The conservative think tank’s requests are clogging the pipeline at federal agencies in an apparent attempt to find employees a potential Trump administration would want to purge.
By Sharon ...
“Fun” fact, criminal justice records are often subject to different rules than other records. In CO, we have 3 days to respond, or up to 10 if the request is so large that it needs an extension. The police, on the other hand, seem to just fart around forever. FOIA has a longer response time, but I’m guessing most federal agencies don’t get the leeway cops do, so getting a ton of these malicious requests back to back is a real pain in the dick. Speaking from experience, I’m glad I’m not the one dealing with these assholes.
Eh, if it’s all from one entity and all related to similar subject matters you can deny requests or roll them up. You can also start charging maximum fees in this situation.
We can’t really do that, at least not where I am. Denying a request has to be based on it being information that we genuinely can’t release to anyone, we can’t just determine we’re not releasing something because the requestor is a pain in the ass. We also can’t charge people unless it takes more than 2 hours of time per request - depending on how the requests are split up, they may not meet that time. I don’t know how FOIA fees work, so maybe it’s different, but I also doubt fees will put the very- well-funded Heritage Foundation off too much.
It depends on how many pages and how much time it takes. The rules sound simple, amd they mostly are, but the agency calculates how long something takes. Them asking for repeat requests is like one of the few ways something can be denied.
If the police department can ignore my FOI requests for over a year, I’m sure they can ignore these as well
“Fun” fact, criminal justice records are often subject to different rules than other records. In CO, we have 3 days to respond, or up to 10 if the request is so large that it needs an extension. The police, on the other hand, seem to just fart around forever. FOIA has a longer response time, but I’m guessing most federal agencies don’t get the leeway cops do, so getting a ton of these malicious requests back to back is a real pain in the dick. Speaking from experience, I’m glad I’m not the one dealing with these assholes.
Eh, if it’s all from one entity and all related to similar subject matters you can deny requests or roll them up. You can also start charging maximum fees in this situation.
We can’t really do that, at least not where I am. Denying a request has to be based on it being information that we genuinely can’t release to anyone, we can’t just determine we’re not releasing something because the requestor is a pain in the ass. We also can’t charge people unless it takes more than 2 hours of time per request - depending on how the requests are split up, they may not meet that time. I don’t know how FOIA fees work, so maybe it’s different, but I also doubt fees will put the very- well-funded Heritage Foundation off too much.
It depends on how many pages and how much time it takes. The rules sound simple, amd they mostly are, but the agency calculates how long something takes. Them asking for repeat requests is like one of the few ways something can be denied.