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I am a FOIA Officer and Hate It
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Anonymous
| What else can I do? I'm overwhelmed, we are understaffed and everyone hates me when I ask for their records. The public is constantly harassing me about responses and records. I'm an attorney but don't want to litigate. |
Anonymous
|
OP, I feel for you. FOIA work is some of the most thankless in the federal government. It is also critically important, but it is difficult to get the respect/acknowledgment it deserves.
IF you are a lawyer, see if you can get more work and slowly transition into other areas of administrative law (employment, ethics, etc.) Alternatively, you could move toward being more of a records/privacy specialist. |
Anonymous
| Maybe a private sector job in the Compliance & Ethics division of a large company? |
Anonymous
| There are many options for a federal attorney other than FOIA and litigation. Explore those. |
Anonymous
| I’d kill to have your job |
Anonymous
| I would probably try to move into more Privacy related work. I have done both FOIA and Privacy Act work as an attorney. To be honest, while neither was my favorite, I found the Privacy Act work much more interesting than FOIA. |
Anonymous
| What type of employees work under you? Just looking for job titles as I'd love to work in the FOIA sphere. |
Anonymous
| Could you take that expertise and go work for a newspaper? |
Anonymous
Google can help |
Anonymous
More helpful would be visiting usajobs and typing FOIA into the search bar |
Anonymous
Thank you - I've found some great leads. - PP |
Anonymous
Hi - no one works under me. I work alone. |
Anonymous
Why? What do you think my job is like? I literally receive at least 50 requests per month. Many of them ask for emails and large batches of records - think 100s of pages. It is like doing doc review. I read until my eyes glaze over, redact and on to the next one. I am usually responding beyond deadline which means I have the threat of litigation hanging over my head. Plus I do this job for an agency full of attorneys and every attorney has an opinion about the records they provide me and what is exempt/not exempt even though none of them have any experience. I can't imagine why someone would ever want this job. I have NO staff so it is only me. My brain is fried. |
Anonymous
Switch agencies. An attorney shouldn’t be processing FOIAs, especially if you are getting that many a month. Initial FOIA processing is a GIS job. |
Anonymous
DP. Different boats for different folks. Some people like monotony. I'm almost sure you have very few meetings to deal with either. Maybe 1-2 month check-ins with your reporting supervisors? No Zoom calls. You do your doc review silently and efficiently, meeting certain metrics per day, and you're done. No crazy side projects or implementations to work through. |