Freedom of Information Act in the UK means I make a request, and I get the information I asked for within 30 days. No excuses, no nonsense "fees".

Just what in the hell is happening in the USA?

Statutes in the USA have even shorter timescales than that, but it doesn't stop the public bodies doing all sorts of end-run-arounds to avoid it.

And when they do violate your timescales, whatchagonnadoaboutit? It's technically a criminal offense in many jurisdictions, but no prosecutor in their right mind is going to bring the case. Which means you have to litigate it in civil courts and now you're four years deep and you've taken 73 days out of your work to attend court dates that end in continuances.

[The worst thing is, in Illinois it is a "civil penalty" for violating the FOIA; one State's Attorney was honest with me - "I don't care when I lose, we just write out a check to ourselves. Out one account, into the other!"]

That’s not true. They can reject requests for basically any reason and routinely do. They’ve actually patently ignored requests I’ve sent previously.

Any corrupt organization anywhere will do its very best to protect itself from reputational loss whenever possible. It just happens that in some societies, the amount of protection those organizations can provide to themselves without quick consequences is much higher than in others.

In the US, a lot of supposed government organizations are basically immune to pressure from elected officials. A police department can do more to harm the standing of a mayor than the mayor can do to said department. In fact, sometimes you even have state involvement to make sure the mayor looks bad. See, for instance, the wonder of the St Louis Police Department. The state votes in a different way than the city, and the state passed laws to take over the local police department. Thus they control budgets and leadership, even though the actual taxpayers that foot the bill are local. As you might imagine, this leads to very strange incentives.

That surprises me. When I worked in the Uk in a regulated industry, I observed it is very risk averse and process focused. I'm surprised the government can consistently turn around a response in 30 days.

USA states have their own public records laws on top of federal FOIA laws. The national FOIA law is basically the same as UK.

In this case, they are using the Oregon Public Records Law to drag their feet. Other states have better laws, or worse depending on which side of the information the state's voters are more keen on protecting.

There's no one standard because it depends on if you're talking about federal FOIA requests or laws for one of the 50 states. And they're different.

A big difference is that so many positions that in the UK would be civil servants are elected positions in the US or are appointed and possibly confirmed by a legislative body. That means that so many positions down to the local level in the UK are political. Even if the position isn't political, the person in that job might be hoping to gain one of those positions one day.

We famously have a Kentucky clerk, Kim Davis, who refused to issue marriage licenses for same-sex couples because it was, she argued, against her faith [1]. That should be unacceptable from any person fulfilling a government function. If something is against your faith, don't do that job. Or leave your faith at the door when you go to work. So many other places that just wouldn't happen.

But this infects a lot of state and local government functions too where sheriffs and DAs are elected positions and there have been cases where they simply won't investigate or prosecute certain cases. This was a real problem as civil rights activists were the victims of violence in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. Nobody would get prosecuted.

On top of all of that, many people who one day want to run for office want to be perceived as "tough on crime" so they back the police even when doing so is indefensible.

Back to FOIA, depending on what laws are applicable, there are often laws about deadlines for a response and limitations on cost, being only reasonable labor and materials. Yet agencies will slow walk FOIA requests, sail right through deadlines and, as in this case, come up with ridiculous cost estimates to comply.

But increasingly in the US, particularly at the federal level, people responsible will just flagrantly break the law because there will be no consequences.

This has forced a lot of people to file what in the US are called (writ of) mandamus lawsuits. This is when you ask a judge to force an agency to do something they're supposed to do anyway. Really what you're doing is forcing them to explain themselves to a judge. It shouldn't be necessary but it is.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2024/01/04/1222810445/ex-kentucky-clerk-...

Corruption, grift, fascism.