Appalling FOIA Performance
Since you’re reading this, you probably know that while there are not yet any hard-and-fast time limits for the processing of FOIA requests, the general guideline is to try and process “perfected” requests within twenty working days. Most parts of the government fail to meet this time limit, though many at least come close.
The Defense Intelligence Agency is not one of them. This is hardly news; according to the National Security Archive, as of this summer, their ten oldest pending requests dated from the mid-1990s. You might think those were anomalies; you’d probably be wrong.
More than fifteen months ago, I made a simple, perfected request to DIA for two short, unclassified documents. Earlier this week, I was reminded of the outstanding request, and sent them an email inquiring about its status. I thought I was being facetious when I asked them in which decade they anticipated responding; as it turned out, that was likely a perfectly legitimate query: “[Y]our file”, their response says, “is still waiting to be tasked to the appropriate offices.” Once they eventually get around to it, they will have to “take a week or so process and task the search, and then the tasking office will be given a one-month suspense date. If everything runs on schedule, we will receive the documents after a month and be able to process them,” a task they, probably wisely, neglect to attach a timeframe to.
To clarify, for those of you not up on FOIA-speak: After fifteen months, the request is still waiting to be processed and forwarded to the component (identified in the original request!) with the responsive records. That’s appalling, plain and simple. It’d be one thing if the bottleneck were in processing records for release, or in individual components locating records; needing over a year just to forward a request to the appropriate component indicates a FOIA system more broken than DHS’ used to be. The latter, of course, made a huge effort to improve their FOIA performance; DIA seems happy with the status quo.
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We deal with this too. The good news is sometime in the next 10 to 20 years you’ll get a reply. One of our readers has been told he can have his reply anytime he’s ready to write a check for $12,900.00 to the Coast Guard.