

Reclaim NY, established by Steve Bannon, Presidential Counselor and former Breitbart editor, and funded by Trump campaign founders, the Mercer family, is an organization that claims NYS government and education are corrupt. New Yorkers, Reclaim NY says, are victims of government waste, secretiveness, corruption, and taxes and that government can’t be trusted to monitor itself.

Just over the past year, Reclaim used the Freedom of Information Act to “request,” and sometimes sue, for financial documents from more than two hundred and fifty schools, villages, towns, and cities in NYS, including those in Delaware and Broome counties. Reclaim NY is also holding workshops to build "citizen armies" that will flood local schools and governments with dozens FOIL requests. Why? Reclaim's sole purpose is to disrupt our communities, overwhelm our town boards and schools, and create financial burdens. As Steve Bannon promised, Reclaim's aim to "deconstruct the administrative state".



While FOIL is valuable for maintaining transparency, it should be used as a valuable tool and not weapon. Local town board and schools are observed regularly by community members in open meetings. In fact, in our rural towns, citizens know their local representatives personally, and speak with them whenever a question or concern over government actions arise.

There is no need for an outside and politically biased organization to place such a burden on our communities. By stopping this orderly operation and by creating chaos, Reclaim NY is creating a self fulfilling prophecy to prove their inaccurate theory that “government doesn’t work.”



We therefore demand and petition Reclaim NY to cease and desist from creating crises in New York State that do not exist and that divide people from their government