[caption id=”attachment_109520″ align=”aligncenter” width=”3484″] U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell (AP Photo/Alan Diaz)
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Obamacare is to blame for a lack of transparency and extra long delays in filling public records requests, government officials said in a new lawsuit.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has a backlog of about 3,000 Freedom of Information Act requests and claims that it will take at least a decade to get caught up on some of them, the Center for Public Integrity reported. This backlog was first disclosed in a FOIA lawsuit brought by the Center against the Department of Health and Human Services, the parent agency of CMS.
The suit, which was filed in May 2014 after the Center failed to receive any records in response to a 2013 FOIA request, seeks a broad array of records for an ongoing investigation by the organization. FOIA requires federal agencies to respond to records requests in 20 working days, though providing documents typically takes much longer.
In its court filing, the Justice Department revealed that CMS couldn’t fulfill the request because its resources “have been placed under unusual strain”due to the launch of Obamacare.
“The ability of HHS to meet its obligations under the FOIA is limited by the scarcity of its available resources,” officials wrote. The CMS office that handles FOIA requests has “only a staff of 19 people to discharge the agency’s FOIA responsibilities,” they continued in the filing.
Justice lawyers also said CMS has been “handicapped by a lack of technology,” which has slowed down the process.
Liz Hempowicz, a public policy associate at the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, told the Center for Public Integrity that a decade-long pile-up of government records is “ridiculous.”
“I think the excuse that record keeping is not up to date is absurd in 2015,” she said. “These agencies need to get record keeping systems up to date. It shouldn’t take that long.”
