{mosads}”Agencies should know when they are releasing internal documents to the public and should do so deliberately, with appropriate protections for truly private information.”
In his letters, Grassley asked the agencies what requirements they have in place to protect sensitive information from becoming public.
He added that Quality Associates told his office that it “had not done anything other than follow” clients’ orders in the case of the FDA.
The six agencies with documents housed by the company are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Agriculture, the Internal Revenue Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health, and the Consumer Products Safety Commission.
The FDA has come under fire for what The New York Times described as an “extraordinary surveillance effort” meant to “counter outside critics of the agency’s medical review process.”
Tens of thousands of pages of documents from the effort were posted online by Quality Associates, apparently by accident, according to the paper.