Quite a few reasons. 1. A lot of the paperwork is all over the place. It has to be gathered, which takes time. 2. Same is true for the digital info, all over

Quite a few reasons. 1. A lot of the paperwork is all over the place. It has to be gathered, which takes time. 2. Same is true for the digital info, all over multiple databases. It takes a programmer or few to focus on pulling it (and getting all the necessary permission to do so). 3. Everything, once compiled, has to be reviewed to ensure it is on target and that any necessary info has to be redacted. The problem is that no one wants to take responsibility for a massive data dump without checking ever single word/number. This is because, while column X or form Y should only have publically available information on it, the people who processed the forms or input the data may have put information that would need to be redacted (SSNs appear in all sorts of places where they shouldn't). So the programmers will not give any sort of guarantee for the data pulls and the people pulling the physical files won't give any sort of similar guarantee for the physical files. This means the FOIA office (or what ever they are called there) has to do a line by line, word by word, number by number redaction. 4. To make this worse, many times the staff is not fully trained and has outdated equipment. FOIA has to print out files, use a black marker on both sides of the paper, and then scan it back in and print out again (and this is per policy, so the worker can be disciplined if they do anything else, even if it is more efficient). The programmers often are tasked to go through largely undocumented decade old (or older) systems. 5. Even without the political nature of the work, so even for a completely benign info request, the work is often time of low priority and for most of the staff involved it is on top of their normal day duties. Often times the staff is already underpaid and overworked, and with the info request being of low priority, it gets largely pushed aside. It would be ideal to have it all accessible to an API, but having this done would take multiple miracles that would be better spent on obtaining world peace and ending world hunger.