling off-brand versions of those GLP-1 products because, they argued, Lilly and Novo Nordisk cannot keep up with demand.
But the FDA began shutting down that option for the compounders, including Hims & Hers, late last year. The agency declared in December that the shortage of tirzepatide was over, and ruled the same about semaglutide in February. Since then, Lilly and Novo Nordisk have filed hundreds of lawsuits against the compounders, including those that have tried to modify formulations (such as changing doses or adding ingredients) to argue they are not making a direct copy. In a statement issued two weeks ago, Novo Nordisk announced that it has filed 111 lawsuits in federal courts across 32 states against entities unlawfully marketing and selling compounded semaglutide. Novo Nordisk said the compounded drugs “pose significant risks to patient safety due to high levels of impurities (as high as 33%) or misbranded due to inaccurately labeled strengths.” Lilly has recently filed similar lawsuits against compounding pharmacies, telehealth companies, wellness centers, and medical spas for selling unauthorized versions of tirzepatide.
- Elon Musk and DOGE: Reuters, CNN, Fortune, Politico, and the Wall Street Journal were among the dozens of media requesters seeking documents from the FDA, FTC, and FDA and other agencies or departments about Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency.
The various media requests about DOGE often had twin themes: assessing the Musk team’s influence on the independent agencies and gauging the magnitude of possible firings. This dual focus on regulatory independence was exemplified by two requests from Politico’s Declan Harty to the SEC, one seeking “copies of any agreements or memoranda of understanding between the SEC and United States DOGE Service” and the other requesting “a list of all SEC employees, including job titles, as of March 12, 2025.”
Along the same lines, Douglas Gillison of Reuters requested from the SEC “electronic copies of any written report produced in compliance with Sec 3(e), (‘Developing Agency Reorganization Plans’), of the President’s Feb 11, 2025, Executive Order titled ‘Implementing The President’s Department of Government Efficiency Workforce Optimization Initiative,’ dated March 10 through 14, 2025.” Joshua Sisco of Bloomberg made a similar request to the FTC.
But one DOGE-related Reuters FOIA request stood out. It was spurred by the Intercept’s disclosure of Musk’s hitherto-secret White House email address: erm71@who.eop.gov.
When the Intercept first published Musk’s email address, on March 6, journalist Shawn Musgrave wrote that the online publication was doing so because “FOIA works best when requests are as specific as possible. The U.S. government sometimes plays games with journalists, researchers, and other watchdogs, rejecting asks it considers too vague — such as requests for correspondence that fail to include an official’s government email address. That’s why the Intercept is publishing Musk’s government email address.”
As Musgrave explained it, “the email address reflects [Musk’s] attachment to the White House Office, the Executive Office of the President, and, apparently, Musk’s full initials plus his birth year, 1971. This differs from the standard format for EOP emails, which typically include the staffer’s full first and last name.” The Intercept said it already had filed more than a dozen FOIA requests for Musk’s emails, and used its FOIA efforts to solicit donations.
Reuters tailgated almost immediately on the Intercept’s disclosure, seeking from the FDA “copies of any and all emails sent by erm71@who.eop.gov. to FDA acting commissioner Sara Brenner, CFO Benjamin Moncarz and Chief Information Officer Vid Desai since January 1 2025.” A few other such requests that included Musk’s “secret” email address hit FOIAengine, but we didn’t see the expected deluge.
Also, notably, the FTC redacted on privacy grounds the names and organizational affiliations of many of its DOGE-related FOIA requesters.
- Cryptocurrencies: In 2024, a few years after Politico founder Robert Allbritton sold his company to Germany’s Axel Springer for a billion dollars in cash, he brought forth another media start-up, this one a non-profit called NOTUS, short for News of the United States. (POTUS, SCOTUS, and now NOTUS, get it?) We’ve begun to see some intriguing FOIA requests from NOTUS, including one recently about the Trump memecoins.
NOTUS’s “lobbying and influence reporter” Taylor Giorno on March 21 requested from the SEC “emails, letters, memoranda, text messages and third-party communications . . . referencing the memecoins $TRUMP and $MELANIA launched by President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump.” For more context about the Trump family and its memecoins, see our March 5 story, “Huge Turnaround in SEC’s Crypto Enforcement.”
- Background Check on the new SEC Chairman: Paul Atkins was confirmed by the Senate on April 9, 2025, and sworn in on April 21, 2025. He will serve the remainder of former Chair Gary Gensler‘s term, which expires on June 5th, 2026. Atkins previously served as an SEC Commissioner from 2002 to 2008. Thus far, Atkins hasn’t been the lightning rod for FOIA requests that Gensler was. (See, for example, our story, “Who Doesn’t Like Gary Gensler?”) But that doesn’t mean the media isn’t investigating.
Dave Michaels, the Wall Street Journal’s reporter on the SEC and white-collar crime beat, requested a “list of all enforcement actions of Patomak Global Partners between January 1, 2013 through December 31, 2024.” The FOIA summary that the SEC released didn’t mention the new chairman’s obvious connection: Atkins founded Patomak in 2009, immediately after ending his first stint as an SEC commissioner. In the years that followed, Atkins turned the consultancy into a revolving-door juggernaut, notably signing on as an advisor to Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX cryptocurrency exchange about 10 months before the exchange blew up in 2022 due to accusations of fraud and misappropriation of customer funds by its founder. According to reporting by Bloomberg, Patomak also served as an FTX lobbyist, and is listed as an FTX creditor in bankruptcy documents. In a February 2023 podcast episode titled “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Crypto,” Atkins acknowledged Bankman-Fried’s fraud, but also called FTX’s collapse “this international debacle that happened because, I think, the U.S. didn’t make our rules accommodating to this new technology.”
Atkins’ pre-confirmation financial disclosure valued his stake in Patomak at a minimum of $25 million. Atkins and his spouse, Sarah Humphries, an heir of a national roofing company, have a combined net worth of at least $327 million, which would make him the wealthiest SEC chair in recent decades if confirmed. Their biggest asset is the roofing interest.
Patomak’s blue-chip client list includes Bank of America, Barclays, and major digital asset players. Atkins pledged to divest his share of Patomak within 90 days, and resigned in December from his role as co-chair of the Token Alliance, a crypto-advocacy organization affiliated with the Digital Chamber. In a smooth spin of the revolving door, the new top management team at Patomak was announced the day after Atkins was sworn in. Former SEC Chairman Richard C. Breeden will be at Patomak’s helm, joined by former Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairman Randal K. Quarles.
FOIAengine access now is available for all professional members of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of journalism. IRE is the world’s oldest and largest association of investigative journalists. Following the federal government’s shutdown of FOIAonline.gov last year, FOIAengine is the only source for the most comprehensive, fully searchable archive of FOIA requests across dozens of federal departments and agencies. FOIAengine has more robust functionality and searching capabilities, and standardizes data from different agencies to make it easier to work with. PoliScio Analytics is proud to be partnering with IRE to provide this valuable content to investigative reporters worldwide.
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John A. Jenkins, co-creator of FOIAengine, is a Washington journalist and publisher whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere. He is a four-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit for his legal reporting and analysis. His most recent book is The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist. Jenkins founded Law Street Media in 2013. Prior to that, he was President of CQ Press, the textbook and reference publishing enterprise of Congressional Quarterly. FOIAengine is a product of PoliScio Analytics (PoliScio.com), a new venture specializing in U.S. political and governmental research, co-founded by Jenkins and Washington lawyer Randy Miller. Learn more about FOIAengine here. To review FOIA requests mentioned in this article, subscribe to FOIAengine.
Write to John A. Jenkins at JAJ@PoliScio.com.
