I'm sure a lot of it works fine within the agencies, it's just the translation process to "muggle" where the problems coincidentally appear.

I've heard that that actually varies a lot; sometimes you're working with the world's biggest data center, sometimes it's 30 guys with a building full of cabinets and a single TRS-80 in a closet.

Or at the very least someone who can accurately place a piece of paper on a photo copier.

If you're good at placing a piece of paper on a photocopier, don't you think you can find a better job than placing pieces of paper on a photocopier?

In other words, the Peter Principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

Budgets are tight, FOIA compliance is way down the list. Congress likes keeping the executive branch on short rations, and legal stuff like this is a cost center.

If they were asked to supply the White House with photocopies of non controversial documents, would the photocopies look like that? I'm, (perhaps wrongly) assuming not.

So to me, it hints at a level of contempt for having to comply.

In other words, doing a slap dash crappy job because doing it annoys the person tasked with it or authorizing it. Like a kid who is told to clean it's bedroom and then doing it sloppily because it doesn't want to do it.