Teams handling Freedom of Information Act requests at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration were gutted Tuesday as part of the widespread job cuts ordered by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., multiple officials said.
The process of fulfilling FOIA requests from reporters, advocacy groups and others is a crucial way the public gains access to information on government data and records.
All of the workers in the CDC’s FOIA office were cut, two officials said. Two-thirds of the Food and Drug Administration’s records request staff were also cut, down to 50 remaining.
“Most still here don’t do FOIA processing. They do litigation and other types of disclosure,” said one FDA official, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
It is unclear what will happen to hundreds of pending requests before the agencies.
“For most types of FOIA requests there is no staff,” the FDA official said.
Many FOIA staff at the National Institutes of Health were also let go, one official said, but not all. No explanation was given for why some were cut while others remain on the job, the official said, in an apparent violation of the federal government’s procedures for prioritizing for some employees based on their military and federal service.
The goal of the cuts is to create a central place to handle FOIA requests for the entire department, an HHS official said, making it easier for the public to submit their requests.
While no final decisions have been made on what exactly the new FOIA process will look like at HHS, the official said, their goal is to continue the work started by the now-cut staff.
The cuts come as officials say the department’s public affairs shop, headed by Kennedy’s former campaign press secretary Stefanie Spear, has tightened its grip on communications being issued by health agencies.
The department’s staff has already been tightening its oversight on agencies releasing public information, including unprecedented steps to control scientific publishing at the CDC.
Communications staffers have also been among the hardest-hit by the cuts, multiple officials said. Teams within the public affairs arms of the CDC, FDA and Health Resources and Services Administration saw many or all of their staff cut.
At a White House meeting earlier this month, Kennedy cited the department’s dozens of communications teams as an example of “redundancies” to be “streamlined.”
Kennedy has also been critical of FOIA responses by past administrations, backing lawsuits to speed or broaden the response to records requests.
“Public health agencies should be transparent. And if we want Americans to restore trust in the public health agencies, we need transparency,” Kennedy said at a Senate hearing in January.
