I ask myself that with every FOIA request. If I had a dollar for every internal email I obtained saying that the public body intended to ignore the FOIA and make me sue for access, I would certainly be able to buy a sandwich.
Why do public employees do this? It's not their data. Why do they fight tooth and nail to avoid responding to FOIA requests for public information? If you want a government employee to do some work, file a FOIA. They'll work their little butts off day and night to do whatever it takes to not send you the requested docs.
There needs to be a formal study done of why this happens.
I think it harms the ego of the government workers to think they are effectively of lower status than a random citizen who can ask for them to account for themselves
My guess is that citizen's freedom (of information) places a compulsion (of fulfillment) on the body being summoned, and our natural inclination has always been to resist being compelled.
It may have been a mistake to phrase the FOIA process to the affected bodies as "you must share" rather than "you now have the tools and process to share".
They already had the tools to share before FOIA processes were implemented and too often chose not to share back then too. That's why we have FOI acts in the first place. Seems more like these neede to be better enforced and backed up with negative consequences to those that try to fight them.
One of my first real interactions with a public body was filing a FOI request to a local council. I'm still a little shocked that they made me fight it all the way to the regulator.
Why do public employees do this? It's not their data. Why do they fight tooth and nail to avoid responding to FOIA requests for public information? If you want a government employee to do some work, file a FOIA. They'll work their little butts off day and night to do whatever it takes to not send you the requested docs.
There needs to be a formal study done of why this happens.