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.
