When Gregory S. Kaufman filed a federal Freedom of Information Act request for records he needed for a civil case, the Washington-based Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan attorney never dreamed the government’s response would reach him via an abandoned suitcase found at a thrift shop outside a U.S. Air Force base in Germany.

That was a dozen years ago, Kaufman said. By 2019, such extreme examples of misdirected paper shuffling by the federal bureaucracy could be a thing of the past.