DoD Seeks New FOIA Exemption for Unclassified WMD Info
The Department of Defense is seeking a broad new exemption from the Freedom of Information Act for unclassified information relating to weapons of mass destruction.
According to the proposed legislation, “Examples of such information could include … formulas and design descriptions of lethal and incapacitating materials; maps, designs, security/emergency response plans, and vulnerability assessments for facilities containing weapons of mass destruction materials.”
The proposal is puzzling because most such information, including that which is not classified, is already exempt from the FOIA. Meanwhile, some related categories of information that are not exempt should arguably remain public.
The draft DoD language “is so broad as to potentially sweep everything related to any chemical facility into the exemption,” said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel at the National Security Archive. “There is nothing in here that explicitly protects the public’s need to know some things about these facilities, e.g. violations of the law, lack of required certifications or licenses.”
Furthermore, she said, “the lack of a temporal limit on the withholdability of the information, and the lack of any appeals mechanism, creates a potential black hole.”
She suggested that any such exemption should be more narrowly “focused on what they actually are trying to protect, which I think is vulnerability information DOD learns of regarding private facilities.”
The draft DoD FOIA exemption was first reported in “DOD Asks For New FOIA Exemption Covering WMD-Related Information” by Keith Costa, Inside the Pentagon, April 13.
In anticipation of future known and unknown health security threats, including new pandemics, biothreats, and climate-related health emergencies, our answers need to be much faster, cheaper, and less disruptive to other operations.
To unlock the full potential of artificial intelligence within the Department of Health and Human Services, an AI Corps should be established, embedding specialized AI experts within each of the department’s 10 agencies.
Investing in interventions behind the walls is not just a matter of improving conditions for incarcerated individuals—it is a public safety and economic imperative. By reducing recidivism through education and family contact, we can improve reentry outcomes and save billions in taxpayer dollars.
The U.S. government should establish a public-private National Exposome Project (NEP) to generate benchmark human exposure levels for the ~80,000 chemicals to which Americans are regularly exposed.