Health Secretary RFK Jr. Promised Radical Transparency. Now He’s Closing FOIA Offices
Following weeks of mass purges of employees across federal agencies led by Trump officials and Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is next on the chopping block, with some 10,000 workers set for dismissal. The cuts will see medical researchers, doctors, and regulators removed from critical roles — along with staff responsible for handling Freedom of Information Act requests.
Government agencies are statutorily required to disclose information requested by Americans under the 1966 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) unless it falls under one of a handful of exemptions, such as material classified for natural security or content that, if made public, would violate an individual’s personal privacy. FOIA applies to the HHS, like any other department, and distinct agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and National Institutes of Health (NIH) all have FOIA offices.
Or they did until Tuesday, anyway. Officials at the FDA and NIH have confirmed that many civil servants who work on FOIA in those offices have been let go, while the CDC’s FOIA desk has been completely eradicated, according to the agency’s chief operating officer. An email from Rolling Stone to foiarequests@cdc.gov returned an auto-reply that read, “Hello, the FOIA office has been placed on admin leave and is unable to respond to any emails.” Emails to several other addresses for FOIA requests at HHS agencies — to check whether they are still active — did not receive immediate replies.
Trump’s health secretary, the anti-vax conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., promised to remodel the HHS in the interest of “radical transparency” after he was confirmed in the role. Yet in practice he has often taken the contrary route. He has already eliminated the Richardson Waiver, a rule in place since 1971 that requires the HHS to give notice and allow a period of public comment on decisions affecting “agency management or personnel or to public property, loans, grants, benefits, or contracts.” That means he can change agency policies or priorities with greater secrecy, potentially altering the rules of systems like Medicaid in ways that are broadly unpopular and thus likely to face stiff resistance if submitted for feedback.
Kennedy has also apparently canceled vaccine advisory meetings at the FDA without providing a reason. Peter Marks, the agency’s top vaccine scientist, was forced out last week, writing in a blistering resignation letter that “it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” Meanwhile, Kennedy’s slashing of entire teams — such as the staff behind the National Survey on Drug Use and Health at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration — may mean that the kinds of data they collect will not be accessible in the future. In a letter on Monday, three House Democrats accused Kennedy of not being transparent about the HHS firings themselves, demanding “more information about his plans to gut the Department,” which they warned “will jeopardize Americans’ health and well-being.”
On Tuesday, Kennedy welcomed the new NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, a critic of Covid-19 public health measures, and Martin Makary, who opposed Covid vaccine mandates and predicted in a February 2021 column that the disease would “be mostly gone” within two months, as commissioner of the FDA. “The revolution begins today!” Kennedy wrote on X.
Like Musk’s DOGE — which has argued that its records are not subject to FOIA despite a court ruling that they likely are — Kennedy seems to believe that his HHS doesn’t need real oversight. Musk claims his team’s actions are “maximally transparent” because they provide an online “wall of receipts” showing the purported taxpayer savings of its cuts, though this page has been riddled with errors and exaggerations. Kennedy, for his part, has said that in the past, public health agencies were too slow to respond to FOIA requests, but believes they will become unnecessary during his tenure. “We will make our data and our policy process so transparent that people won’t even have to file a FOIA request,” he claimed in his first major address as health secretary.
Of course, that leaves the problem of HHS institutions being legally required to provide records when asked and lacking the staff to do so. Though in Trump’s lawless second term, there is evidently no reason to pretend you care about the duties and responsibilities of executive office.
