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.
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.
