A health official said all the Freedom of Information Act offices were previously operating in an isolated fashion.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s entire Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office was fired as part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reorganization, a health official confirmed on April 2.
Some FOIA employees working in other HHS divisions, including the National Institutes of Health, were among those laid off by HHS this week.
The terminations are part of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s restructuring plan, aimed at streamlining operations, an HHS official told The Epoch Times.
The various FOIA offices did not communicate with each other, nor did they report to their parent agency, HHS, the official said. Instead, the offices “all operated in their own silo.”
The plan is to take the work the offices conducted and centralize it into one FOIA office. The plan is still being finalized.
The official said that all the requests that have been submitted will be handled.
FOIA is a federal law that enables journalists and members of the public to ask for and receive information from government agencies, including internal emails and documents. Responses regularly shed light on important topics. CDC records produced through FOIA in recent years showed that agency officials found evidence COVID-19 vaccines caused deaths, saw millions of cases of post-vaccination COVID-19 early in the pandemic, and why officials changed the definition of vaccine.
A CDC employee told The Epoch Times via the agency’s FOIA portal that the agency’s entire FOIA office has been placed on administrative leave.
Emails sent to CDC FOIA employees were returned with automated messages stating that they are on administrative leave and unable to respond.
Meredith Schlaifer, deputy director of the Food and Drug Administration Office of the Commissioner’s Division of Headquarters Freedom of Information, told The Epoch Times in an email that her office’s nine people are still employed, but that a number of other administration FOIA staffers were fired through a reduction-in-force, or mass termination.
The FDA declined to comment.
National Institutes of Health officials did not respond to inquiries.
