Why does this get downvotes? It's simply how things are, FOIA is a rather adversarial process. If you spend any time on muckrock you will see that only a very small % of requests actually get serious replies from the government, more often the responses seem like straight up trolling "Hey, we were supposed to reply to you 2 years ago but didn't feel like it. Are you still interested in this request?"

For example, look at some of these requests pending (since 2019) with various agencies: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/multirequest/foia-outliers-queu...

Most of the replies are clownish at best.