It's a bronze statue, not marble. Bronze is cast, not carved. The artist moulds clay into the form they want (an additive, not subtractive process) and then a mould is made from the clay original. Then bronze is poured into the mould and when it's cooled, the artist pulls off the mould and discards it.
"Many FOIA responses contain documents scanned at skewed angles using the worst hard copy available. It happens often enough that it almost appears the government is seeking to maintain a level of obfuscation while still paying lip service to transparency."
I think you're ascribing malicious intent into sheer laziness. Record center contractors get paid by the number of pages they do. They need to fulfill a ccertain number of scans in a time period. They don't have to be *good* scans, and of course there are perverse incentives to doing good QC.
And most tech services are done by contractors who change every 5-10 years, which doesn't do much for creating a stable cohesive database system. So I'm not surprised that the DoD system is even more messed up than the EPA system was that I worked on. Throw in multiple regions, all with different systems, and yeah, the entire back end is a mess.
Not that I'm excusing the cost, but it's hardly a simple task to get all the documents, even if they are supposed to be available. And most of the cost of FOIA isn't from the document management side, it's because all of the documents need to be reviewed by a lawyer, who gets paid hourly, and well.
The reasonable thing would be to create a redacted copy of a document when it gets scanned/added, but dear God, the number of records generated is breathtaking, far beyond the ability for anyone to do more than a cursory indexing of them, let alone the time-intensive work of redaction.
Tl;dr: you're assuming that the federal government has its record management stuff together far more than it does, and it's more about bad management, perverse incentives, and entropy than it is malice.
I think you have this backwards. The EPA is having its budget slashed left and right. The number of employees has dropped significantly; half of the cubicles where I work, which were once filled with employees, are now empty. From what I've heard from friends, there are equal numbers of people in the private sector goofing off too; this is not just a "government waste" issue but an issue widespread throughout the white collar world.
So no, given that the last decade has been all about reducing the EPA's budget, reducing it some more is not going to fix the problem and bolster morale; quite the opposite as good people suddenly don't have the resources to do their jobs.
So basically they want Federal employees to do what us contractors do: use our phones to access porn (and everything else) while at work. In an age of smartphones, it's futile to attempt to control productivity this way. It's addressing the surface issue rather than the deeper issue of motivation.
That said, it would be nice for Federal employees to have the same level of scrutiny as us contractors. I was encouraged by my supervisor not to even check my non-work email while at work because the IT department can monitor what we do on our computers at any time.
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It's a bronze statue, not marble. Bronze is cast, not carved. The artist moulds clay into the form they want (an additive, not subtractive process) and then a mould is made from the clay original. Then bronze is poured into the mould and when it's cooled, the artist pulls off the mould and discards it.
"Many FOIA responses contain documents scanned at skewed angles using the worst hard copy available. It happens often enough that it almost appears the government is seeking to maintain a level of obfuscation while still paying lip service to transparency."
I think you're ascribing malicious intent into sheer laziness. Record center contractors get paid by the number of pages they do. They need to fulfill a ccertain number of scans in a time period. They don't have to be *good* scans, and of course there are perverse incentives to doing good QC.
And most tech services are done by contractors who change every 5-10 years, which doesn't do much for creating a stable cohesive database system. So I'm not surprised that the DoD system is even more messed up than the EPA system was that I worked on. Throw in multiple regions, all with different systems, and yeah, the entire back end is a mess.
Not that I'm excusing the cost, but it's hardly a simple task to get all the documents, even if they are supposed to be available. And most of the cost of FOIA isn't from the document management side, it's because all of the documents need to be reviewed by a lawyer, who gets paid hourly, and well.
The reasonable thing would be to create a redacted copy of a document when it gets scanned/added, but dear God, the number of records generated is breathtaking, far beyond the ability for anyone to do more than a cursory indexing of them, let alone the time-intensive work of redaction.
Tl;dr: you're assuming that the federal government has its record management stuff together far more than it does, and it's more about bad management, perverse incentives, and entropy than it is malice.
Oh good..
We will have a place to put all those KKK members.
Wait.
You don't mean those terrorists, do you General Clark?
Re:
I think you have this backwards. The EPA is having its budget slashed left and right. The number of employees has dropped significantly; half of the cubicles where I work, which were once filled with employees, are now empty. From what I've heard from friends, there are equal numbers of people in the private sector goofing off too; this is not just a "government waste" issue but an issue widespread throughout the white collar world.
So no, given that the last decade has been all about reducing the EPA's budget, reducing it some more is not going to fix the problem and bolster morale; quite the opposite as good people suddenly don't have the resources to do their jobs.
So basically they want Federal employees to do what us contractors do: use our phones to access porn (and everything else) while at work. In an age of smartphones, it's futile to attempt to control productivity this way. It's addressing the surface issue rather than the deeper issue of motivation.
That said, it would be nice for Federal employees to have the same level of scrutiny as us contractors. I was encouraged by my supervisor not to even check my non-work email while at work because the IT department can monitor what we do on our computers at any time.