Published at Open the Books Substack

One of the key commitments of the Trump administration is to find enormous efficiencies in federal spending by rooting out waste, fraud, abuse and self-dealing. But in order for those changes to be enduring, the feds must also radically improve transparency when it comes to public records requests.

According to new data obtained by Open the Books, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests last year that were labeled “complex” had an average response time of 267 days across 416 agencies. “Simple” requests took an average of 39 days for an initial response, but 31 agencies still took in excess of 100 days on average. At two agencies, that number was more than 800 days. 100 business days is roughly five calendar months. 800 is an astonishing 40 months, or more than 3 years. It’s simply unacceptable.

Download data on FOIA wait times, taken from FOIA.gov, here.

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