Some Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, to borrow from George Orwell, are more equal than others.
If you are ProPublica and want to know about conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service, the Treasury Department sends you floods of documents on 31 "social welfare" entities — within 13 days. (See this ProPublica account of their FOIA request.)
If you are the Center for Immigration Studies, on the other hand, and want basic approval-denial statistics about immigration benefits from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) the response is quite different. After more than 13 months — not 13 days — we got three-quarters of a page of data, which only fulfilled a small part of our request.
We could not tell whether the response was simply an incompetent one or a deliberate attempt to confuse the issue. We certainly know that we did not get the floods of apparently interesting documents that were sent to ProPublica. See this earlier blog on the CIS/FOIA experience.
Perhaps providing information on the tax status of conservative groups stirs different juices within the administration than a request for data on the almost-always-say-yes-to-migrants decision-making process of USCIS.
Perhaps ProPublica, a non-profit investigative-reporting organization, with funding from the Ford Foundation, George Soros, and others, is regarded more fondly by this administration than CIS.
Whatever the reason, the responses were quite different.
