Last week, a group of plaintiffs filed a complaint against federal agencies (including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) challenging the federal government’s handling of information reporting related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The plaintiffs include a public charter school, a non-profit health and housing group, a New York City councilmember, and a medical student. According to the complaint, the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act of 2019 mandated the creation of a “biosurveillance network” to provide information on the progress of public health emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic, but the agencies tasked with creating and maintaining the network have failed to carry out their biosurveillance duties, failing to adequately report information, and failing to involve the public in policymaking decisions (as required by the law):
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Judge Furman: Secretary of Commerce Must Sit for Deposition Over Census Citizenship Question
By Michael Keough on
This week, Judge Furman ordered U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross Jr. to sit for a deposition in a case challenging the constitutionality of adding a question about citizenship status to the 2020 U.S. census questionnaire. The question had not appeared on the census questionnaire since 1950; according to the complaint, the question was purposefully added to decrease the response rate among immigrant communities, leading to fewer public services and less Congressional representation in those areas.
Judge Furman had previously found that the plaintiffs had “made a strong preliminary or prima facie showing that they will find material beyond the Administrative Record indicative of bad faith” and allowed discovery into the decision to add the citizenship question back to the census. Judge Furman found that the deposition of Secretary Ross himself was required because of Secretary Ross’s high degree of personal involvement in the decision and the extent to which his credibility and intent was thus at issue
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