I don’t know if David Schnare even wrote a resignation letter when he quit his job at the Environmental Protection Agency. But if he did, I want to know what it said.

That’s why, on March 20, 2017, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for that letter and Schnare’s EPA e-mails regarding his resignation. Signed into law on Independence Day in 1966, FOIA established citizens’ right to know what’s happening inside the government. Mine was a simple request, and thus it was given an expected return date of April 19, 2017.

On June 4, 2018, I received an email from the EPA legal counsel’s office. “The Office of the Administrator has experienced a significant increase in FOIA requests since the start of this administration,” it read. “As of May 7, 2018, your FOIA request ... is currently 203 in the queue.” The email went on to say that the average processing time for complex requests was about 388 days, and thus my request for Schnare’s resignation letter would now have an estimated completion date of September 13, 2018—512 days after my initial request.

The EPA has indeed experienced an increase in FOIA requests since Scott Pruitt took the helm at the agency, and career employees in the agency’s various FOIA offices have told me they are understaffed and overwhelmed. But Pruitt appears to be making it even harder for them to do their jobs.

On Monday, the House Oversight Committee’s top Democrat delivered a letter to Pruitt, accusing him of “intentionally delaying the release of documents under FOIA relating to your tenure at EPA.” Congressman Elijah Cummings said two of Pruitt’s former top aides testified that Pruitt ordered EPA staff to focus on old public records requests related to the Obama administration, and not to fulfill requests related to him until those were finished. This is not a normal practice; in fact, Pruitt’s former senior advisor Sarah Greenwalt told Cummings she explicitly advised against it. She recommended that EPA respond to FOIA requests the normal way—“as they come in, recognizing that some FOIAs are larger than others and more time-consuming and more complicated than others.”