As U.S. officials dealt with the fallout of the government’s once-secret “Cuban Twitter” program, they had one thing on their side: notorious delays in the federal Freedom of Information Act. The government didn’t have copies of the documents, which formed the basis of an Associated Press investigation detailing a program on which taxpayers spent millions. But officials were worried that asking the contractor to hand over copies would risk making the details even more public. […] USAID’s calculus — realizing that the nation’s public-records law can be so slow as to border on unusable — comes amid new data showing...