[trdlts]

Per the OP

>To meet the plaintiffs’ proposed FOIA deadline, the FDA would have to process a daunting 80,000 pages a month. But the plaintiffs note that the FDA has 18,000 employees and a budget of $6 billion and “has itself said that there is nothing more important than the licensure of this vaccine and being transparent about this vaccine.”

[tablespoon]

> But the plaintiffs note that the FDA has 18,000 employees and a budget of $6 billion

So what? Are they supposed to do stuff like assign the software development team to do document review for the next couple years? Because I'm pretty sure almost all of those 18,000 employees have very different jobs than FOIA document review (and may not appreciate reassignment), and that budget is already allocated to other stuff that's probably higher priority.

Also, the bottleneck may not only be staffing. What if they staff this with 1,000 people, and those guys are all waiting on one dude at Pfizer?

> and “has itself said that there is nothing more important than the licensure of this vaccine and being transparent about this vaccine.”

A FIOA request has nothing to do with licensure, and transparency doesn't necessarily mean doing whatever someone demands (to give an exaggerated example: if you say it's important to be transparent, and someone asks for nudes "for transparency," they haven't proven you wrong if you don't provide them), or doing that thing on their schedule.

[tcmart14]

Assuming that all 18,000 employees can actually do the work. Im sure some FDA employees are spread through out various states and have various different responsibilities like focusing on the 'F' in FDA. And those people might not be qualified to work on the processing of papers on vaccines and drugs. That also assumes that they don't overload pfizer and other drug makers with questions that they can't answer in a reasonable time to meet the proposed deadline.