 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. And thank you for joining today's webinar, FOIA Request for CDC COVID-19 Records. Before we begin, please ensure that you have opened the WebEx participants and chat panels by using the associated icons located at the bottom of your screen. Signal or audio connections are muted at this time. You are welcome to submit written questions throughout the presentation, which will be addressed at the Q&A session of the webinar. To submit a written question, select all panelists from the drop-down menu in the chat panel, then enter your question in the message box provided and send. If you require technical assistance, please send a chat to the event producer. With that, I'll turn the webinar over to Alina Simo, Director of the Office of Government Information Services at the National Archives. Alina, please go ahead. Thank you, Michelle. Good morning, everyone. As the Director of the Office of Government Information Services, OGIS, it is my pleasure to welcome you all to this event titled FOIA Request for CDC COVID-19 Records. I hope everyone who is joining us today has been staying safe. Healthy and well. Shortly, I will go through some basic housekeeping roles, review our general agenda, and set some expectations for today's meeting. First, I would like to give you some background on today's event and how OGIS became involved. As many of you know, OGIS is the federal FOIA ombudsman. In that role, we work to improve the FOIA process in a number of ways by reviewing agency compliance, by offering dispute resolution services to assist requesters and agencies, by chairing and managing bodies like the FOIA Advisory Committee and the Chief FOIA Officers' Council, and the work. In that role, OGIS has a unique perspective on FOIA programs across the federal government. We have been watching with interest the impact of the COVID-19 emergency on both how agencies are processing FOIA requests and the types of requests agencies are receiving now that work from home and stay at home have become the role rather than the exception. Many agency FOIA programs are doing their best to adjust their operations in response to the impact of COVID-19. We have heard success stories of FOIA programs that certain agencies that have managed to make a relatively seamless transition from full-time in-office work to 100% or close to 100% telework. And we have also heard of challenges that other agency FOIA programs face, including examples of how remote work has resulted in delays and other process disruptions across the government. While many agencies have been in a reactive mode, we are very excited to hear from the CDC's FOIA program about their plans to be proactive and reach out to their stakeholders and requesters, and that is how the idea for this webinar that OGIS is co-hosting today was born. So that is the purpose of today's event, to hear from the CDC about how they are working to make COVID-19 records available and what they need from the requester community to make the agency requester partnership as successful as possible. With regard to today's agenda, we will hear from Roger Ando, CDC's FOIA Director and FOIA Officer. In conjunction with Roger's presentation today, we direct you to the PowerPoint that we run during the webinar today, and that is also accessible on the OGIS website, archives.gov.com. Roger will then be joined by Grimo Diana, the current CDC Acting FOIA Officer, as we turn to focus to your questions. We will be taking questions throughout the presentation, so as you think of your questions, please type them using the chat function of the webinar. We will also open the telephone lines after Roger's presentation for those of you who would like to ask general questions. We will do our best to answer as many questions we received today via chat and telephone. If we are unable to get to your question, we will follow up with questions and answers that we will post on our website after today's webinar event. An important reminder with regard to your questions, please be aware that this is not the right one to ask questions about specific FOIA requests. However, if you have a general question about the CDC's FOIA process or records, we are glad to hear those. We are also recording today's session, and we'll post a video of this event on the OGIS website as soon as it becomes available. At this time, I would like to take a minute to introduce our main presenter today, Roger Ando. Roger joined the CDC on June 27, 2016 as the FOIA director and FOIA officer. Roger transferred from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission where he served as the agency's FOIA officer. Roger has extensive experience supervising units responsible for handling high-profile and highly sensitive FOIA requests. In 2014, Roger was awarded the Greater Kansas City Federal Executive Board's Federal Employee Distinguished Leadership Award for his work in processing multiple FOIA requests for information surrounding the Boston Marathon bombing and his benchmark work in handling highly sensitive information involving designated terrorist groups as a supervisory government information specialist with the U.S. citizenship and immigration services. Roger is a licensed attorney and a certified privacy professional. Although Bruno will not be presenting, I would like to take this opportunity to introduce him as he promises to be an active participant during the Q&A session that follows. Bruno Vianna currently serves as the acting CDC FOIA officer and has been the CDC deputy FOIA officer since 2011. Bruno's entire federal career has been as part of the CDC FOIA office, which he joined in 2004. At this point, I will turn the program over to CDC FOIA officer Roger Ando. Roger, over to you. Thank you, Elina. Good morning, everyone. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services are heavily engaged in dealing with COVID-19. So it's not surprising that both CDC and HHS have seen a steep increase in COVID-19 FOIA requests. The CDC FOIA office is adopting to this unexpected flood of FOIA requests, and we're eager to respond to requests as quickly as we can. We view the relationship between the agency and the requested community, especially generalized as a partnership. Good communication with the requesters is key to any successful FOIA operation. So we reached out to OJs to assist us in facilitating this call today. The goal is how best you can help us help you. That's the goal. How best you can help us help you. In my presentation today, I covered three main topics. One, CDC's FOIA process. Two, how CDC is responding to COVID-19 requests. And finally, share some tips with you on how to submit a successful FOIA request. But before I do so, let me please share a little bit about the mission of CDC and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, A-T-D-S-D-R. Next slide, please. CDC and A-T-S-D-R are both agencies of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. However, CDC carries out administrative functions for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. So the CDC director also acts as administrator for A-T-S-D-R. Just something for everyone to know. CDC is the nation's health protection agency. We work 24-7. We conduct critical science. We provide health information that protects the public against, excuse me, against dangerous health threats and respond to threats when they're okay, like we are responding right now to the COVID-19 virus pandemic. CDC promotes quality of life and ways to prevent the leading causes of disease, injury, disability, and death. We have more than 12,000 employees. 75% of CDC employees are located in Atlanta, Georgia. We have 2,000 employees who are stationed in 60 countries around the world. And the types of documents that CDC typically generates are varied. I would say that if you want to submit a FOIA request to CDC and to any agency, the first place you should start with is go to their website. That would give you a sense of what it is that they're doing. Go to your website. Secondly, take a look at their FOIA log. Their FOIA log would give you the roadmap to the types of documents that any agency tends to create. And CDC posts, we post our FOIA log on our website. And so that would be a good place to start if you want to know the types of documents that we, that the agency creates. But I'll just give you a few examples today. CDC is involved in outbreak investigations. So, obviously, this coronavirus is one of them. Others that we've been involved in have been included, the Salmonella outbreaks, Virginia's disease, E. coli, the Ebola outbreak, measles. CDC has labs. So, you can make a request for lab safety records. CDC has oversight in labs. For example, select agent labs. CDC issues guidelines. For example, on opioids, sexually transmitted diseases, vaccines, immunizations. Just to name a few. And finally, I'll make sure I'm covering everything. And finally, you can also request data and statistics from CDC. So, CDC works with local and state authorities and obtains a tremendous amount of data that we analyze and do research on their behalf. And some of the requests that we see might, we might involve influenza, mortality rates, opioids, gun violence, lung injury associated with vaping, and e-secrets, to name a few. Next slide, please. So, the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry. What do they do? They protect the people's health from environmental hazards that are present in the every breath, the water we drink, and the world that sustains us. And how do they do this? By investigating the relationship between environmental factors and health, by developing guidance, and by building partnerships to support healthy decision-making. And like I said earlier, I'm going to restate. ATSDR is an independent operating division within the Department of ATJs. However, CDC carries out its administrative functions. One of those functions includes handling their FOIA requests. So, what types of documents could you get from ATSDR? Documents related to your climate and health program, food safety, air safety, safe water. We're involved in the Flint water crisis and the Camp Lejeune water crisis. ATSDR also is involved in cruise ship inspection that might be of interest to some. And they also create health reports. For example, the study, the human exposure to environmental contaminants. Next slide, please. This is the current CDC organizational structure. So, the purpose of this chart would be, you could use this as a reference point for custodians of records when it comes to specifically COVID-19 requests. Now, that does not mean that you want to target everybody on this list and say, I want all their records, because not all of them are involved in the response. And not all of them are involved in every aspect of the response. We have to be very targeted as to what individuals records you're seeking. Now, if you haven't noticed, but I pointed out to you, some of them have hysterics besides their name. Those individuals are in an acting position, so they're not permanent, so they could change. The president highlighted in yellow, Ms. Sherry Berger, she's highlighted because the FOIA office is now part of her office. We used to be part of the, we used to report to the chief information officer. The chief information officer reports to the chief operating officer. And sometime I think in 2017, we were reorganized and moved directly to report to her. And that, I think, shows the support that the agency has for the FOIA program and how important they know it is. And she's been very supportive for the FOIA program, and I have to put that plug in for her. Next slide, please. So this is just, this shows you the slide, the office of director for ATSDR. As you can see that it has a deputy director, so they still fill it. And if you look at the previous slide, she reports to the director for CDC. So, and as I said earlier, and just to reiterate, the director of CDC is the administrator of ATSDR. Just a quick note. The vast majority, probably all the COVID-19 requests that we received have been for CDC records. So this is just a takeaway for you in case at some point you want to make a non-COVID related request for ATSDR records. This would be a good guide for you. Next slide, please. And this is just an illustration of the divisions within the program. Next slide, please. Now this is an organizational chart for the Office of the Chief Operating Officer. As I indicated, their FOIA office reports directly to her. Previously we reported to the Office of Chief Information Officer, as you can see from the chart, the Chief Information Officer reports to the Office of the Director. Next slide, please. The CDC FOIA office. The CDC FOIA office handles all FOIA requests for the entire agency, period. And we also handle requests for ATSDR. What we do is when a FOIA request comes in, unless we do our best to identify what programs within the agency would have responsive records. And most times we use our institutional knowledge of the FOIA request. You have someone like Bruno who's been there for a very long time. So he's very familiar with some of the records that the programs generate. And sometimes the requesters would give us enough information to direct us to where to go. And we do this electronically. So we send through our automated parking system what we call a request for documents to a program or multiple programs. And we attach a copy of the FOIA request. And we basically don't tell them how to conduct a search. The requester directs how the search is going to be conducted. Now, if the program has concerns or needs clarification with a request, they can reach back up to us to help them out. Now, sometimes we facilitate direct communications with a requester. And sometimes it's been helpful in helping their programs get what the requester needs. Or sometimes the program would say, look, we can help you outside of the FOIA process. Can we just do that? And it's short. And then the request is closed and they assist it outside the FOIA program. Each CDC has centers, institutes, and offices. So for short, if I refer to CIOs, that's what I mean. We also have business service offices, BSOs. The BSOs are the offices that are more in the support role. So they support the CIOs. So the human resources that they're using, for example, is a BSO because it supports the programs. Each CIO and BSO has a FOIA coordinator embedded within the organization. They are the ones who are the liaison between the programs and the CDC office. So we submit our FOIA request to the FOIA coordinator or co-ordinateness. And then they triage the request within their programs or centers however they fit. So we don't direct them as to how to do it. They do all that. We give them a set amount of time to respond to a FOIA request, to give us records. If they ask for extension, we tell them we don't give extensions. You just be late. And we have an overview list that we track that we report up to our leadership when we have our standing FOIA request from the programs. It's a way of making sure that people take FOIAs seriously. Now, once the FOIA office receives documents, then our job is to review the documents. Now, let me probably pause and step back so people have a sense of what actually it takes. So the FOIA records come in and they might come in as emails, PDFs, especially name it. Once those documents come in, those documents need to be now be uploaded into our processing system. So depending upon the volume, it might take a few minutes or it might take hours to upload into the assigned request that needs to be processed. Once those documents are uploaded into the system, then the FOIA office needs to stop going through those documents to locate responsive records. Sometimes the set of records that are given to us are very targeted and there are very few documents that are what we refer to as out of the scope of the request. So the more documents are within the scope of the request, the faster it is to process. The more documents that we have to review outside the scope of the request, the more time it takes to go through to process a FOIA request. Once an analyst completes the process of the request, typically it has to go through a second layer of review. So we make sure that we are not making any improper releases. Sometimes it could be a third or fourth review. What I have done with the program is to make sure that they are comfortable giving us records. That's why their contents when I first came to CDC was that they didn't like to give records to the FOIA office because sometimes they got blindsided by what was released and they were upset with some of the stuff that got out and were very happy. And so I guess the enemy decor reaction was, well, rather than give it to you, because if we give it to you, it's just going to go out. So what I did was, look, if you guys have concerns about the records that we are releasing, sometimes we don't know how sensitive it might be. It might not be obvious to us. Let us know, okay? Let us know. And I give this subject matter experts the opportunity, in some cases, not all cases, because I say, look, we can't do that for every case. In some cases, the opportunity to take a look at what we're going to release, so they are comfortable and go, okay, yeah, we have no concerns. And sometimes when they say, look, we want you to redact A, Y, or Z, and I don't agree with them, I say, I'm not going to do it. We can't do it. It's not defensible, right? Because ultimately under HHS regulations, the FOIA officer for each operating division makes a final determination of what can and cannot be released under the FOIA. So at the end of the day, the bug stops with whoever the FOIA officer is. And they know that. And make sure they understand that. All you do is to recommend. You don't dictate what goes out and what doesn't go out. Next slide, please. So this is an illustration of the typical life cycle of a FOIA request. So once we receive the request, we acknowledge it within 48 hours. Let me explain acknowledgement here for a brief second. Right now, most of our FOIA requests are inputted by the FOIA request themselves through our public access link, which is the public-facing portion of our FOIA Express tracking system. Or when folks go to the national FOIA portal, which is the DOJ.gov site, and they submit a FOIA request to CDC, it automatically enters our present system. We just did that this year. We made sure that we're integrated with the portal so that once you submit a FOIA request to CDC from that site, it automatically enters our system. And in both instances, you're supposed to get an acknowledgement that your request has been received, which is a good thing. But you will see a formal acknowledgement later. Our goal is to send it to you in 48 hours. Our regulation says we can send it to you in up to 10 days, but we try to do better. So we want to send it to you within 48 hours. We're going to tell you a couple things. What track that you're in. We'll tell you, we'll make an indication on whether you, if you made a request for expedited processing, if you made a request for a fee waiver. All those definitions, you'll be notified at that point. We'll tell you what your request number is. We will tell you whether you, what your fee category is and whether you could be charged fees. And if so, what types of fees you could be charged. We also will tell you what is the estimated date of completion. This is just an estimate. I get calls a lot from folks going, hey, I got this request. I'm in a complex queue. You say six months down the road. I'm concerned about it. And I say, look, it is just an estimate, right? And we base that based on the level of work, how much time that we think it's going to take as a response request. Not our drop dead date. We don't say just because we said six months out, it means we're going to slow walk a request and respond to you in six months. No, I'll go, my goal, Bruno's goal, all of us, we want to get requests out as quickly as we can. And I can't say this enough. We have no desire to hold on to a request. None. We want to respond to a request as soon as we can. And that's why we need your help to do that because we both have the same goal, right? Now, when your request is acknowledged, sometimes we may ask, come back to you and say, we need you to clarify, organize a scope of your request. And that can happen at any point in time. And once we've agreed on a clarify request or announce a scope of the request and discuss fees, then the next stage would be, we send it to the programs to search for responsive records. Then the programs, like I said earlier, they collect the documents. They not only send out the documents, but they also have to document how the search was conducted, who conducted the search, where they looked, those kind of things. Because we want to be able to go back and go, okay, when we get challenged by the question of the search, that we don't have to rely on people's memories for how a search was conducted. That's also the opportunity for them to tell, highlight for us if they have any concerns with the result of the information that they're providing to us. Maybe it might contain confidential business information. It might contain PII. That's the opportunity to tell us or it contains pre-decision of the documents or technical and privilege. That is the opportunity to flag and say, hey, we have concerns with some information. That's the opportunity for them to say, no concerns. We have no concerns with this information. You can let it go. And so then then we process the document and the request closed. So that is a general life cycle. I want to look at where statistics in FY19, more than 95% of our searches were conducted by the programs. And I want you to remember this because this is, we're going to talk about when we talk about the impact of COVID-19 on searches, you would understand. 95%, more than 95% of the searches were not conducted by the FOIA office. They were conducted by the programs. Next slide. When you take a look at any federal agency's FOIA personnel, it could be deceptive. It might seem that they have a lot more staff working on FOIAs than they really do. Because basically anybody working in the FOIA office is tagged as FOIA personnel. When not everybody actually works on processing FOIA requests. So the same is true for CDC. And as you can see from this chart, FOIA personnel for CDC, let's look at the blue column, has stayed pretty stagnant. When I joined CDC in 2016, I believe we had eight FOIA analysts. CDC had contractors because they had a huge backlog. So we had to support contractors to help us with our backlog. And sometime when I came in 2017, as a result of some of the changes that we made, we're able to basically terminate the contract early because we no longer needed them. Because the FOIA analysts, we were caught up in the FOIA analysts. Basically we didn't have enough work for the contractors because the contracts were paid based upon production, pay accounts. So if there are no payings for the enterprise, they end up making money. So at some point it was like, we don't have case to give you because if we give it to you, then RFTs will be doing nothing. So once we just let you guys go. So we saved the agency close to a million dollars just by doing that. The FOIA staff and then we lost one member of the staff left to go to EPA. So right now we're having around 16. So right now we're currently 16 FTEs. That includes Bruno and myself. So now we're down to 14. Of these 14 that we have, we have one IT person. So he does the IT searches. We have two appeal staff who handle FOIA appeals. So they don't process initial for it because they only handle appeals. We have one communication person. So now we're down to 10 people who actually process a question. Okay. Of these 10, only seven of them do it full-time. They do it full-time. And the way we handle FOIA questions is that it's from cradle to grave. A request is assigned to an analyst and they keep that case until it closes. Generally speaking. So in any communication that you would have with them, even though the letters would be signed, would be signed with my name, you are actually dealing with an analyst who sent it to you. So whoever is calling you or you email that's the person who is assigned to your request. And they take your case from when it's assigned to them up until the request is closed. So right now we have seven of them and we're losing one very soon because she's moving on to a different career. So we're going down to six. Now we have three. We refer to them as extreme leaders. They help us in a support role. They manage the FOIA service request online. For those if you want, number is 770-488-6399. I'll say it again. The FOIA request service line is 770-488-6399. We answer the phone anytime. So if you have questions related to a FOIA request, you can call that number. Although preferably I would prefer that you do directly with the analyst on your case. That way things don't get lost in translation. They also manage our FOIA mailbox. We have a FOIA mailbox. It's a FOIA request at cbc.gov. So they also mind to put out their mailbox. So every day e-mails are coming in and they have to triage these e-mails. And so they also have to review cases. They do second-line reviews and they also are saying cases so they have to process cases. So there's a lot going on that they have to do. So the number of folks who are actually processing FOIA requests for the entire agency, including ETSDR, with one IT person helping to conduct searches. We used to have a contractor, but we lost the contractor. We are in the process of trying to recruit for another IT person just to help us with the volume of work that we have to deal with. We also have proven and approved for FTEs, for additional staff. One of the challenges that I've had since I've been at CDC is because we are based on WANNA. And typically, government information specialist positions are not very highly graded. It's difficult to get people to move to WANNA to accept positions. So we tend to get applicants who are not ideal. And my view is I'd rather have it vacant than have somebody that I know can do the job. That's better. But right now, we actually are now recruiting and Bruno is actually reviewing some applicants and we are hopeful that in the next couple of months we'll have an increase in FOIA. That is, we are recruiting for a few staff. So it's not counting against our FOIA requesters. But we've also been approved for two-term positions to help us with the COVID-19 request. So at some point, we're going to try and recruit for just two positions to help us strictly for COVID-19. And it's a ten position. So at some point, they're not going to be permanent. At some point, they're going to leave the federal government to convert them at some point. Next slide. So this is a chart of the CDC FOIA office and you look for requests received, processed, and penned in. And I want you to first look at the number of requests pending at the start of each fiscal year. So in 2015, CDC had penned in 685. That translates to 685 requests that had been carried over from the year before, right? And so in 2015, they received 1,020 requests. So the total number of requests at some point would be 685 plus 1020. That's how backlogs happen when you have too many requests pending at the end of the fiscal year. As you've seen the progression, by 2019, our pending was now down to 130. So when I say the CDC, that our interest is in responding to FOIA requests, I'm not just saying that. I mean that. And our data shows that that is what we are committed to doing. And we've demonstrated that consistently. So if you look at in 2016, which was when we had the highest number of pending FOIA requests, 749, that's a lot of work. And what do we do with that year? We closed out 1,445 requests. That's a lot of work. That's what we did, right? And so by the end of 2019, we had reduced, like I said, the number of requests pending to a very low number. And that is our goal. That's what we want to do moving forward. That's what we want to do with COVID-19. That's what we want to do, period, whatever the situation is. Next slide. FOIA requests, response time for all process-perfected requests. Now, we track how much time it takes us to respond to a FOIA request. And so let me first talk about simple requests and the complex request. So CDC has only two tracks. Some agencies have a simple track, complex track, XLA track. CDC, we only have two. The track that we place your request in is based on the estimated amount of time and work it's going to take us to respond to a FOIA request. So if you want a FOIA request, your FOIA request to respond to timely, you want to get into the simple track. That's where you want to be, right? Because that means we estimate that it's going to take us a very short amount of time to close out your request. Now, if you could see, it's that by 2018, we were on average spending taking only 54.88 days to respond to a complex FOIA request and 12.25 days to respond to a simple request. The 2019 data, and Alina pointed out this out to me and I had to go back and look at our data. Unfortunately, somebody made a keen error. So the number that's showing that it took us 122.6 days to respond to a simple request is actually not accurate. It's actually 12.6 days. But it is what it is. But at least we know that that was a mistake. And that same number is reflected in the panel justice report, the data for non-reports. But it's okay. Our complex, as you guys could see, our complex cases were responding to an average within 26.23 days. This goes to show you what CDC, how committed we are to respond to FOIA requests timely. Next slide. This chart tells you the types of exemptions that we apply. What is an exemption? Exemption under FOIA statute is a basis for which an agency could use to withhold information from release. There are nine exemptions. CDC primarily uses only a couple of them. Exemption three, four, five and six. The exemption that we apply the most is exemption six. And then exemption five and then exemption four and to a very small extent exemption three. Next slide, please. So exemptions, what is an exemption three statute? The exemption three statute is basically that the agency is reliant on another act passed by Congress that lays out the exemptions. The second standard on which information may or may not be the second under which information may be withheld from release. So reliant on another statute, not the FOIA statute without information. So the very first one, the ethics and government act of 1978. That is used to protect combination of financial disclosure information. Some CDC employees, for example, the CDC director, are supposed to complete what they refer to as the form 458. And that information is going to contain confidential financial information of these individuals. And this information is protected from release. We want to talk about 242MD, identifying information for certain research and statistical activities. CDC collects, let me rephrase, not collects. CDC receives quite a bit of data from local and state authorities asking for CDC conduct research or statistical analysis. Sometimes the research that CDC is conducting requires that we agree that the participants' information we kept confidential. And so for those types of research, they're in place at the beginning of the process, an assurance of confidentiality, AOCs. If an AOC applies to a data set they're requesting for, then in more likelihood, there's some types of information they request that we cannot release because of the statute. With regard to the stockpile, CDC no longer applies this exemption because the stockpile has now been removed from CDC no longer. The employees of the Strategic National Stockpile are now part of the Office of Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, ASPR. So it's now directly under Health and Human Services. So any request for stockpile information will be referred to HHS. And the last one, 262AH baritage-related information. CDC has select agent labs. CDC has oversight over select agent labs. And some types of information that are collected, that are contained within the records of these select agent labs can be withheld. Next slide, please. Expedited processing. That probably is of interest to a lot of people. In order to qualify for expedited processing, it is driven, our decision to grant or deny an expedited processing or AP is driven by the FOIA statute and by HHS FOIA regulations. So, and CDC, there are only two that CDC applies. I know some agencies have other provisions for when they can grant expedited processing, but CDC only has two. So one is that the requester, you have to articulate that if we don't provide you with these documents that somebody or an individual would be, life would be in danger, basically, that somebody's life or safety would be in danger. Secondly, another way that you can make a case for why we should grant expedited processing is that there's an agency to inform the public about an alleged or actual government activity. And typically it has to be done by somebody who's primarily in the business of disseminating information, a.k.a. it's easier for a news-reader person or a generalist or a group that disseminates information a lot to make the case that they qualify under the regulations for expedited processing. In 2019, we barely approved any expedited processing, primarily because the request is we're not able to make the case for why they should be granted expedited processing. But in every single case, we provide to the requester an appeal right so they could have an appeal date. And if you go back and look at our data, it goes to show that even in spite of the fact that we did not grant expedited processing, we responded to fire requests pretty timely. And I didn't say this, but I'll say this now. Our complex queue, which is the queue you probably don't want to be in, the majority of the cases that we closed in FY19, we closed most complex requests were closed within 60 days, which is pretty good for any agents to do. So in spite of the fact that we didn't grant expedited processing, did a pretty good job at making sure that requesters got responses to their request timely. What does an expedited processing mean? All it means is that you get to jump the line. That's what it means. It means that we get to process your request outside of the normal process of processing fire requests. The statute does not lay out a specific amount of time that it should take to respond to expedited processing request. It's supposed to respond to it as soon as possible. When the CDC office receives a fire request and we are conducting a search for records and we ask for records from the programs, we do not put expedited request at the front of the queue. We basically tell them you're supposed to respond for all requests X amount of time. If you're late, you're late. We don't give an extension, so we don't discriminate. But what we do is once we get a request for expedited processing has been granted, we process those requests ahead of requests that have not been granted expedited processing. So if multiple requests have been granted expedited processing, then you are within an expedited processing queue. So even though we technically don't have one tracking system tracks request for expedited processing has been granted, and it puts them in order of when it was approved. So there's an order to that. In 2019, our average response time for expedited processing was 35 days. Unfortunately, we can't do that. I don't think that we can meet that metric now. But the goal is that hopefully if we can get fire requesters to work with us and make their request more targeted and more specific, we'll be able to do that. Next slide, please. Request for fee waivers. What is, again, fee waivers are driven by the FOIA statute and HHS regulations. You would ask for a fee waiver because you're saying, based on what my fee category, a fee could be imposed on me. And I'm asking that for particular reasons that I have to articulate that I should be granted a fee waiver. I would say oftentimes, but sometimes we do see requests for fee waivers where they go, well, I'm a non-profit organization. Therefore, give me a fee waiver. Or I don't have money. Give me a fee waiver. A fee waiver is granted, you'd have to refer to it as regulations, but just briefly, you have to show that the records that you're requesting, there's a public interest in it. And two, that you're requesting these documents not primarily in your commercial interest. But in order to make sure that your fee waiver is granted, your best bet is to take a look at the HHS FOIA regulations or other regulations for the agencies whose records that you're requesting and make sure you articulate in great detail why you're entitled to a fee waiver for that request. A fee waiver is not carte blanche that we say this organization or this person is entitled to a fee waiver for all your requests now. Your fee waiver is tied to a particular request that you're making. A request for expedited processing is tied to that particular request that you're making, not for all requests. So something for you to keep in mind. I know most of you do, but just something to keep in mind. Now, we adjudicate fee waiver determinations fairly quickly. And in 2019, and we didn't, would you see on the chart that quite a few were denied, right? Now you might go, does it mean that we charge fees now? So even though we denied quite a bit of fee waivers, we didn't end up necessarily charging fees. In fact, CDC in FY19 only collected in fees $30,000. So I did a math. We closed out 1,263 requests. That comes up to $25 for each request. That's it. Next slide. Number of incoming request and complete for responses. So as you can see, in FY20, and this data right now is now outdated, I checked yesterday and we had reached 1,700 plus requests. That is more requests than received for the entire fiscal year of 19, more than received in 18, more than received in 17, 16, 15. So any more requests than I received, I don't know whether Bruno can speak for this, but we are probably on track to maybe hit in 2000, maybe more than that at the end of the fiscal year. Next slide, please. So on this chart, I just want you to concentrate and focus your attention on the number of CDC personnel supporting the outbreak. Remember, I said earlier that in 2019, over 95% of the searches that were conducted were conducted by the programs, aka by the custodians of the records themselves. With the COVID-19, and we have 4,600 CDC personnel, probably more than a quarter of CDC staff supporting the response, that has impacted our ability to collect records from the programs directly. Next slide. So here I just want to talk about the impact of COVID-19 specifically. So as it's obvious, you can see from the two slides prior, the FOIA office has received a significant number of COVID-19 later requests. I believe we're probably approaching 500 requests. Bruno, if I'm wrong, correct me at some point. So we've experienced a 100% increase in income requests over the same period last year. Thousands of our CDC staff have been activated to assist with this pandemic, and that has impacted our ability to obtain records directly from the programs. So let me show you this data here. Our FOIA analysts have seen, are now currently having a 500% increase in their workload. I want to just take it, right? They averaged 15 to 20, three months ago, after all the hard work they did to bring FOIA backlog to its lowest point in recorded history for CDC, FOIA-19 and FOIA backlog was 18, to now they're carrying a workload of 80. Very soon they might be pushing 100 every single day. Give or take, because as you close, you get assigned new cases, and that's a lot of things that they have to juggle. But nevertheless, in spite of all that, we are committed every day to locating records and responding timely to all FOIA requests, including the COVID-19 FOIA request. We, this year, next slide please, next slide. So I've talked about, now the vast majority of COVID-19 FOIA requests have been approved for X-ray processing. The last time I checked that thing was yesterday, we've approved, I believe, 161 requests have been granted X-ray processing like I said earlier. X-raying means that your process, your process, ahead of non-X-ray requests. We've had, we have received not a lot from what I can tell, but we've received requests where they were seeking records that have been requested in other requests. And what we're trying to do, what we're working to do, is to make sure that to the extent that we can close out multiple requests with that response, we'll do that. So, for example, if you requested, this is an example, you requested, your FOIA request involved item one, two, and three. And Bruno requested one and two. And Roger requested one. The smartest thing, the more efficient thing for us to do is we'll process it once. So we'll process the one who requested one, two, and three, and then we'll give our request as one, two, and three, so you get more than you asked for. We don't have to process the same documents three times. The only disadvantage if you want to call it that is, you get more than you asked for, which is okay. Now, the primary methods for searches that are conducted are, the FOIA office conducts a search independently, or two, we seek the assistance from the COVID-19 Emergency Operations Center. So let me talk about how the FOIA office does searches because that is probably a matter of interest. So the FOIA office, I believe sometime maybe two years ago, secured an eDiscovery tool to assist us improve efficiency in responding to FOIA request. So we have an eDiscovery tool that we use to independently conduct searches once we've notified the respective programs and people that we're going to conduct enterprise research for their documents. Now, in 2019, we only conducted independently, we used that tool for only 109 requests. So more than 1100 requests were sent to the programs for records. Now, because of COVID-19, and the fact that we have 4,600 people activated or working in some capacity with the pandemic, we no longer send FOIA request to the programs, the FOIA coordinated for the programs to ask them to assist us with looking at the records. We don't do that anymore because an EOC has been stood up. So CDC activated the Emergency Operations Center. And once that happens, they set up a FOIA liaison to handle request for documents related to that EOC. So in this case, every COVID-19 related request that is not independently set for by the FOIA office has to go to the EOC to ask for assistance in looking at records. So in some of the centers, they are disadvantaged because they may not have historical analysis for the programs. These are folks who rotate in and out. People just come in and they move out. So they do it the best they can in assisting us either by giving us leads, by giving us names of people who we best contact, by giving us email boxes that they think we should search against, and so on and so forth. Next slide. CDC is proactively releasing quite a bit of COVID-19 related information. And these are two examples of information that's being proactively released by the agency. Once you click on the link, both bullets are linkable. It will take you directly to the site. CDC, just like every other agency, under the 2016 amendment to the FOIA statute, are required to post on our website any documents that have been requested through MoTimes. We do have some requests that fit into that category. We have not been able to post any documents yet. We will do so at some point. We will work on getting that done, but at this point we haven't done so. However, in spite of the fact that we haven't been able to do that, what we have done is that we have worked with the EOC and the SMEs to help request us who is seeking data, surveillance data submitted to CDC by the local state authorities related to the human infection. It's called the case report form. Sometimes it's a PUI form. We're having quite a few requests for this information, what people are asking for, a variety of data related to it, you know, gender, ethnicity, age, that kind of stuff. So what we said was, look, can you guys come up with a public use data set that people could access so that we could take them outside of the FOIA process? So I happened to report that that was established, I think, last week. We've closed out some requests for that, but that does not mean that if a FOIA request that goes and looks at that data set and goes, eh, that doesn't work for me, that it can't submit a FOIA request. We are hopeful that it would be sufficient, but if you are not, if data doesn't satisfy your request, then you certainly welcome to submit a FOIA request to the agency. Next slide. What can you do to help us get records that you seek? It's a good question. One, keep your request brief. But before I say that, let me say this, the request for FOIA request starts with you. That's who it starts with. You get to decide whether your FOIA request is successful or not. We all have a role to play in it, but it starts with you. Keep your request brief. Sometimes we get requests that are two, three, four pages long. Put yourself in the shoes of an analyst who's having to juggle an ADK's load or an EOC person who has to look at a FOIA request that we submitted for records and having to decide for what it is that you're asking. By keeping your request brief or at least bound line upfront, it makes it easier. You can add whatever thing you want to add, you know, somewhere else as appendix, but that's key in what do you want so we can get to the point. Give us enough information upfront so we can quickly process your request. Sometimes you know exactly what you want. You have the context, but your context is buried in some newspaper article that you saw somewhere or some document that we have to decide for by reading the document. So I'll give you an example. There was a request that I was reviewing and they had sent out, you know, the request is too broad. It's not clear. We're trying to figure out where to get records and I kept looking at this stuff and I said, well, let me keep reading. And I decided to read in the fee waiver portion of the request and they don't know me, that it gave me the context for the request and that guided me in helping to locate records for that particular request. Now that's me, okay. That same request with my IT person who's not a FOIA person. He might miss that. He's looking at just where it says I'm seeking or I'm requesting one, two, and three. That's it. So if he's not playing on that, that means he starts going down the path that he shouldn't go because he's going by what he's reading in the request. As for what you want and nothing more, sometimes we get requests like this, just throw everything out at them because we fear that if we tell them what we want, we may not get it. I'll say this, take it for what it's worth, but I really mean it. If you tell us what you want and the document exists, we'll find it. If we can't release it for whatever reason, we'll tell you we can't release it. And if you disagree with the agency, you can file an appeal, you can file a lawsuit. But you can believe that we are not going to purposely say we are not going to give this document so we're going to play dumb. We're not going to do that. So just ask us for what you want and nothing more. Work with us to do that. Keep your request as narrow and as specific as possible. That helps out a lot with everyone. Folks in the FOIA office, with the programs, with the active person, it keeps it simple. It's really easy when it's very narrow and specific. Try and get your request into the simple track. A request would go into the complex track under certain conditions. One, that we have estimated is going to take more time and work to respond. So if we make that determination, it's going to go into the complex track. Two, we'll put in the complex track if it will result in us collecting records for multiple programs. So multiple CIOs are involved in the record collection. It's going to go into the complex track. If the documents collected could be voluminous, that will put you in the complex track. Finally, and we don't have to check all the boxes. If any one of them could trigger, you go into the complex queue. Finally, a complex, you can be placed in the complex track if we have to consult with other programs, other federal agencies, or to make a pre-disclosure notification to submit us of confidential information. We are required under this FOIA statute to notify submitters of confidential business information before their records can be released. And we have to give them a signal of days. So I think it's initially five days, but five working days, and then if there's disagreement on maybe 10, and if there's disagreement on when, if there's disagreement on if they objected disclosure information and the agency disagrees with the objection, we still have to give them an opportunity to file what we refer to as a reverse FOIA, basically, to file a lawsuit to stop us, stop the agency from responding. So if the doctors you requested contract documents, you should 100% guarantee that you've been in complex queue because we have to factor all those things in in the response time. COVID-related responses, there are going to be a lot of consultations because there are multiple agencies involved in it, FEMA, NIH, FDA, HHS. So what you're asking for, if you know, based upon your request, that it covers all these multiple agencies, then don't be surprised if you get placed in a complex queue. And if you don't want to be placed in a complex queue, then try and target it at only CDC-originated records. Makes it easier. Finally, be realistic about the response time. That is obvious on the face of the request that what you're asking is not, we're not going to respond to it within 21 days. We just can't. Even if we wanted to, we just cannot do it. So be ready to think about response time. Work with us on your request. If you do, we're more than happy to do everything we can to respond to your request timely. Next slide. So what are tasteful and iron-score requests? So you might get, you might, I'm sure myself you have received some way, you get a letter from us saying your request is overly broad and we need to narrow the scope of your request. Sometimes some of you push back. You push back, we, sometimes we go ahead and say, okay, let's do it. And sometimes we push back and say, no, we can't do it. You need to narrow the scope of your request. But how can you narrow the scope of your request? Give us names and emails to be searched. For example, if you're looking for emails, tell us who the custodians of these records are. Tell us upfront. Because the more back and forth that we do with you, the longer it's going to take to respond to your request. That's just the reality. So if you want us to get to Z quickly, then the more information you give us upfront, the less time we go, how to go back and forth with regard to the scope of your request and how to conduct the search. So tell us that right away. So we can get moving. Give us a timeframe. Give us a timeframe. The shorter the better. Let's use COVID-19. Every single day, all of us, and I can't imagine how many requests you know the ship are getting or sending every day, a ton of emails. That's pretty much how they conduct their business, a ton. So if you were to seek records for, let's say, you were seeking a request for the documents for maybe one of the top three leaders in CDC. Let's use Dr. Sicker, for example, and say you want all our emails where the word coronavirus is mentioned. You're pretty much asking for a top mailbox for that period. That's what you're asking for. So you haven't really identified for us what specific thing about coronavirus do you really want. That's what you need to get to, because otherwise you're pretty much asking for, for the most part, a top mailbox. Because probably pretty much every single email that she's going to send or receive might contain that word. I'll mention it again. So a month might be too much under the circumstances. A day or two, three days, a week, much better. Target fewer people. Most of the time leaders are copied on emails. So you don't need to target everyone because you can target one person and you get emails that they sent or received because most of them get copied and those who are not being copied are not in the loop. So even if you say I want their documents, it would end up with no hits on them because they went on loop on that particular subject matter. Providers with keywords. Combining keywords is very helpful. Again, like I said, sending keywords are unhelpful because they're probably going to appear in every single. For example, somebody made a request and was seeking my documents, for example. Since January, for the word coronavirus, you're going to find some, right? Probably nothing that interests you, but you're going to find some because I can't imagine any single CDC employee who has not received something about coronavirus in a week. We all are. So that word is not helpful. It's not helpful. You have to combine keywords to make it more helpful, right? Tie the keywords to other words. The closer the proximity, the better. Maybe identify a subject matter that you're looking for. It makes it easier because oftentimes, at least I make sure as a matter of practice I do this, that my subject line speaks to what it is that the content of my email is. So if you are able to identify this subject, then a search can be done against that subject. And even if you don't have the full subject line, for as long as that word appears in that subject, if we independently do a FOIA search, it's going to pull every email that has that word contained in the subject line. And that probably is more likely to be a response to your request because they're talking about what it is that you're asking about. As opposed to a key word, any document that contains that word, that could appear in an attachment. It could appear in a newsletter. It could appear in anything. And it would be totally unrelated to what it is you're asking for. And if we have to go through all those documents in order to respond to you, that's not helpful to you. But let me develop a record that you are seeking. And this is speaking multi-genital reporters. I see myself a lot. I see stories being written on a few documents. An email here, two emails there, a particular document that was provided. You don't really need a whole lot in order to write a story. And so if that's your goal, if that's what you want to do, then if you help us with your request in terms of fashioning your request, it's not the way that we can get you that email that's going to be, you know, your lead, or that's going to review what it is that you want to write a story about. The better for you, the better for us. If you go with this kind of approach about them asking for everything, then you are unlikely to get the documents as soon as you want. Not because we don't want to respond to you timely. It's just because we can't under the circumstances. And finally, I'll say that contact us to assist you with scoping out your request. And I mean this. So you can contact myself. You can contact Bruno. You can contact the special analyst who's assigned your case for assistance with scoping out your request. Next slide, please. Now, this is now on our FOIA access link, and I happen to see this as a congressional research service that wrote up a very short summary on how different agencies were responding to FOIA requests and posting things on our website. So I was surprised to see that CDC's made it into the research, into the document. Well, obviously we don't want people to send FOIA requests to us by mail. Because now all of us are 100% teleworking. There's nobody in the office, no one. So we dreaded Bruno was saying we're probably going to get back to a room full of FOIA requests. We don't know. We hope not. But so we definitely don't want you to submit FOIA requests by mail. Now, we also said that starting May 1st, we didn't want FOIA requests to be submitted to us via email. Then you go, why not? Okay. Very few staff working on FOIA requests. I want to optimize their production. I want them to focus on the real work of responding to FOIA requests. The less time they spend logging requests, the better. Right? And so we want FOIA request this, and we want you to input your own request. It's easier. And you can do that through our FOIA public access link. You can do it through the COVID-19. You can do that through FOIA.gov. You are inputting, you're literally inputting your own request. And it's just easier on you. It is easier on us. And I checked today. It's been successful. We've only received six FOIA request comments through our mailbox since Saturday. It doesn't mean that if we get requested a FOIA mailbox, we're not going to log it. We will do it. We are just wanting to discourage people from doing that. That's all. And certainly when we get back to the office, we'll resume accepting FOIA request by mail. And that would continue. Next slide. These are just resources available to you. And at this point, I would open the floor for any questions from me or for Bruno. Roger, thank you so much. You've done an outstanding job. I think you've covered a lot of material today that I think everyone will find very, very helpful. We have received a few questions on chat. I also want to give our vet producer the opportunity to provide information again about how to call with a question. So, Michelle, may I ask you to do that, please? Absolutely, ladies and gentlemen, as we enter Q&A, if you would like to ask a question over the telephone, please press pound two on your telephone keypad. You will hear a notification when your line is unmuted. At that time, please state your question. Once again, it's pound two to ask a question over the phone. Okay. Thanks, Michelle. Do we have any questions waiting on the phone line? There are currently no questions on the phone. Okay. Great. So, Roger, I'll go ahead and begin by asking you a few questions that we received via chat about searching. Folks have questions about that. The first question was, as follows, are CDC FOIA staff trained by the various CDC components to allow for a better understanding of the CDC's internal responsive documents? If not, would such training foster a stronger collaboration between FOIA staff and stakeholders from various CDC components? The CDC FOIA, we do have training for our FOIA staff, but we had it over the years where we'd bring in subject matter experts from the different programs to tell us about the documents that they collect, the sensitivity around the documents. We have not been able to do that for COVID-19 requests for obvious reasons. So there's difficulty with doing that. And so I would admit that are there challenges with us being able to locate records outside on our own now? Yes, because it's a moving situation and people rotate in and out. And so we have to primarily rely on going to the EOC's to assist in locating documents, or we conduct research independently if we can do so using our discovery tool. Okay, great. Thank you. So Bruno, anything you want to add to that? No, I think that's good. So like Roger was saying, we've had members of CDC staff coming from different areas. So we had someone come and discuss food outbreaks and the different outbreaks that occur at CDC and kind of give us the ins and outs, the types of records that are created. So we touch base with subject matter experts and they come in and teach us. But we don't just rely on that training either, right? So during the processing of requests, if we have a question, we'll go to them. They offer their concerns when they provide the document. So there's different touch points that we use to better process the documents. So while we've been chatting, there's been some other questions about searches, particularly by e-mails, but I'm just going to ask them in the order in which they came in out of fairness to those folks. Someone asked a question to clarify whether the search process documentation is also generated by a computer program. And I think relatedly, if you could clarify why the computer program would be impacted by those who are working for the pandemic, isn't this just a computer program slash software that conducts searches based on their request? I want to share something. So to conduct the indiscriminate searches, the IT specialist has to manually put in the keywords, so the combination of the keywords, identify the mailboxes, and other information that the request has provided to conduct the search. That's how the search is conducted. So yeah, so that's how it's not a computer quote-unquote generated search in that sense. It's somebody has to input information into the search tools, and then the system then runs, and then it identifies documents based upon the keywords or information that it is searching against. And real quick, I want to add to that. So during Roger's presentation as well, he mentioned somewhere in there that programs are affected by the current COVID-19 response. And I want to differentiate between a computer program and the program offices. So maybe that's a CDC term or a government term, but when we say program, in this instance, we need the program office, the office that is the subject matter expert that's doing that work. So there's a difference there between... There is software that we used to do electronic searches, so you could call that a program, but in this instance, it meant the program office, so the folks doing the work. Okay, thanks. I think that goes to clarify that question. The next question is, how can a requester avoid a, quote, chicken egg, unquote, situation with identifying the subject of a request? A lot of times, requesters do not know the exact title of a document or record, but know that certain records exist based on other reporting, tweets, or a leader's prep conferences. Any advice on that? Okay, that's true. So we saw things... I mean, we don't expect you to know the subject matter. So if you don't know it, then you don't make it up, but give us enough information to help us ask the right question. So I have routinely gone to my wait and said, ask, you know, reach out to people within the program to say, hey, we have a full request for this. What would be a good place for us to go? Because sometimes the e-discovery is limiting, right? Because or it might be an inefficient way to look for the document when we can just ask and go in, oh yeah, these people worked on it, they can get it for you. So we certainly reach out. If you don't know the subject matter, give us enough context. Give us a tweet, okay? Give us the statement that a person made. Give us when they made it, because that gives us context so we could say, oh, well, we can go and they go, yeah, we've heard about this tweet. We know this happened, but no discussions were heard about this. Or this is where you need to go to talk about this, to get records related to this subject matter. So that helps us out with that. Thank you. Bruno, anything you wanted to add or your question? Yeah, I mean, I was just asking what Roger said. You know, you don't need to know the specific title of a document, but if you can pinpoint, you know, a few days around the time it came out, or like Roger said, when a tweet came out, you know, the guidance on wearing masks, or something like that, you can pinpoint when a document was released or information was released. If you can just get us in the area, all you need to do is describe the document you're looking for. You don't need to give us pinpoint accuracy on the exact title of the document. Okay, great. So another email-related question. How are requesters supposed to provide email addresses for search? Most emails are redacted on your B6, exemption six under the FOIA, and it's hard for requesters to get the email addresses. Okay, so let me be more precise in my response. So when we say email addresses, email addresses of external employees, right? So you don't need to give us an email address for a city employee. We've got that down, but you don't have to worry about that. But for example, if you say, if you are asking for an external person, and you just give us a name, you know who that person is. We might not know who that person is, right? And so it is easier for us to do a search using an email domain name. So even if you don't know the email address of the person, but you know the domain name for where the person works, that's good enough. We can use that as our basis. So that's what we mean by, to the extent that you can give us, the more information you can give us to conduct the search, the better. If you don't know, again, context matters, right? That would be helpful to us. And folks can also avail themselves of the organizational charts, right? That are posted on the website. Absolutely. That are also displayed in the PowerPoint today so they can get a better understanding of where folks fit into the organization. Great. Okay, another, you know, related question. Can you talk about what search capabilities you have with email searches? For example, terms and connectors like and or not file cards for keywords. We only want to take that. Yeah, I'll take that one. So we can, as far as email search capability, we can use all of those. And I've just learned as well, we can do near, so like if you wanted coronavirus and another term, you can give us how many words within coronavirus you want the other term. So that might be another way to link a document, but still, you know, because we run into instances where let's say coronavirus and mask. Okay, so like just as an example, coronavirus and mask may be in that document, but coronavirus is up at tippy top, whereas the mask is somewhere on page 93 where they're talking about a mask or, you know, it's a different document altogether but the word mask is there. So by linking or using the near feature, we can do within so many words, within 10 words, within words where coronavirus and mask would likely be in the same discussion. So instead of just, you know, until the opposite ends of the document, we can do and as a good one because it links the two, we can do or not. I mean, so I guess any of those Boolean search terms that you can use, I think we have access to most of them. Okay, thanks. That's really helpful. Another question, is CDC conducting independent searches on COVID-19 requests at all or is the FOIA office asking the COVID-19 emergency operations center to conduct all searches? We're doing both. So this, we're doing both. So this year, I think I looked at the data I'm going to show, we have conducted as of yesterday 244 independent searches for COVID-19 requests. So I'll probably go and say about slightly more than 50% of COVID-related requests are being done by the FOIA office. So the difference is being sent to the EOCs. So it's a split. It's not exclusively going to EOCs and it's not exclusively being done by the FOIA office. Sometimes you might have a request way to hybrid where parts of it can be done by us and parts of it, we need to go to the EOC. And I would say, you know, even in current circumstances, we're trying, as many as we can do, we're trying to help out in any way that we can. So if we can pull a search and not, you know, have to pull someone off or, you know, even try to ask to pull someone off to do a search, we're doing everything we can in order to assist CDC staff to where we can take care of the FOIA part and they can go take care of their normal everyday duties. Sure, that makes sense. Thanks. I'm just going to pause for a second. We have a number of other check questions if there are any calls waiting on the line. There are currently no calls in queue. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, Pound 2 will enter you into the verbal question queue. All right, great. Thanks. So continuing with our chat question, could you talk about any efforts CDC is working on regarding proactive release of records? There's no doubt a lot of FOIA requests that are seeking COVID-19 related records. What is your office working to proactively release that data? I think you guys already covered this during the presentation, but... Bruno, you want to take that and speak about a few. Yes, I mean, CDC is proactively releasing some information. Like Roger said just last week, we had some new tool that could be used to pull data. The CDC FOIA office, as we respond to FOIA requests, we do plan to post information on the CDC FOIA website. We haven't gotten to that point yet, but I know if you look there now, there's not a whole lot to see, but we will be improving in that aspect and posting records in the future. And I do want to second that, and we take ownership of the fact that we have not been able to do that. Well, I'm not going to make any excuses for that, but we will definitely work on making sure that requests that meet the three or more requirements are posted to their website. Can you explain how the CDC gets and gathers state-level data on the number of people tested, numbers of those numbers of people tested, morbidity, cause of death, where death occurred in a nursing home, homeless shelter, or hospital? I don't know whether you're able to answer substantive questions or someone did ask that question. Let me... I'll give it a shot, and this is... Let me take my FOIA hat off, please. So I'm not giving an agency response, I'm giving a larger response. If you read some of our, what do you call it, MMWR reports, they show how the agency has been collecting data from local and state and counties. And it goes through... If you read them, they also show that sometimes the information that's provided is spotty, right? They don't provide information for all the columns, right? So CDC just takes what they can get. I also recall, I think, recently, the vice president ordered or directed, maybe use that word, directed, that setting types of information, especially on nursing homes and hospitals and beds and equipment needed to be submitted to report it to CDC. So that's how... So to the extent, to what extent, what information they're collecting on a daily basis, I don't know the details of that. I know that we are collecting information. We are receiving information. And let me say this, I was kind of surprised when they said, you know, some of the information can be sent by e-mail. So think about it. If they're sending... If CDC is receiving by e-mail data from the state, so forth, somebody has to take that data and put it into something else, right? So if you make a follow-up question and say, I'm looking for this data, don't be surprised we can't get it to you soon, right? Because they're still working on trying to take that information submitted through an e-mail or in a form, right? Because it's not... And then putting it into some spreadsheet or some data that they can analyze. So that takes time. So if they say we can't respond, there's nothing really that four of us can do at that point by just to wait. And so our push would be, hey, can you come up with a public use data set? That way we can push these people out of the process. So one of my colleagues is directing folks to cdc.gov forward slash mmwr forward slash index dot html. That's the link for the information that this person was asking about. Michelle, our event producers informed me that we have a call on the line caller. Can you please go ahead? Cola, your line is unmuted. You may ask your question. Hi. My name is Greg Bridges. I work at FEMA's FOIA office. I was just wondering what are you all doing to prioritize your responses to the COVID request against non-COVID related FOIA requests, particularly non-COVID related requests that also qualify for expedited processing? Thank you for the question. I would say the overwhelming number of FOIA requests that CDC is responding to right now are COVID related. Fortunately, and I didn't give this data, but I'll go and see it now. So even though as of yesterday, we received 1,706 incoming requests, we have responded to 1,091. So probably most of the non-COVID related responses, we've responded to most of them. And so right now what we are really dealing with for the most part are COVID-19 related responses. And our non-COVID related responses are generally, I don't believe that we have any one of those requests where they have requested expedited processing. That doesn't mean that we are not prioritizing them, right? We want to respond to all requests, but if a request has been given expedited processing, then obviously that comes ahead of a non-executed request. But at the end of the day, it's driven by whether there are records to process, right? So if we've granted you expedited processes but there are no records to process and we have a non-COVID related request with records, it's going to be a process to go out. So we are trying to wake and respond to all our requests as soon as we can. That's our bottom line. I mean, we pride ourselves on being one of the best FOIA programs, at least within HSS, for sure, we can see that. And we don't want to slip back to where we used to be, where CDC's FOIA program was always in the news for delaying FOIA responses, telling the requesters it would take three or four years to respond to a FOIA request. We don't want to go back there at all. And that's why one of the reasons why we had this meeting is because we want to be proactive and work with the requesters and paint a picture for you to understand that we're doing the best we can but as the FOIA request starts with you, you can help us with the way you craft your request. You can help us with the way with your willingness to be open to modifying this FOIA request so that we can respond to your request as soon as we can because we both have the same goal. You want records, we want to close that request out. Okay, thanks very much for that question. Another CHAC question related to searches, you said that when you pass a request along to the appropriate record keeper, that record keeper is given a deadline. What is the consequence for missing these deadlines and how much do missed deadlines contribute to extending your turnaround times? Let me start with the consequences. The CDC office, we can't impose any penalties on them for not providing documents. We can't do that. And I don't know whether they get in trouble with that issue but this is what we do for accountability purposes. Like we said, we have an overdue list that we send out to the program's leadership every month so there's visibility. That drives competition, right? Because nobody, they want their programs to look good. And I know for a fact, right? When I first started in CDC, the overdue list was running about 400 to 500 requests a month, right? At some point in 2008, we had zero. That's how committed people are. I mean, they take it seriously. They don't want to be on that list. The fact that they're on that list is not because they don't care or not working on it, it's because their fact is beyond their control. So we are selling today, I'm not going to today blame their programs for delaying responses. That's beyond their control because they're really working hard to give us responses. 83% of CDC's FOIA responses were responded to timely. I can say that. That's how that data shows. 83% of the FOIA requests that we have responded to, we responded to them timely. So we are continuing to work with the programs to get us records as soon as we can. We push them and that's what we've offered to them. Say, hey look, if you can give us a lead, a person, an email box to such a game, whatever it is that you can do to help us look at the documents, we'll do that so you don't have to worry about it. And I can add to that a little bit. So like Roger was saying, when he got here, the overdue report had about 480, I think, requests on it. And the attitude of the program was kind of, understandably I would argue, the CDC FOIA office is behind, why should I kill myself to get you these documents if they're just going to sit in their closet somewhere. So we worked very hard to improve our processes and things. And I can tell you that the program, people responsible for giving us these responses, take it very seriously. So Roger sends out a monthly report that I prepared for him and I'm the lucky guy. He says, if you have any questions, please contact Bruno. So I'm the lucky guy that gets the emails. But people are, they take it very seriously. Their management takes it seriously and you can tell because I get, every month, as soon as that report goes out, oh my gosh, let me clean this up. Let me clean that up. We sent this. I get contacted a lot when that report goes out, either by the manager themselves or the people in charge of pulling those records. And like Roger said, we were at 480 or so when he got here and I think it was September or October of last year. I think it was last year where we had zero overdue for the entire agency, at least responsive records coming from the program office to the FOIA office, there was zero for that month. So it is taken seriously. You know, we obviously take it seriously because we need those records to do our job and they take it seriously because they don't want their managers coming in behind them and saying, hey, why isn't this being responded to? So. Sure. All right, well, that sounds great. Thank you. A couple more search questions. We have one that asks, what keywords do you recommend using when trying to identify communications, planning, resources sent from the CDC to states? I don't know. You can think about that one. We can answer if you can't answer right now. Yeah, I mean, you know, and again, I think this is a good, maybe this isn't a perfect response, but this kind of gives you a view into what we're working with. So I don't have a perfect response to give you as far as what the keyword should be, but we can run a search and we can always, if you, you know, if we respond to a request and we say we didn't find anything or, you know, we found very little and we turn it over to you, that doesn't have to be the end of the process there. So you can adjust from that point, submit a new request. You can call up and say, hey, I'm trying to get this document, but the response that you sent me wasn't exactly what I was looking for. So we can work together to try to find that document. We can reach out to the program, get some insights. Maybe they have a better idea than we would because they're the ones that are doing the work to do the state or receiving stuff from the states, however that relationship is happening. We can reach out to them because they would have more insight than the FOIA office would, and then we can work with the requester in order to try and pinpoint the exact document that you're looking for. I thought about some of the data Bruno has gone, which would be a different route rather than using a keyword. So for example, if you can identify the state department or local state agency that CDC interacted with, so find any email correspondence between CDC employees and the state, then that would include, presumably, this document that you're referring to. So if you don't know the keyword, but at least you know the players, you know the people that CDC would have contacted in the state, then that's your in-route into getting the document because we can easily locate the documents throughout the discovery about email conversations between CDC personnel and California, or Georgia, or whatever state it is. Because there's only a few people, right? Okay. One more question we have on searches. Does the CDC FOIA office conduct cross-reference searches from the beginning, or is that something that needs to be specified in the request or on appeal, or on administrative appeal? Could you clarify what you mean by cross-reference searches? So I can just give you a clarification from my own personal experience, having worked at the FBI for almost 15 years. So there's some information that is only mentioned in a particular file. It's not the main subject of a file. And so some requesters are interested in that information as well. But perhaps the way you're conducting your searches is not conducive to that. But maybe you could talk about that for a minute in terms of subject matter versus something that's just a mere mention, a casting reference to a subject matter. Well, without such capabilities, if you just give us a word and you give us the names of the people, the costumers of those records, if that word happens to appear in any document that they received or sent or called out or anything, it would come up. So the computer would look for it for us because it's going to identify that word in whatever document, wherever it is located. Okay. Based upon the search parameters. Thank you. So moving on, we actually have one exemption-related question. And I will leave it to your discretion if you think it's broad enough to answer. With regard to contract and procurement information, does the CDC apply exemption three to contract or bid and proposal information after the contract has been awarded by the agency? Or does the CDC use exemption four to withhold this information in addition to exemption three? I can only speak for my experience at CDC and for experience with records that I'm familiar with. We primarily withhold contract documents using exemption four. We maybe use exemption three in some circumstances, possibly, but primarily we use exemption four. Right, yeah. There's some information in contracts like Roger said is going to be held under exemption four. There's going to be some that is held under exemption three, proposal-related information in some instances. So it just depends on, you know, the contract itself, you know, what point in the contract if it was awarded or not awarded. There's a lot of factors that go into that question. So I can't give you a hard and fast, like paint by numbers, yes or no, whatever, but there are instances, yes, that three and four will be used in both. So we just received one question just shortly before we started our webinar today. I'm not sure if you're able to answer it, but I'm just going to pose it. How would FOIA or HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, apply to information contained in debt certificates or in state agencies vital statistics database? I would pass on that question. I can't speak to HIPAA. So I'll have to pose it like we did. That's fair. All right. I'm going to ask Michelle if we have any other questions on the line because I believe we've exhausted our chat question. Sarah, currently no questions on the line. All right. I'm just going to double check that we've asked you all the questions. It looks like we have. Okay. And I think we can give folks back the gift of time, give them a few minutes off early to go and have lunch. We again want to thank Roger and Bruno for their time today. Lots of great information. We're all living under some unprecedented circumstances. The CDC in particular is uniquely situated to really experience what's going on. And we very much hope that everyone has found this information helpful and insightful. I do want to remind everyone, we've posted the PowerPoint presentation. We did just get a question on the line, Alina. Sorry. Okay. Roger posted that Roger presented today. The PowerPoint presentation is online on the OGIS website. So I want to invite everyone to take a look at that. And our event producer informs us that we have one call on the line. So go ahead, please. That question is for Bruno. All right. Well, your line is now unmuted. Thank you. I'm sorry to squeeze in there. My name is Zach Newman with 9 News Basin Denver. And I know one thing I'm trying to wrap my head around is the responses from the various agencies, you know, between FEMA and HHS, and then CDC within HHS. And so I'm curious about your recommendation for making sure that all bases are covered within the FOIA process. And I'm, you know, specifically we'll be filing FOIAs within Colorado, but was just curious if there's a particular difference in like document names, or just in general as I'm requesting that I should be aware of between all those agencies. So I mean, what I would say is, as far as if you need documents from HHS, CDC, and FEMA, as far as the HHS and CDC portions would go, I think it'd be cleaner if you sent that request to HHS. They will then refer down our portions for us to respond to. But like Roger was saying at the beginning during his presentation, clearly there's going to be a lot of consultation that's going to be required on that FOIA. Each agency only makes a determination on their own records. You know, if HHS or FEMA equities are contained within the CDC portions, we would either consult or refer that to them for them to respond either directly to you or to give us their response so that we could respond for our portions or within our portions. But as far as names of documents and terms and that, as far as that goes, it would depend on what you're asking for, but I wouldn't have any insider knowledge as to how HHS or FEMA structures their documents or the documents they collect or anything like that. I would say this, just a suggestion. Take a look at NIH's website. Take a look at FDA's website. Take a look at FEMA's website. Take a look at some of the statements that have been made by officials working with these agencies. That would give you an insight as to who's doing what, for example, right? So if the CDC director went and said something somewhere about something or not saying anything, then you know if you're looking for stuff around about that subject matter, you can come to CDC. If it's communications that say between FEMA, DHS, about, let's say, PPEs or whatever it is and consultations with CDC, then you should automatically know, right, that CDC is going to have to go to FEMA and consult with them or vice versa. So if you're willing to wait for that process to go forward, the bomb is made up of requests. But if you want something quickly, then you might want to focus on targeting requests that would not require a consultation or not a lot of consultation. I mean, we receive consultations from FEMA, for example, at least FEMA. And we try and respond to them very quickly. I mean, we take a deal to go through it because we know, look, they're under the gun like everybody else and we're not going to hold it. But at CDC, I can't speak to what other agencies are doing about when we get a consultation from another federal agency, we try as much as possible to look at CDC's equities, give them our disclosure determinations and just keep it moving. Thank you very much. Any other followers on the line before we close up? I do not see any additional questions. All right. Well, again, Roger, thank you very much. Bruno, thank you very much. And I hope everyone and their families remain state, healthy and resilient. Take care, everyone. Have a great day. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. That concludes our conference. Thank you for using Event Services. You may now disconnect.