BuzzFeed Has More Than 4 Decades-Worth of Federal Payroll Records, and It's Sharing

In an achievement brought on by the patience-testing work of filing a FOIA request, BuzzFeed has received the payroll records of federal employees dating back to 1973. That’s almost 30 gigabytes of info comprising “hundreds of millions of rows,” according to BuzzFeed News reporter Jeremy Singer-Vine, who writes that the information comes out of two FOIA requests filed with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management in September 2014 and December 2015. Two or three years to get that information? Seems about right, unfortunately.