The Department of Health and Human Services has just laid off “10,000 people,” including entire offices that respond to Freedom of Information Act requests. At HHS, “some entire divisions were gutted including groups working on sexually transmitted diseases, environmental health, global health and birth defects, according to people familiar with the matter. Big swaths of the agency’s communications and federal records teams were also laid off.”
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control produced records in response to my Freedom of Information Act request, after I sued it. It took months to get the records, which shed light on woke, discredited crime policies pushed by CDC employees. In 2022, the FDA released records to me that revealed that HHS promoted gender transitions for minors without consulting with key experts at the FDA, even though the FDA had warned that some gender-transition treatments could lead to brain swelling and vision loss.
But in the near future, it may not be possible to get such newsworthy records at all, even when the records shed light on government stupidity or expose wrongdoing.
That’s because the Department of Health and Human Services has laid off all employees who handle FOIA requests at the FDA and the CDC.
Bloomberg News reports:
the entire CDC FOIA office — nearly two dozen people — received reduction in force notices starting that they would immediately be placed on administrative leave. All FOIA personnel at FDA and NIH were also dismissed, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News. The CDC has seen a massive uptick in FOIA requests this year. It’s the second busiest year since Covid, the person said.
During his first address to HHS personnel after he was sworn in, [HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.], who routinely used the FOIA to obtain a wide range of records from the health agencies, promised a new era of “radical transparency” and remarked that the public wouldn’t need to use FOIA. HHS has received at least 2,000 FOIA requests this fiscal year and expects its backlog to grow to 9,000.
The web pages used to submit FOIA requests to the CDC and FDA are also down, notes journalist Jason Leopold, both at the CDC and at the FDA. The “CDC FOIA” web pages “are being dismantled, including pages containing FOIA request logs and the portal to submit FOIA requests,” Leopold says. So it will be hard to submit a FOIA request to these health agencies or obtain frequently requested records.
If these FOIA offices are gone, the CDC and FDA may not respond to Freedom of Information Act requests for months or years after they are submitted, even though FOIA usually requires them to respond within 20 working days. These agencies often failed to meet FOIA’s statutory deadlines even when their FOIA offices existed, sometimes due to heavy volumes of FOIA requests.
The FDA was under a court order to produce hundreds of thousands of pages of records related to COVID. I have no clue how the FDA will be able to comply with such court orders if it has no FOIA office to process and release records in response to FOIA requests.
HHS headquarters may still have a FOIA office in Washington DC, but it may not be very effective at handling FOIA requests aimed at the CDC, which is located 600 miles away in Atlanta. The HHS headquarters FOIA office is worse than the FDA or CDC FOIA offices, and was often slower in the past.
So FOIA requests currently being processed by the CDC and FDA will likely stop being processed, resulting in huge backlogs.
Eventually, a judge may order these agencies (CDC and FDA) to comply with FOIA, perhaps by requiring them to reassign some of their remaining employees to work on FOIA requests, to replace the FOIA employees they fired today.
But it might take a long time for such employees to address a massive FOIA backlog, and they might have to spend months learning about the scope of FOIA’s nine exemptions (such as the exemption for trade secrets and other confidential information) in order to competently process FOIA requests. In the meantime, FOIA requesters may have to wait additional years to get records that they previously could have obtained in weeks or months.
