The FDA has 14,000 employees; its FOIA office has 10, and they go at roughly 80,000 pages per month, meaning each employee does 8,000 pages per month, or roughly 400 per working day per employee, less than a minute per page. That to my non expert opinion sounds pretty fast.
That speed has been appropriate until now that the plaintiffs want 4 months' worth of FDA FOIA work for yesterday.
I agree that there should be a solution for these cases, but it's this particular FOIA request that's the anomaly, not the FDA way of work.
More sensibly, if we want the FDA to make delivering a particular set of documents a sizable piece of its job, we should (through Congress) direct that and allocate appropriate funding for that purpose.
From a Reuters article on it: They also argue that Title 21, subchapter F of the FDA’s own regulations stipulates that the agency “is to make ‘immediately available’ all documents underlying licensure of a vaccine."
So it really sounds like this is just part of the course of making sausage of approval. You have someone already embedded in the licensure project/process where this is all (very likely largely automagically) handled as it is always expected to be released to the public.
A lot of cash was dumped into fast and extensive R&D, trials and production scaling because of the urgency of the situation, and along comes an insane documentation backlog.
To put in perspective, the original HPV vaccine R&D and trial spanned over 7 years with 25,000 patients (of which only 20,000 women), and assuming the documentation was provided to the FDA as it was produced, it could be FOIA'd relatively quickly.
Pfizer/BioNTech did the same, with almost double the patients, in just over 6 months.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
It's not a document, and many of the documents involved weren’t created by the government, and no government agency is funded for unlimited reserve capacity for doing public records releases just in case.
In 2020, FDA spent a little under $5.5 million (a little over $5 million net after fees collected) handling over 10k FOIA requests. [0] There's not a lot of resources to dedicate to any one request.
[0] https://www.hhs.gov/foia/reports/annual-reports/2020/index.h...
It didn't prepare them for the public (and, in many cases, it didn't prepare them at all). It prepared or gathered them to support the function it performs for the public, much of which, by law, includes preparing, gathering, and reviewing legally non-disclosable information. That's the mandate it has in law—so it is not at all “incompetence” that that is how it operates.
You may not like the law (given that elsewhere in the thread you have suggested it is literally equivalent to the institution of slavery, I assume that you do not), but it is not incompetent for government agencies to follow the law that actually exists rather than your individual preferences for what the law ought to be.
Producing documents in response to a FOIA request isn't just a matter of simply copying them. If the documents contain anything that is not legal to release to the general public (such as personal information of patients) that has to be redacted first.