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I would imagine it's like technical debt. There's benefits to paying that debt down, but there are always other issues that have higher priority. Sure, the software should have been architectured to be easily extensible / system should have been set up to make it easy to release half a million pages of documents, but this update has to be released in time to beat the competition / these drug approvals needs to be completed to save lives.

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The argument on technical debt isn't wrong, but it doesn't fully take into account the importance of this information and the legal requirements these agencies are held to. Just because it's difficult doesn't mean the information shouldn't be released. If we accept that the request is difficult as a reason to not release the records, then they'll never get released. Once that seed's planted, it's so unbelievably hard to come out of. It's something you see with agencies that never get held accountable to their lack of transparency.

It sucks, but the alternative is much worse.

Absolutely. Even with highly profitable global megacorps, technical debt is an issue, but eventually they have to pay the piper. I'm not sure if it is true in this case, but my image of governmental agencies are that they are perpetually underfunded and short-staffed, so it must be an even greater difficulty to choose between what should be done and what must be done.

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