Bradley Merrill Thompson, Member of the Firm in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, authored an article in Law360, titled “What the Data Says About FDA Responses to FOIA Requests.” (Read the full version – subscription required.)
Following is an excerpt (see below to download the full version in PDF format):
Information is important, and thus so is access to it. Our democracy needs to know what is going on in our government, and businesses trying to navigate regulatory processes such as the ones at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration likewise need to understand the regulatory process. For both purposes, the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, process should be fair and efficient.
On Dec. 21, 2022, I submitted a FOIA request to the FDA seeking data on all the requests made over a 10-year period, and I received the data less than a month later.
With over 118,000 requests during the 10-year period, there is a lot of data to analyze. This article focuses on a high-level analysis of the response times.