What's the Matter with Federal Salary Redactions?
Recently, Open the Books filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management for all federal employee names, titles, agencies, salaries, and bonus information. We’ve captured and posted online this data for the past 11 years. For the first time, we found missing information throughout the federal payroll disclosures.
Here’s a sample of what we discovered from the FY2017 records:
- 254,839 federal salaries were redacted in the federal civil service payroll (just 3,416 salaries were redacted in FY2016). Now, one out of every five federal salaries is hidden.
- 68 federal departments redacted salaries. Even small agencies like the National Transportation Services Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation redacted millions of dollars in salaries.
- $20 billion in estimated payroll now lacks transparency.