FOIAengine: The Investigative Outlet Gets Active at the FDA
Capitol Forum may be one of the more under-the-radar journalistic enterprises in Washington, but recently it was easily the most active when it came to filing FOIA requests with the Food and Drug Administration.
After the federal government reopened last month, the FDA was the first agency to release FOIA logs that had been delayed during the shutdown. The FDA’s logs for October (still the most recent month available) show that Capitol Forum, the subscription-based investigative outlet, accounted for nearly 80 percent of all media requests to the FDA – 89 out of a total 113 media filings. The sheer volume stands out, but the pattern might be even more revealing. Capitol Forum’s FOIA trail offers insight into where the organization’s next story could be.
According to PoliScio Analytics’ competitive-intelligence database FOIAengine, which tracks FOIA requests in as close to real-time as their availability allows, all 89 Capitol Forum requests were filed with the FDA by reporter Mike Williams.
FOIA requests to the federal government can be an important early warning of bad publicity, litigation to come, or uncertainties to be hedged and gamed out. In this case, the FOIA requests appear to reflect an investigative pipeline still gathering momentum.
A closer read of Capitol Forum’s October requests shows two distinct target clusters. At one end are companies that have already faced regulatory pressure: Linde Gas, whose NOxBOXi neonatal nitric-oxide device has drawn FDA scrutiny and has been linked to serious safety concerns; Magellan Diagnostics, whose flawed lead-testing devices were at the center of a federal criminal case; US Foods, a national food-service distributor that has figured in multiple recent contamination-related recalls as a key link in the supply chain; and Steris Laboratories, part of a sterilization and testing sector that has come under heightened FDA and environmental enforcement pressure. All four were targeted by Capitol Forum in its October requests.
The investigative outlet’s requests for inspection reports, warning letters, and complaint files on those firms suggest it may be mapping broader narratives around quality lapses and uneven FDA oversight across drugs, devices, and the food supply.
But more than half of Capitol Forum’s October FOIA requests pointed in a different direction – toward facilities and companies that have drawn little or no recent public scrutiny. Those targets include lesser-known pharmaceutical plants, foreign device makers, sterile-drug outsourcing facilities, ingredient suppliers, contract sterilizers, and logistics hubs. Many Capitol Forum requests targeted individual manufacturing sites by address alone, or sought all Form 483 notices from the FDA listing objectionable conditions or potential violations found during an inspection.
Why those sites? Capitol Forum often uses FOIA not merely to document problems already in the news but to identify emerging vulnerabilities in the FDA-regulated ecosystem.
The October batch showed sustained interest in potential weak points: overseas device plants, compounding pharmacies, respiratory-therapy manufacturers, and repackagers and distributors that operate largely out of public view but often sit at critical points in the regulatory chain.
In at least one instance – involving Linde Gas, which makes a NOxBOXi neonatal nitric-oxide device – Capitol Forum’s FOIA request signaled publication a few weeks later of a detailed investigation into safety issues and the company’s long-term awareness of them. Capitol Forum said its investigation “found that Linde Gas appears to have been aware of a fatal flaw with its NOxBOXi nitric oxide therapy device for newborns for several years, but continued to market the device to hospitals and represent to the Food and Drug Administration that it was safe and effective.”
For now, Capitol Forum’s high share of October’s media FOIA activity offers an early indication that some of the most consequential FDA stories of 2026 may already be taking shape quietly, in a stack of records requests.
Following are among other highlights from Capitol Forum’s October requests:
- Upsher-Smith Laboratories: Capitol Forum requested Form 483s and Establishment Inspection Reports (EIRs) for the facility at 6701 Evenstad Drive in Maple Grove, Minn., a site tied to Upsher-Smith Laboratories, a national generic-drug manufacturer. Upsher-Smith has been the subject of past FDA manufacturing concerns, but no recent media reporting has focused on federal inspections or product-quality issues tied to the Maple Grove address.
- Fareva/Morton Grove Pharmaceuticals (Morton Grove, Ill.): A Capitol Forum request sought inspection findings for the sterile and topical drug manufacturing site at 6901 Golf Road, long associated with Morton Grove Pharmaceuticals, now operated by global manufacturer Fareva. Fareva is a major international producer of OTC medicines and personal-care products. The Morton Grove site has a historic regulatory footprint, but there has been no recent U.S. media scrutiny of its FDA compliance status.
- Domino’s National Supply Chain Center (New Boston, Mich.): Capitol Forum requested records related to inspections at 17605 Commerce Drive, which maps to Domino’s Michigan Supply Chain Center, the company’s main dough and ingredient distribution hub for the Midwest. Despite Domino’s enormous national presence and its reliance on centralized food-production nodes, no published reporting has called out FDA oversight of these facilities.
- Capital Seaboard/G. Cefalu & Bro./CGC Holdings (Jessup, MD): Capitol Forum asked for inspection and enforcement documents tied to 7540 Assateague Drive in Maryland’s Wholesale Food Center, home to large, long-established food distributors. These companies supply seafood, produce, dairy, and prepared foods across the Mid-Atlantic. Food distributors frequently play a role in contamination-linked recalls, but no firms at the listed address have been the focus of recent coverage about FDA inspections or food-safety performance.
- Ashland Specialty Ingredients (Bridgewater, NJ): Capitol Forum sought FDA records referencing the facility at 1005 US-202/206, used by Ashland, a multinational chemicals and pharmaceutical-ingredients supplier. Ashland ingredients appear in many OTC and prescription drug formulations. Public regulatory attention has been minimal in recent years, and no current reporting covers FDA’s oversight of this major producer.
Like those above, most of the other Capitol Forum targets have yet to surface in published reporting. That may be the strongest signal in the data, foreshadowing future scrutiny of firms now flying below FDA and mainstream media radar. If past patterns hold, some of the facilities buried in the FOIA logs will likely become tomorrow’s inspection controversies, warning letters, or recalls.
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Next: Newly released FOIA logs from the Federal Trade Commission.
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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. His next book, Summer of ’71: Five Months That Changed America, about the fateful year before Watergate, will be out next year. 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.
