Agencies regularly send out letters to requesters saying, "Your request has been pending for so long that we wonder if you still want us to answer it. If you don't reply, we will pretend you never filed this FOIA request." This lets them sneakily evade requests.
It's fine for agencies to ask requesters if they'd like to voluntarily cancel their FOIA requests. What isn't fine is for agencies to cancel the requests without ever hearing from the requester. If the agency gets no response to its inquiry, it should continue processing the FOIA request.
Comments (2)
FOIA needs complete reworking. It is being abused by foreign governments (including Israel, France, and Germany as well as China) and by corporations to obtain information they have no right to. FOIA should be limited to individual citizens, and ONLY the citizens concerned or their legally designated representative should be able to make absolute demands for disclosure, including to the classified databases of the US intelligence community.
I agree that FOIA needs a complete overhaul. And while it may be unnerving to have info sent to places like China or internal documents sent to a corporation, transparency is transparency. In the day of the Internet, you can't have transparency for some people and not others.