Overburdened bureaucracies increasingly face expanding transparency obligations without corresponding increases in administrative capacity. In Spain, Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation has established a legal framework granting citizens the right to know the activities of public administrations, placing additional demands on organizations that often face chronic resource scarcity. This study examines how street-level bureaucrats respond to administrative overload generated by FOI requests, focusing on discretion, interpretation, and organizational coping strategies.

Using a field experiment, we submitted deliberately open-ended FOI requests to 292 local public sector organizations in Catalonia, including city councils as well as their dependent entities, such as autonomous bodies or publicly owned companies. The ambiguous wording of the request created discretional space, allowing us to observe how frontline public servants manage transparency obligations under uncertainty and workload pressure. The findings reveal systematic restrictive interpretations of requests and a response rate below 70%, indicating coping behaviors consistent with administrative overload rather than isolated non-compliance.

The results suggest that limited administrative capacity and defensive practices shape FOI implementation at the street level. Overall, the study demonstrates how transparency policies, when layered onto already overburdened bureaucracies, are selectively implemented through street-level discretion, contributing to persistent implementation gaps. Hence, these findings highlight the value of applying street-level bureaucracy theory to FOI implementation, opening new avenues for research in this field.