To be fair, the government's computer systems really are just that crappy. Technical debt and obsolete systems that still kind-of-sorta work are always the las

To be fair, the government's computer systems really are just that crappy. Technical debt and obsolete systems that still kind-of-sorta work are always the last things to be addressed in budgets. There is also no incentive for the government to do anything other than 'try' in the most perfunctory manner possible. One solution would be to make a separate entity responsible whose performance is judged based on what they can actually dig up (of course someone has to get the funds and resources for these people to work). There is no incentive to build systems that are optimized for FOIA requests (ie enough hardware to search the data, or data indexed in ways that make it easily possible). I doubt servicing FOIA requests is super high up on the spec list when a system is designed. There are also legitimate issues concerning cost recovery: think of it in terms of paying for someone to spin up new instances to hit multi-TB databases for a couple of days, then paying someone else to see if the results are responsive, if they're actually releasable in terms of security, privacy, etc. And then you have to deal with the less legitimate requests that come along. I think serving FOIA requests is a core part of the government (both ideally and by law) and resources should be spent accordingly. Finally, there are government officials, especially at the state and local level, who use the above excuses to make it hard for people to find out what they're up to. The worst effect of the issues listed above is providing these people with cover and plausible excuses which are used to stonewall legitimate investigation by the people they serve.