In 1988, thanks to my boss, the legendary United States Department of Labor Chief Administrative Law Judge Nahum Litt, who served from 1979 to 1995, I was blessed to attend the United States Department of Justice Advocacy Institute two-day FOIA training in the basement of the Justice Department building in Washington, D.C. In the depths of depravity, with Edwin Meese III as Attorney General and Ronald Wilson Reagan as President and George Herbert Walker Bush as Vice President. I saw and heard how federal employees were supposed to treat FOIA requesters.
What rough beasts were in charge. They taught a classroom full of junior federal employees how to discourage FOIA requests. Give them a fee estimate and hope they go away, they said. Estimate how long it will take to locate and redact (or censor) the records.
How do we calculate it, I asked.
Do we estimate in hours, or quarter hours or tenths of an hour?
"Any way you want," they replied.
In attendance were several of the dozens of bPR employees of the United States Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), whom I had encountered as editor of the Appalachian Observer.
No comments:
Post a Comment