RFK Jr. Promised Radical Transparency. His HHS Gutted the Staff Who Release FDA Inspection Reports and CDC Outbreak Data.

On April 22, 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his department would be more open than any that came before it. “We’re going to make it much easier for people to get the information,” the Health and Human Services secretary told an interviewer. “We’re going to try to post as much as we can.” Two weeks earlier, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington had filed a records request with one of his agencies and gotten a different answer from the same department: the staff who handle Freedom of Information Act requests had been placed on administrative leave and could not respond. On April 5, 2025, CREW sued.

The offices CREW was trying to reach are the public’s only supported route into a specific class of government paper. FDA inspection reports cover the plants that make the country’s food, drugs, medical devices, and dental products, alongside adverse-event and clinical-trial records. The CDC’s officers are how an outsider obtains the agency’s detailed data on large outbreaks of food- and waterborne illness. CREW’s own request named one such record directly: whether the CDC had suppressed, in March 2025, an expert assessment of the Texas measles outbreak. The demand is not small. During fiscal 2024 the CDC received 1,800 requests and the FDA and NIH together handled almost 14,000; across the three agencies the total ran past 15,000, and the FDA alone provided at least some records in response to more than 12,000 of them. Peter Lurie of the Center for Science in the Public Interest called the cuts “antithetical” to Kennedy’s stated openness and warned they would have “an enormous effect on patient safety.”

The cuts arrived as part of a much larger demolition. On March 27, 2025, HHS announced it would cut its workforce by 20,000 people, and within days the records teams went with everything else. At the CDC, the offices that fulfill FOIA requests were eliminated outright; at the FDA and the NIH, multiple teams of records staff were fired. Gunita Singh of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press put the direction plainly: an agency buried in requests should be doing the opposite of this, hiring more staff, not fewer. The department that had just promised to post more of its paper had removed the people whose job was to hand it over.

The reversal came fast, and on the record. On May 1, 2025, the FDA told the fired workers their terminations were rescinded and they should return; a notice described the reduction in force as withdrawn, and an official told one worker the position had been deemed “mission critical.” That same day, in federal court, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Edward Martin, filed that “streamlining inefficient operations will benefit the public by enhancing transparency and accountability to the taxpayer.” One arm of the government was defending the cuts to a judge as a transparency measure while another arm was calling the same staff mission-critical and bringing them back.

Kennedy framed the whole episode as restoration. What the paper trail actually shows is narrower: FDA workers recalled under legal and internal pressure. No comparable record establishes that the CDC’s eliminated offices or the NIH’s fired teams were rebuilt to what they had been. A promise to “post as much as we can” is tested in one place, and it is not the press conference. It is whether the document a citizen asked for in April arrives.

Sixteen months later, the machinery is still seized. On August 11, 2026, ProPublica reported that more than 600 government information specialists, the staff who administer FOIA, have resigned or been fired since the start of the second Trump administration. The clearest measure ProPublica found sits at the Office of Personnel Management, a different agency running the same policy: at the end of fiscal 2025 its backlog stood at more than 1,600 requests, seven times the count a year earlier, and the average simple request took over 84 days to answer, twice the prior year. OPM releases no inspection reports and no outbreak data. It is simply the agency whose numbers are visible, and the arithmetic it shows, fewer staff against a rising queue, is what every records office is now working against.

When the ordinary route closes, the courthouse is the door that remains. On August 29, 2025, the Center for Investigative Reporting filed a FOIA suit against the Justice Department in the Northern District of California. A lawsuit, though, is a tool for an organization with lawyers on staff. It is not available to the patient trying to pull the inspection report on the plant that made her implant, or to the county reporter chasing the source of a local outbreak. For them the queue is the only door, and the queue is counted in months and climbing.

So the account stands where the paper leaves it. The promise and the firing are both dated April 2025, sitting on the record side by side; the FDA rehire is dated May and reaches one agency of the three. Everything after is a backlog that has grown and a wait counted in months, held by a department that has not published its current records staffing, its present backlog, or the number of requests it is actually filling. Kennedy said he would make it easier to get the information. The record that would show he kept his word sits with him, and he has not produced it.

Sources

1. KFF Health News – Firings at Federal Health Agencies Decimate Offices That Release Public Records (2025)
2. KFF Health News – In Reversal, FDA Rehires Staff Tasked With Releasing Public Records (2025)
3. ProPublica – Is There Anyone Who Can Respond to My FOIA Requests? Anyone? (2026)
4. The Free Speech Center (MTSU) – Sudden dismissal of public-records staff at health agencies threatens government accountability (2025)
5. CourtListener – The Center for Investigative Reporting v. U.S. Department of Justice (N.D. Cal., 2025)