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The Pentagon’s $660 million FOIA fee

A friend reminded me today about this story from 2016 which was a Finalist for 2016 Golden Padlock award given each year by the group Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) “celebrating” the most secretive government agency or individual in the United States. that year, there were some real doozies. But I think the winner hands down was the US Department of Defense charging a $660 million fee to fulfill a FOIA request because the request would require 15 million labor hours (more than 1,712 years for one person)! MuckRock has the rest of the story.

There’s a lot to unpack there, so let’s break it down, bottom to top.

  • The $660 million fee estimate is nearly 500 times our previous record, and will likely hold that dubious title for quite some time.
  • 15 million labor hours breaks down into 625,000 days, or a little over 1,712 years. So assuming one DoD employee started working on this nonstop tomorrow, they’d finish somewhere in the summer of 3728. To put that in perspective, if they started on year zero, by the time they were done, they’d only have to wait 20 years to hand off the work to an infant George Washington for safekeeping.
  • Finally, the idea that DoD can’t search their digitized contracts – therefore creating the need for the labor and associated cost – is problematic for a couple reasons. First, here at MuckRock, we know a thing or two about scans of paper copies, and running those through even a rudimentary OCR is pretty simple. The fact that they’re allegedly not doing that somewhat defeats the purpose of digitized archives. Second, there’s got to be a better way to preform this search than a brute force look through all their contracts.

via The Pentagon’s $660 million FOIA fee • MuckRock.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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