The Real Cost of FOIAIs Staff Time

Every US state has a public records law, and every one of them puts a clock on the agency. Illinois gives a public body five business days to respond. California gives ten days to decide whether records will be released. The federal Freedom of Information Act gives twenty working days. The deadline is fixed by statute. What is not fixed is how much work sits behind each request, and every hour of it is done by agency staff.

City clerks and police records units review every page line by line. Department liaisons pull the files, and attorneys sign off on what gets withheld. Many of them handle FOIA alongside other duties, and all of them are doing more of it every year.

Three costs that compound

• Staff capacity. A large request can take days of page by page review, and that time comes out of every other duty the same people hold.
• Disclosure risk. One missed home address or date of birth is an improper disclosure, with the privacy and legal exposure that follows.
• Growing backlogs. Volume rises faster than headcount, so requests wait longer and the labor cost of each one climbs.

Each of these feeds the others. A team short on capacity works faster, and rushing redaction is how protected details slip through. A team that slows down to be careful builds a backlog, and a backlog turns into missed deadlines. Those have consequences of their own. In Illinois, a public body that misses the deadline loses the right to charge copying fees or to treat the request as unduly burdensome. Under federal FOIA, a late agency generally cannot charge search fees.

Volume is also rising from a newer source: automated and AI-generated requests that arrive in bulk, which agencies across the country are now adjusting policies to absorb.

Where the hours actually go

Ask a records officer to walk through one request and the same steps come up every time.

1. Finding the records. Searching email, shared drives, and case systems for anything responsive, then deciding what is in scope.
2. Reading every page. Not skimming. Every name, address, phone number, plate, date of birth, and account number has to be seen before it can be withheld.
3. Deciding the exemption. Each redaction needs a statutory basis, and the basis has to hold up if the requester appeals.
4. Drafting the response. A letter that lists what was produced, what was withheld, and under which section.
5. Logging all of it. The dates, the decisions, and the copies, in case the request is challenged later.

Every one of these steps grows with the size of the request, not the number of requests. A single request for a year of body camera footage or a decade of contracts can take more hours than a month of routine ones combined.

What this means for the budget

Staff time is the cost line, and it hides well. It shows up as overtime in the records unit, as attorney hours billed against a request, as a new hire justified by the backlog, or as fees an agency can no longer collect because a deadline passed. None of those appear on an invoice labelled FOIA. Add the downside of an improper disclosure, which can mean a privacy complaint, a lawsuit, or a story in the local paper, and the true cost of a request sits far above the copying fee a statute lets an agency charge.

That makes the hours between receiving a request and releasing the records the cost worth attacking. Most agencies already own software for the request itself, which raises a fair question: why hasn't it brought those hours down?