EPA Responded to The DCNF’s FOIA Request Two-And-A-Half Years Late

TheDCNF quoted Chris Horner on the difficulty which conservatives face when submitting FOIA requests to the EPA compared to environmentalists.  

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sent The Daily Caller News Foundation a Christmas present this year by finally responding to a records request from more than two years ago.

Well, it wasn’t all holiday cheer. EPA said TheDCNF needed to narrow down its two-year-old request for emails between Obama administration officials and environmental groups regarding the Clean Power Plan.

Federal agencies are required by law to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests within twenty working days. TheDCNF filed its FOIA request on May 29, 2015, and EPA responded on Dec. 21, 2017 — that’s 646 working days.

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Conservatives were critical of the Obama administration’s handling of FOIA requests. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), found that EPA in particular made it harder for conservatives to obtain information, while expediting environmentalists’ requests.

CEI is no stranger to FOIA litigation either. The libertarian group sued EPA in 2015 over the agency’s slow-walking a FOIA request for emails from former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s alias account “Richard Windsor.”

EPA’s planned to release 120,000 records associated with CEI’s request at a pace of 100 per month — meaning the request will be fulfilled in about 100 years.

Read the full article at TheDCNF.