More to Follow

[Jason]

I will be posting the relevant regulations on NOAA disability processing. That is, once they respond to my Freedom of Information Act requests.

I have to say that out of all the uniformed services, the NOAA has been the most secretive. It took me only a short while to identify the action officer at NOAA in early November. She was very courteous in turning down my request to furnish the regulations. This was after a week of researching whether or not she would give them to me. So, I sent a FOIA request to the NOAA FOIA Office. No response for three weeks. I sent a third request, copied the Department of Commerce FOIA Office and finally got a response. They have assigned a deadline of 14 December to respond to my request. I hope that they are just a busy office and that is the reason they have not sent me the regulations yet. I can't imagine them saying no; if they do, my next step is filing suit in Federal court. So far, NOAA gets a bad grade for its information practices. I am very interested to see what the regulations say. More to follow.

[Jason]

Okay, I finally got a response from the FOIA Office at the Department of Commerce regarding the processing of cases.

In their letter, they wrote that they use the regulations from the US Public Health Service (found here).

"Since the NOAA Corps does not have an internal mechanism to process these cases, they are outsourced to the US Public Health Service." (italics mine).

Outsourced? I am not done getting to the bottom of this. I have my doubts about the legality of "outsourcing" this function. My next request if going to be for the memorandums of agreement, and grants of authority to do this. Since NOAA falls under Commerce and PHS under Department of Health and Human Services, I have serious questions about the processing of NOAA cases.