Reclaim The Records. “Today we’re simultaneously announcing a big new free database update, about 1.5 million new names and more basic biographical information about deceased American veterans from the 2020-2023 period! It’s the first public update to our big BIRLS database, a dataset that we originally released late last year, bringing the new grand total to over nineteen and a half million names of US veterans, the largest dataset of its kind that we know of. And we’re also discussing how the very same government agency we won these records from in a multi-year FOIA lawsuit, the US Department of Veterans Affairs (the VA), is now, as of just a few weeks ago, suddenly refusing to process thousands of FOIA requests from the public for these exact kind of amazing files — including, very likely, many of your own FOIA requests! A quick recap about BIRLS If you’ve been using our new BIRLS.org website over the past year to make free FOIA requests for copies of the C-Files (benefits claims files) for your relatives or research interests, you may have gotten to see some incredible never-before-available records, scanned for the very first time, and sent right to your house. People have gotten C-Files for everyone from barely-known relatives to Hollywood movie stars to Hall of Fame baseball players to WWII POWs in the Pacific and everyone in between. Many of these benefits claims files really should have been moved out of the VA warehouses and over to the National Archives (NARA) years ago, but they were not. And for years it was also almost impossible to get the VA to properly respond to a FOIA request for the materials — unless, as we discovered, you sent in your FOIA request by fax. So we at Reclaim the Records built the BIRLS.org website so you could file a FOIA request and fax it to the VA right from your web browser, all for free.”