# American Oversight Nonpartisan government-watchdog nonprofit (501(c)(3)) founded in 2017. It works almost entirely through public-records requests and **Freedom of Information Act and Federal Records Act litigation** against federal and state agencies. Its method is procedural: it rarely argues about policy. It sues to make agencies produce or preserve the paper. ## Why a records shop matters The second Trump term's transparency fights have mostly been about the plumbing of accountability: whether records are created, kept and released at all. The statutory enforcer of federal recordkeeping is the [[National Archives]], and the Archivist's office has not been where enforcement came from. Across the vault's cases the pattern is the same: **the practical check came from an outside NGO and a federal judge, not from the agency Congress built for the job** ([[Federal Records Act]]). ## The cases in this vault - **Signalgate (2025).** Days after *The Atlantic* revealed that [[Pete Hegseth]] and other officials had discussed the March 2025 Yemen strikes on a Signal group chat with auto-delete turned on, American Oversight sued under the Federal Records Act. On March 27, 2025 Judge [[James Boasberg]] ordered the chat from March 11 to 15 preserved. In June 2025 he declined to order recovery of messages already deleted, finding that request no longer "redressable." He did order officials to notify the Archivist and stop further deletions. The partial result is typical: the court could stop future destruction but could not bring back what was already gone ([[Hegseth Signalgate]], [[Signalgate Timeline]]). - **The Ruben Martinez shooting (2026).** Records that American Oversight obtained through an unrelated request revealed in February 2026 that an [[ICE]] agent had fired the shots that killed Ruben Martinez on South Padre Island, nearly a year earlier. His family had never been told. DHS, ICE, local police, the county prosecutor and Texas DPS had each declined to say ([[ICE Shooting of Ruben Martinez]]). - **The Arizona "audit" records (2021–2022).** American Oversight and the *Arizona Republic*'s publisher sued for the records of the [[2021 Maricopa County Presidential Ballot Audit]]. The courts held they were public even though the contractor, [[Cyber Ninjas]], held them. The company refused, was held in contempt at $50,000 a day in January 2022, and announced it was shutting down. In May 2022 more than 1,000 pages were finally released through the Senate. It is the same pattern as the federal cases: disclosure happened because an outside litigator kept asking. ## The structural point Both cases show the same thing from different angles. When every agency with a duty to disclose declines to do so, disclosure depends on whether a privately funded litigator happens to be asking. That makes FOIA litigation a substitute for oversight that Congress's committees, the inspectors general and the Archives were designed to provide, and did not. It also makes it fragile: it reaches only what someone knew to request. ## See also - [[Federal Records Act]] · [[Freedom of Information Act]] · [[National Archives]] - [[Hegseth Signalgate]] · [[Signalgate Timeline]] · [[James Boasberg]] - [[ICE Shooting of Ruben Martinez]] · [[ICE]]