Currently, the policy appears to be that FOIA requests that take less than two hours of personnel time are free. https://www.foia.gov/faq.html#cost https://www

Currently, the policy appears to be that FOIA requests that take less than two hours of personnel time are free. https://www.foia.gov/faq.html#cost https://www.foia.gov/faq.html#cost This subsidy is plausibly a good one, to avoid discouraging requests from private citizens, but it can also probably justify why FOIA requests would be rate-limited. (In some situations, you might be able to avoid ever paying by breaking you request up into a bunch of sub-requests that can individually be completed in less than 2 hours.) Are there any sorts of outside investigations that are substantially hampered by the rate limiting? It seems like the turn-around time is going to be more than a day anyways, so you might as well bundle all your requests into one and submit daily. Or is there an aspect of this I'm missing? Incidentally, are there estimates on how much the FBI (or other agencies) spend to fulfill FOIA requests? This report from 1980 says ~$50M, but that that might be a substantial underestimate since there were large ancillary costs it doesn't cover. https://www.justice.gov/oip/blog/foia-update-costs-and-benefits-foia https://www.justice.gov/oip/blog/foia-update-costs-and-benef...