What Can You Do While Waiting for a FOIA Response?
It often takes almost a year or more to get public records from the federal government. Here are some things you can do while you wait.
The government is slow, especially at answering questions about itself. In theory, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lets Americans ask any federal agency for any public record and get a response back within 20 days. All 50 states have similar records laws. After all, government documents are the property of the taxpayer.
In practice, almost no government agency meets its own deadlines. FOIA requests can take weeks, months, or even years longer than the legal deadline. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are notorious for sitting on requests for ages before handing back pages that are almost entirely censored with a black highlighter.
Using data from the public records site MuckRock, Reason calculated the average response times for several agencies. It turns out that you can do a lot of fun (and not so fun) things while waiting for bureaucrats to give you the documents that your taxes paid for.
The averages only include cases where the agency actually managed to turn up documents. It doesn't count requests that are still pending or cases where an agency straight-up ghosted the requester.
In the time it takes the Department of the Interior to respond (477 days), you could hike the Appalachian Trail twice (and then some).
In the time it takes Customs and Border Protection to respond (410 days), you could build 112 miles of border wall.
In the time it takes the Drug Enforcement Administration to respond (338 days), you could grow three pot plants consecutively.
In the time it takes the Bureau of Prisons to respond (318 days), you could serve out your sentence for a Zone C offense.
In the time it takes the Department of Education to respond (287 days), you could bring a baby to term.
In the time it takes the Coast Guard to respond (263 days), you could sail the world 6.5 times with world record yachtsman Francis Joyon.
In the time it takes the University of California, Berkeley, to respond (222 days), you could finish a spring and summer semester on campus.
In the time it takes the New York City Mayor's Office to respond (361 days), you could build a sixth of a mile on the Second Avenue subway extension.
In the time it takes the Federal Election Commission to respond (199 days), you could run a presidential campaign from the Pennsylvania caucuses to Election Day.