Mass firings at the FDA have decimated divisions tasked with releasing public records generated by the agency’s regulatory activities in sectors including tobacco, food, medical devices, and veterinary medicine.
But as the dust settled on the layoff melee, a notable exception emerged among the agency’s staff charged with responding to Freedom of Information Act requests. The cuts spared at least some workers who furnish documents in response to court orders in FOIA lawsuits involving the FDA division that regulates vaccines, which includes litigation brought by an ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s who represents anti-vaccine interests, according to four current or former agency employees.
KFF Health News agreed not to name the workers because they are not authorized to speak to the press and fear retaliation.
Lawyer Aaron Siri filed the FOIA lawsuits, on behalf of the nonprofit Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, in 2021 and 2022 against the FDA to obtain records related to Pfizer’s and Moderna’s covid-19 vaccines. Siri was Kennedy’s lawyer during his 2024 presidential campaign and has represented prominent anti-vaccine activists in numerous lawsuits.
The FDA has released millions of pages of documents about the vaccines after a federal judge in Texas ruled against the agency and set deadlines for furnishing the records. The judge, Mark Pittman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, wrote in January that the nonprofit’s request seeking materials about Pfizer’s covid vaccine is “arguably the most important FOIA request in American history.”
In a Jan. 3 court filing, Department of Justice lawyers said the lawsuit’s plaintiffs had received roughly 4.5 million pages of covid vaccine records and the agency still had at least 1.2 million pages to process in one of the cases. The agency hired about a dozen workers in 2023 and 2024 to help process the records, in addition to one part-time and nine full-time contractors at a cost of $3.5 million. Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency has been posting documents on its website.
The FDA faces a June 30 court-ordered deadline to finish releasing documents. Staff members who work on FOIA litigation in the FDA’s vaccine division “are pretty much exclusively working on Siri litigation,” one worker said.
HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon declined to answer specific questions from KFF Health News about layoffs of FDA FOIA workers. The questions sought responses to accounts of firings provided by current and former employees.
“These claims are untrue and unfounded,” Nixon said.
“FDA FOIA staff, including those working on litigation involving CBER, were impacted as part of HHS’ reorganization,” Nixon said, using the acronym for the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, the FDA division that regulates vaccines. He declined to elaborate.
“The simple fact is that FOIA offices throughout the Department were previously siloed and did not communicate with one another, which is inefficient and not effective. Under Secretary Kennedy’s vision for a more efficient HHS, these offices will be streamlined into one place and the work will continue to increase radical transparency for the American people,” Nixon said in an emailed statement.
Three workers bristled at Nixon’s characterization of the cuts. “There’s plenty of ways they could be impacted without being fired,” one of them said.
Siri did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Details of the fallout of the firings on FDA’s FOIA operations, which have largely ground to a halt, are based on interviews with half a dozen current or former employees.
The move to keep FDA staff working to furnish government records related to its approval of covid vaccines came amid a purge of FOIA workers across federal health agencies, including the FDA, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. HHS laid off the entire CDC office handling that agency’s FOIA requests and significantly cut staff at the NIH and FDA, according to eight current or former federal workers. Overall, as part of its plans to shrink the department by 20,000 people, HHS officials said 10,000 employees would be laid off, 3,500 of them from the FDA.
Nikhel Sus, deputy chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a legal advocacy group, said, “It’s very concerning that an agency would be prioritizing requests for political reasons.” For years, Kennedy has peddled falsehoods about vaccines — including that “no vaccine” is “safe and effective,” and that “there are other studies out there” showing a connection between vaccines and autism, a link that has repeatedly been debunked.
“That is not what FOIA is meant to do,” Sus said. CREW this month sued the CDC for firing its entire FOIA office.
The layoffs gutted the workforce that process FOIA requests across FDA centers overseeing vaccines, drugs, tobacco, medical devices, and food, current and former employees said. During the 2024 fiscal year — October 2023 through September 2024 — the FDA provided at least some records in response to more than 12,000 requests, according to HHS’ annual FOIA report.
The firings have been inconsistent across offices. Within the FDA division that regulates vaccines, public records staffers who proactively release certain documents, such as information about approved products, were fired, three of the workers said. But in the FDA’s drug division, they were not, two workers said.
At least some who handle FOIA litigation in the FDA offices regulating vaccines and drugs kept their jobs, according to four workers.
By contrast, FDA workers who handled FOIA litigation in other FDA offices, including those that focus on tobacco and medical devices, were fired as part of the mass layoffs, according to one former and two current employees. The former employee said they had been working on litigation in which a court order required documents to be produced monthly, among other FOIA responsibilities.
“Because we were cut, those things stopped abruptly,” the former employee said. “There was no plan in place to take care of the work.”
FOIA is a transparency law signed in 1966 that guarantees public access to the inner workings of federal agencies by requiring officials to disclose government documents. It has been used by researchers, companies, law firms, advocates, and journalists to review public records and the work of agencies, hold officials accountable, and uncover harm, corruption, and political meddling in policymaking.
Health care experts and transparency advocates have said that HHS’ mass firing of FOIA staff across agencies will hamper public access to government records that document the handling of illnesses, faulty products, and safety lapses at health facilities, putting the health and safety of Americans at risk.
At the height of the covid pandemic, in late 2020, the FDA granted emergency use authorization of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s covid vaccines, before granting full approvals in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Covid vaccines are credited with saving millions of lives in the U.S., but Kennedy has rejected the science behind them and questioned their safety.
While speaking to Louisiana lawmakers in 2021, he falsely claimed that the covid vaccine was “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” During one of his Senate confirmation hearings in January, he said, “I don’t know,” when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) pressed him about whether covid vaccines were good. “We don’t have the science to make that determination,” Kennedy said.
In a June 2021 post on the social platform X, Kennedy publicized a petition to the FDA to remove covid vaccines’ emergency use authorizations that was submitted by Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine nonprofit he founded and chaired until December.
Pittman, the federal judge in Texas considering the two Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency cases against the FDA, was appointed in 2019 by President Donald Trump. Pittman ordered the FDA to release records related to approval of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s covid-19 vaccines on an accelerated schedule.
Siri for years has fought vaccination requirements, including challenging a Massachusetts flu shot mandate and a covid vaccine mandate in public schools in San Diego. His clients have included the Informed Consent Action Network, a prominent anti-vaccine group founded in 2016 by activist Del Bigtree. Bigtree worked as communications director for Kennedy’s presidential campaign and is a major player in Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
Like Kennedy, Siri has spread misinformation about vaccines and questioned their safety. During a 2023 legislative hearing in South Carolina, Siri said, “There are actually a number of studies that do show correlation between autism and vaccines,” even though claims of such a link have been repeatedly debunked. During one of his Senate confirmation hearings, Kennedy refused to say vaccines do not cause autism.
“We must be able to raise valid questions about vaccines without fear that anyone who deviates from the accepted orthodoxy will be smeared as a radical. There are many issues that divide Americans, but drug and vaccine safety should unite us,” Siri wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece following a story in The New York Times that he had petitioned the FDA on behalf of ICAN to revoke approval of the polio vaccine.
And in early January, Siri responded to a CDC social media post by saying: “CDC’s message for the new year is get a C19 vaccine. Their worship of vaccines as the path to safety and health is a cult.”
We’d like to speak with current and former personnel from the Department of Health and Human Services or its component agencies who believe the public should understand the impact of what’s happening within the federal health bureaucracy. Please message KFF Health News on Signal at (415) 519-8778 or get in touch here.
