Bandwidth, storage space, digitization, records management, salaries for the employees involved, and secure delivery infrastructure are very far from free. Craw

Bandwidth, storage space, digitization, records management, salaries for the employees involved, and secure delivery infrastructure are very far from free. Crawling nearly 1 TB of data from a system absolutely makes it more expensive for everyone; what do you think, transit, bandwidth, and storage just appear from thin air? I could go on for a long time about how often records management systems keep some data cold and the dozens of infrastructure concerns that undermine your idealistic position. The cost of serving you a document under intense regulatory scrutiny (ever heard of the OMB?) is not "practically zero," and it is incredibly short-sighted to allege that it is so. It's easy to sit as a startup employee and think "gosh, you could just throw all those documents in MongoDB and have some fun!" but the reality is that government and traditional corporate environments do not work that way. You didn't think about Sarbanes-Oxley when you were designing your billing and accounting system, did you? Do you even know what it is? For better or worse, systems outside of Silicon Valley are under intense regulatory pressure. Some of that is absolutely essential: Sarbox is one of them, and it was reactionary to mostly Enron. Document delivery and management can be expensive when you have a broader perspective, which is that government is incredibly complex and convoluted. Look how much they spend a year on PACER and tell me I'm wrong. If you want to reform something, reform that. I won't address the rest of your comment because it is completely uncalled for.