My general impression, having seen the 'inside' of such processes, is that everyone would be better served by mandates around open data than continued interpret

My general impression, having seen the 'inside' of such processes, is that everyone would be better served by mandates around open data than continued interpretations and amendments around FOIA. 1.) The most common sort of requests (salary schedules, the outcomes of past competitive bid processes) are for information that could/should simply be public in the first place. All this stuff can simply be published as part of a normal workflow rather than manually compiled on a per request basis. 2.) Compliance could be checked trivially via API rather than having to wait for failures to bubble up over time and potentially raise scandal. 3.) Proper funding could be allocated and structure put in place to build and maintain these services. As it is, there's a good chance any given request lands on the desk of some plebe who lacks the knowledge, tools and authority to handle the request correctly or efficiently.