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.

Matthew Petti, Reason, July 2024 issue

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.

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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.

Read more here.