In my case it is the latter.

In one example, someone wanted all internal training, presentations, engineering documentation, internal policies, etc related to the use of AI to accomplish a specific goal.

I was temporarily assigned to be a kind of product manager for the project, so I have the best access to all the multiple departments with 100s of staff involved. That said, I have no authority over them. I don't know every related policy, who developed what training, what engineering documents exist in some random share drive.

It meant calling meetings with the project leads to explain the request. Then hassling them to hassle their staff to check all their drives. Reading through all that material to ensure engineering didn't screen cap PII while making a training slide or put security-sensitive details in an engineering document. There was no guidance on what is not releasable.

And we get maybe one or two of these requests a year for different projects. So it wouldn't be a judicious use of taxpayer resources to build a reliable system for answering these requests.