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Comment by Eelongate | Hacker News Reader

This country has more than 300 million people. Any federal agency having a bottleneck of merely ten clerks for processing FOIA requests is unreasonable to the absurd.

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I see what you are saying, yet I wonder about the logistics of this. I doubt these a minimum wage jobs. Surely it takes a knowledgeable person who is willing to do this kind of tedious work. How many people fit the requirements? Do they have to live in a particular geographic location? Everyone is having trouble hiring people. Is the government any different? I assume they have to go through background checks and get trained. How long does that take? How many other FOIA requests do they have in the backlog? Is there a risk of the current 10 people quitting if the work load becomes to onerous? Can they really ramp up to get it all done by March? Maybe if the government threw insane amounts of money at problem. I don’t like tedious exacting work, but I’d happily do it for 1 million dollars a day.

Get 20x the staffing and see if these questions resolve themselves. It's not a challenge to hire more than 10 people, and training time is going to be significantly less than 55 years.

Why would they be paying you a million dollars a day again?

Because I hate that kind of work so I wouldn’t do it unless they make it worth my while.

Consider it spending to prevent vaccine hesitancy. It would probably be more effective then a advertising campaign with the same money (provided the documents indicate everything is on the up and up) as it stands this looks bad and will push people further away.

What evidence is there that more lives would be saved by diverting FDA employees from other tasks (like evaluating the safety of drugs, vaccines, medical devices, food, etc) to redacting trade secrets from documents that on the order of 10^0 people will read? How does DDOSing the FOIA unit of the FDA undermine the wholely separate review process that conclusively found both mRNA vaccines to be completely safe and extremely effective at preventing serious harm? How could that be more persuasive than the fact that (per the NYTimes COVID tracker) unvaccinated people make up 6/7ths of new daily cases and 12/13ths of new daily deaths?

The people hesitating to get the vaccine aren't doing it for scientific reasons in the vast majority of cases and nothing will convince them short of losing their job or similar negative consequences.

That's a strawman considering the overwhelming majority of people taking vaccine aren't doing it for scientific reasons either. They're taking it because of social pressure, virtue signal, fear, etc. but certainly not knowledge about science since less than 1% of the population is PhD educated and know anything about how science is done in the first place.

I don’t think that’s true at all. I don’t worry about polio, smallpox, etc. because of vaccines. I got vaccinated as soon as possible because vaccines have been proven to work. Absolutely nobody pressured me and I certainly don’t care what other people think.

So only PhD's know how to science. Guess my master's in EE doesn't mean jack then. Why am I even trying to read academic papers or science journals related to my job? I mean I don't even have a PhD...

Tell that to the folks who hold the purse strings

I'm certain the FDA would welcome more staffing across the board, including to handle FOIA requests. Might be worth people contact their representatives and raising the issue.

Perhaps the FDA should require companies to submit a sanitized copy of their reports/filings, thus eliminating the need for the government to do it.

Seems more promising to pursue legislation that will circumvent the requirement to review documents so slowly. This staffing count decision was not made by people who love serving public interest transparently. Such people cannot be removed or ordered to change by the few representatives who would act on comments about FOIA.

Lol. I’ve run large government organizations. You don’t just make people appear out of thin air… the government tends to “grow” specialized people (mostly attorneys) like this into these roles; you can’t hire expertise because the pay sucks.

I stepped into a role once where I led a team of 4 that replaced the last of a group of what had been 40 people that performed a function. Everyone had retired, predictably over 5 years. It was a mess, but the nuances of appropriations and government frugality created a situation where everything blew up. We fixed it, at great expense buying contractor services and ultimately automating most of the work.

Yes, if I understand your implied point, your experiences are congruent congruent with the view that there is little incentive to appropriately invest in this area, both into the ICs and higher up in the organization. A lighter standard for redaction would reduce the need for expensive external costs in the case that short response deadlines could successfully be imposed by a judge or Congress.

There are incentive problems but other governance issues are significant. Government entities are optimized for steady state and have controls to make individual failure less impacting and change hard. Think about how 50 state DMVs fundamentally work with a low error rate.

In Federal government, you have the added impact of congressional meddling. So as a director managing potentially thousands of employees and a billion dollar budget, you don’t have the legal authority to reallocate people — you may in fact have people doing nothing on one side of the room while the people in the other side are working 12 hour days.

Also keep in mind that unlike corporate entities that can just settle awkward matters in court with NDAs, IC employees are held personally liable for their actions, will not stray off the path and have unions to protect them from management coercion. I consulted for some state/local entities that prosecuted 2-5 employees annually for significant breaches (both malicious and negligent) and would sanction folks with docked pay or progressive discipline for minor violations.

And yet we can hear the congress person already

   "The FDA - the actual FDA - tasked with protecting your food and drugs, employs more than a hundred people who do nothing - NOTHING - N O T H I N G - but process FOIA requests. What world is it where an agency supposed to protect us from bad food and drug products employs this many people to service paperwork requests from journalists and other random weirdos? It's a disgrace and it must stop, and it must stop NOW!

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