This seems shocking! Has FOIA become a farce! Are there too many frivolous requests?
"According to new data obtained by Open the Books, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests last year that were labeled “complex” had an average response time of 267 days across 416 agencies.
“Simple” requests took an average of 39 days for an initial response, but 31 agencies still took in excess of 100 days on average.
At two agencies, that number was more than 800 days. 100 business days is roughly five calendar months. 800 is an astonishing 40 months, or more than 3 years. It’s simply unacceptable. ...
Although agencies are required by law to respond within 20 days, in practice many require extensions for months or even years, citing big backlogs of records requests. ...
Recommendations
... start by updating the FOIA legacy software, which is slow and out of date. For example, some FOIA offices are not able to batch automate redactions, meaning a staffer must redact repetitive information over and over again, over potentially hundreds of pages.
More broadly, routine information like staff lists, payrolls, and royalty data could also be posted automatically, obviating the need for staffers to respond to common requests for large datasets. ..."
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