Comment by dragonwriter
2 months ago
I think it is likely to ne about budgets. That is, sure, FOIA and similar state laws usually allow the agency to collect something related to actual costs, but that's mostly meaningless since even if actually covers staff time it doesn't retroactively give them staff to cover it in the impacts areas, and often the FOIA volume doesn't effectively feedback into legislative budget processes for future staffing either, while their litigation needs are more likely to feed back into the legal staffing levels, so approving FOIA requests drains working resources in the area covering them in a way that fighting them does not in the immediate term, while fighting them also has the longer term benefit (from an agency perspective) of discouraging future requests.
In my experience (and probably in Matt's) this has 100% not been the issue. The people responsible for the FOIA responses aren't in any way connected to budgeting or resources. It is just a body-wide personality issue. Some aspect of maliciousness mixed with laziness... or something.
> In my experience (and probably in Matt's) this has 100% not been the issue. The people responsible for the FOIA responses aren't in any way connected to budgeting or resources.
In my experience working in government, including on state-equivalent-of-FOIA requests, almost everyone working on those kinds of requests is “involved in” budgeting and resources, and more to the point anyone in a position to sign off on a decision of whether something should or should not be denied as exempt is a manager, for whom (that is, for any manager, down to the line level, over any function in any government agency, but FOIA-type requests, eepecially if there are going to be assertions of exemptions in total or in part, generally involve coordination and signofffs between multiple managers, e.g., from the most relevant line unit, the public information unit, and legal) managing budgeted resources and doing the work of justifying requests for additional resources that is the root of the agency-initiated budget change request process, and then participating in drills and internal analyses and responses as those proposals work through the budget process is a central part of their job.