FOIA Advisor

FOIA News: Buzzfeed obtains 40 years of government employment records

FOIA News (2015-2023)Kevin SchmidtComment

We're Sharing A Vast Trove Of Federal Payroll Records

By Jeremy Singer-Vine, Buzzfeed News, May 24, 2017

Today, BuzzFeed News is sharing an enormous dataset — one that sheds light on four decades of the United States’ federal payroll.

The dataset contains hundreds of millions of rows and stretches all the way back to 1973. It provides salary, title, and demographic details about millions of U.S. government employees, as well as their migrations into, out of, and through the federal bureaucracy. In many cases, the data also contains employees’ names.

We obtained the information — nearly 30 gigabytes of it — from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Now, we’re sharing it with the public. You can download it for free on the Internet Archive.

Read more here.