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government spending

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Case Studies

How They Did It: Tracking the Copious Travels of Cameroon’s President

The full scale of Cameroon’s President Paul Biya’s jaunts abroad since he took power 35 years ago had never been calculated until now. Journalist Emmanuel Freudenthal details how he and two of his colleagues painstakingly pored over almost 4,000 newspaper pages to establish the number of days Biya had spent overseas on private trips and the amount the lavish trips cost the country.

Resource

FOIA This! — Digging Out Government Spending

Tracking down local government expenses is a recurrent theme for many successful freedom of information requests. Some recent examples suggest that quite a variety of information is potentially available — about credit card charges, salaries, retirement parties, and even costs of leak investigations. Have a great story you developed using a FOI/RTI request? Send it to us at freeinfo@email.gwu.edu. We’re currently looking for examples regarding immigration.