FOIA Abuse
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deal of the requested information in the past – the agency simply has to relocate and copy the same information over and over again–all at the public’s expense. Third, if these radical groups do not receive the information they want – for free – federal court litigation follows, again at the taxpayers’ expense. The vast amount of FOIA cases filed by environmental groups only included the filing of a federal district court complaint, a settlement agreement for the release of the requested information and the payment of attorneys fees. Fee payments
were anywhere from $5000 to $50,000. In May, 2013, the Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for the U.S. House of Representatives, the Ranking Members of the Committee on Environment and Public Works and the Committee on the Judiciary for the U.S. Senate sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) strongly questioning EPA’s practice of “readily grant[ing] FOIA fee waivers for liberal environmental groups – effectively subsidizing them – while denying fee waivers and making the FOIA process difficult for states and conservative groups.” It
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is clear from the above research that the EPA is not the only agency who engages in such practice. Ranchers who should have the information that is kept in their files are forced to pay excessive amounts for information while radical environmental groups pay no fees for using this exact same information to file substantial numbers of administrative appeals and federal court litigation against these ranchers. With these radical groups, it is not a matter of providing fair public information; it is a matter of pushing a political agenda being subsidized by the taxpayers. While there is no question that FOIA is an important statute to allow the public to get information from the federal government, this short essay points out the serious inequities in how the statute is implemented. Individuals are forced to pay search time and copy costs for the information gathered about them and located in their own files, while radical environmental groups can get the same documentation for free to use in litigation against the federal agency and rancher. Is that ■ really the purpose of FOIA?
Lawmakers
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ments with the Center for Biological Diversity and WildEarth Guardians to issue a listing decision for the prairie chicken, which has been a candidate for protection since the early 1980s. The iconic bird, known for its elaborate mating dance, is in danger of extinction in the foreseeable future due to threats including grazing, tree encroachment, conversion of rangeland to crop and nonnative forage, and energy development, FWS said in November (Greenwire, Nov. 30, 2012). “We are committed to working with the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies and the states to further lesser prairie chicken conservation,” Ashe said in his letter to the lawmakers. “We strongly support the efforts to develop a rangewide conservation plan and are working closely with states to refine that plan.” ESA allows FWS to extend its decision time frame “if there is substantial disagreement regarding the sufficiency or accuracy of the available data relevant to the determination, for the purposes of soliciting additional data.” Such a determination was made in December 2010 in the case of the dunes sagebrush lizard. Six months later, the Fish and Wildlife Service decided to withdraw its proposal to list the 3-inch lizard as endangered, angering environmental groups. ■