RFK Jr. purges CDC and FDA's public records teams, despite "transparency" promises
By Alexander Tin, CBS News, Apr. 1, 2025
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.
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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.
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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.
Read more here.
[Earlier in the day, Bloomberg News reported that the FDA, CDC, and the NIH had sacked all of their FOIA employees.]