Successfully? Probably not.

Why not? No matter how small, as a tax-payer, I helped fund that development. National security, it is not. Should qualify as public domain.

Does taxes helping pay for prisons make them public spaces? Helping fund development doesn't give you any right to the code, unless perhaps that was negotiated up front. It could be tax money paid a tiny amount of the cost, or it does include proprietary components or knowledge licensed for use in this form, or many other variations of contract and IP.

Tax money touching development makes everything public no more than a touch of private money turns everything private. Each case is determined by the contracts signed to leverage these investments.

>A work of the United States government, is defined by the United States copyright law, as "a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person's official duties."[1] Under section 105 of the Copyright Act of 1976,[2] such works are not entitled to domestic copyright protection under U.S. law and are therefore in the public domain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_t...

This appears to exclude work done by the private sector under contract which is almost certainly how this app was developed.

Try reading the rest of the page you linked. It states what I claimed.

And copyright is not the only form of legal protection available to code.

This approach fails on all fronts.

You can make an FOIA request for anything.

If you mean “will I get the source code if I make an FOIA request”, then the answer is “maybe”; if it was produced in house by VA (and not contractor-made software that the gvoernment licenses), the source code is probably a record, but its possible that, even then, the agency might invoke an FOIA exception with regard to it.

It may take a different approach than FOIA to get the source code for this, and other, VA apps to be released under an open source license. I'm sure it would be possible though, if the benefits were made clear to stakeholders and they had the source to release.

I'm not an American, so it'll probably not be me, but I hope someone does it.