Rep. Gerry Connolly is insisting on answers on dismissed by Foia employees at CDC: Shots

The American rep. Gerry Connolly, D-VA urges the CDC Foia team to recover after the jobs have been eliminated in the recent HHS entries.

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The top democrat in the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability wants to answer the Centers for Disease Control and Prevent Employees of the federal health authorities were fired.

Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat from Virginia, sent a letter To CDC’s acting director Dr. Susan Monarez on Thursday and pronounced “concern” about the 22 staff members who request public registers to have treated administrative leave and being satisfied until their job on 2 June is eliminated. Their work has been imposed by the congress since the 1960s under the Freedom of Information Act of Foia.

“As a result, there are currently zero staff available to process FOIA requests received by CDC,” Writes Connolly. “The elimination of personnel responsible for facilitating Foia strongly implies an effort from the administration to prevent the public from gaining information about their government that they are entitled to request.”

NPR asked CDC for comment, but did not receive an immediate response.

NPR reported earlier this month That FOIA officers from the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and other agencies within the Ministry of Health and Human Services were also released, making it more difficult for the public to gain access to information about the government.

In the letter, Connolly asked how the agency would continue to meet the laws of the public registers. He also asked for information about open requests and communication between the Trump administration and CDC officials.

Connolly also pointed out that there were several ongoing outbreaks of infectious diseases in the US “Now more than ever, maintaining transparency about the activities of the wider HHS – and in particular CDC – is crucial to understand the ability of the government to respond to such crisis.”

During a press conference Tuesday, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. That he “restored all Foia offices”, although it was not immediately clear whether he would replace or repeat Foia Staff employees. He said it would be “much easier” to get information from HHS, and that his agency would place as many documents as possible on its website “if we can.”

“The papers we produce in this agency are not ours,” he said. “They belong to the American people and we have to be honest with them.”

Kennedy was chairman of an anti-vaccine interest group called Children’s Health Defense, who Dress the FDA For COVID-19 vaccine records under FOIA in 2023. As part of the last federal court order on 9 April, Randolph D. Moss D. Moss, about the dismissal of the FOIA staff and the assets of the agency to produce the required data.

“In short, the agency is warned that the court expects that it will comply with its obligations under FOIA and that it cannot avoid those obligations by dismissing the FOIA staff or not replacing it to do this,” reads the order.

Greta Pittenger has contributed to this report.

You can reach Sydney Lupkin slupkin@npr.org Or on signal at Sydneylupkin.36.