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Michigan's Medical Board want $12,792.93 from me to explain why they they are licensing an #FGM doctor.
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In 2017, federal prosecutors charged a Detroit-area physician with performing female genital mutilation (FGM) on multiple young girls between seven and sixteen years old. It was touted as the first FGM prosecution in United States history.
The federal government lost the case so badly that the 1996 Federal FGM ban was ruled unconstitutional. Even though the doctor's own defense admitted she had performed a procedure that involved "removing mucous membrane from the girls' genitalia," she never faced justice. It would not be until 2020 that a new federal law against FGM was passed, but by then it was too late.
However, this is the exact situation state medical boards exist to handle. A fellow physician, a board-certified anesthesiologist, filed a formal complaint calling for her license to be revoked, writing that performing surgery on young girls without anesthesia "amounts to torture." Medical boards have the authority to revoke a doctor's medical license for far less serious behavior.
Michigan dismissed its investigation two months before the court ruling. The doctor who was federally prosecuted for FGM still holds an active, unrestricted Michigan medical license . She is still employed at an emergency room in the Detroit area and could be seeing patients to this day who have no idea their doctor performed FGM on young girls. Prosecutors estimated up to 100 victims over a 12-year period.
To find out why, I filed multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests asking for internal emails about how Michigan handled the FGM investigation. These FOIA requests seek the internal communications that would reveal how that decision was made. The requests were made only for electronic records, after LARA claimed that searching records prior to 2020 would require “manual review of thousands of paper files.”
The Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA) responded by sending an invoice for $12,792.93 to retrieve the emails. LARA’s fee estimates break down to $2,508 for one request, $2,093 for another, and $8,190 for a third. The largest invoice claims it would take 405 combined hours of labor to search their emails for basic keywords like “FGM” and “female genital cutting.”
According to LARA’s written response to my questions, although they confirmed they could search every email box at once with enterprise-wide keyword searches, their preferred method is “contacting every staff member with the terms to search,” each employee “performing the searches and providing results,” and the liaison “following up with any staff who do not respond timely.” One invoice explicitly calculates: “153 employees × 12 keywords × 5 minutes.”
When I asked why they don’t just search all inboxes at once, the same LARA representative gave multiple contradictory answers. One email claimed enterprise-wide search would involve “a similarly priced fee estimate” but could “take much longer.” Another cited the “heightened cost” of enterprise-wide search as the reason for using manual methods instead. In other words, according to LARA, keyword search would cost the same but take longer, unless it takes the same amount of time but costs more.
When I asked whether their email records are maintained in an electronic system that supports keyword searching, LARA’s FOIA liaison responded: “Not sure what they mean by this. Is Outlook an ‘electronic system?’” The liaison also admitted they would have “no idea of the volume” of responsive records until each employee performed their individual searches—meaning the fee estimate isn’t based on any actual assessment of how many records exist.
Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act requires agencies to use “the most economical means available” when fulfilling requests. Having 153 employees individually search their own inboxes, compile results, and forward them to a coordinator, rather than running a single enterprise search, is the least economical way to approach the problem.
Entering “FGM” into a search bar is not a $12,792.93 task that requires 153 people and over 400 hours of labor. Instead, this appears to be willful incompetence to avoid accountability. These are public documents that the state must provide me by law. They can’t legally say no directly, so instead it appears they are making the process of providing the documents as convoluted and expensive as possible, which is also against the law, but harder to prove.
The difference between their handling of reasonable questions from the public and female genital cutting could not be more stark. The Michigan medical licensing board closed an investigation into FGM for free, without a single hearing. Now, they want $12,793 to explain their actions to the public. The board has also not responded to multiple requests for comment, which is free.
I’ve filed a formal appeal challenging these fees. LARA has 10 business days to respond. However, if this appeal does not prevail, the only way to discover the full story behind why Michigan is licensing FGM-practicing doctors would be either to pay the fee or file a lawsuit. Since both would require funding, I have started a GoFundMe to support this investigation. Please contribute here:
gofundme.com/f/expose-medic…
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