Interior Dept. Plan to Streamline FOIA Responses Alarms Transparency Groups
From: Government Executive “An Interior Department proposed rule published late last month to ease the workload of its Freedom of Information Office staff has drawn fire from at least three transparency advocacy groups. The nonprofits American Oversight and Democracy Forward, as well as ...
Environmentalists and Feds Reach Settlement Over Bison Mgmt
From: Courthouse News “Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) said “a new era may be dawning” over management of the National Bison Range in Moiese, Montana. Management of the range has been inconsistent in the last decade. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai ...
Trump’s EPA Just Handed Another Gift to Big Polluters: Letter to the Editor
From: Cleveland “With new rules imposing the greatest restrictions on the Clean Water Act since its passage in 1972, Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has handed yet another gift to big polluters by drastically curtailing the number of protected waterways and wetlands. An ...
While Others Suffered, the Trump Admin Kept Pushing Oil and Gas Drilling During the Shutdown
From: Red Green and Blue “Critics have blasted Interior for showing favoritism to the oil and gas industry during the 35-day government shutdown by calling some federal employees in to work to issue drilling permits on public lands; to keep some national parks open by diverting entrance ...
Oil and Gas Efforts Proceed and Public Lands Opened to Hunters During Government Shutdown
From: Earth Island Journal “Over the past several weeks national parks have been trashed, climate change research stalled, and crucial wildfire prevention work halted — all while oil and gas drilling efforts continue to cruise along and national wildlife refuges are reopened to hunters ...
Democrats Want Answers About the Interior Department’s Decisions During the Shutdown
From: Think Progress “The use of entrance fees to keep national parks open, along with a sudden decision to bring back department employees to work on offshore drilling and related tasks, have come under fire from House Democrats and environmental groups — they argue Acting Interior ...
Trump’s EPA Has a Light Touch When it Comes to Punishing Polluters
From: Salon “Over the last two decades, according to the report, EPA civil penalties averaged more than $500 million a year (an average adjusted for inflation). The last fiscal year was nearly 85 percent below that, at $72 million. Barack Obama’s former EPA assistant administrator ...
Formaldehyde Controversy Raises Concerns For Retailers Over EPA’s Future Review And Regulation Of Chemicals And Associated Litigation Risk
From: Mondaq “Industry groups have met with EPA and have publicly expressed concerns that the updated risk assessment will be merely a “restructuring” of the original draft and will still suffer from the same scientific and methodological defects previously identified by the ...
Is Trump Using the Shutdown to Serve Energy and Hunting Special Interests?
From: TruthOut “Several moves by the Interior Department to bring back furloughed staff to attend to oil and gas activities aren’t sitting well with some elected officials. Arizona’s Rep. Raúl Grijalva, chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, wrote a letter to David ...
Is the Trump Administration ‘Gaming the Shutdown’ to Serve Energy and Hunting Special Interests?
From: The Revelator “Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit that advocates for public employees who work on environmental issues, says he’s also concerned by information they uncovered that other nonessential staff from six ...
Gaming the System
From: The Washington Post “Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an environmental advocacy group, is calling on the Government Accountability Office to probe whether the Interior Department’s move to recall furloughed staff to move forward with oil and gas leasing work ...
Government Shutdown Becomes a ‘Polluters Holiday’
From: Environment News Service “Federal biological, pollution, and food safety monitoring has been suspended as hundreds of thousands of federal workers are furloughed and forbidden from working due to the longest government shutdown in American history. These interruptions create risks ...
EPA should be making more criminal referrals for polluters
From: Kentucky Kernel “The story reported that EPA referrals resulted in 62 federal convictions in the year 2018, making it the fewest convictions since 1995. Under Bill Clinton’s presidency in 1998, 592 people were referred for criminal prosecution. The story quoted Jeff Ruch, ...
USDA Continues Controversial Call-Backs of Furloughed Employees
From: GovExec “In a sign that resistance to such early call-backs continues, the nonprofit advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility on Tuesday sent a complaint to Congress’s Government Accountability Office asking it to investigate the Interior Department’s ...
Group asks watchdog to investigate recall of furloughed Interior workers
From: The Hill “An environmental advocacy group formally asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Tuesday to investigate whether the Interior Department’s recall of furloughed employees during the government shutdown is legal. Representatives for Public Employees for ...
Environmental group demands GAO investigation of Interior permit work
From: PoliticoPro “Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, in a letter to GAO, requested the agency investigate whether acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt violated the Antideficiency Act, which stipulates that departments can’t spend money not allocated by ...
Meet 3 women who stood up to Trump to protect the American people — and lost their jobs
From: The Hill “Southerland resigned from EPA in early August 2017 and explained her decision in a farewell letter published by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a non-profit group for federal resource professionals. ” Read more . . . Read the PEER story ...
Editorial: Who’s Watching Out for Future Generations?
From: The Daily Nonpareil ““You don’t get closer to the core of EPA’s mission than enforcing the law,” Jeff Ruch, executive director of the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility advocacy groups, told The AP. “We’re reaching levels where the enforcement ...
How Long Can We Go without Prosecuting Polluters?
From: Sierra Club “According to numbers released on Tuesday by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a nonprofit that tracks environmental accountability in the public sector, the EPA has drastically reduced the number of referrals for criminal prosecution. Such ...
California Environmental Law & Policy Update: GAO Investigating EPA’s Low Enforcement Numbers
From: JD Supra “The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has launched an investigation into declining enforcement actions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) against companies accused of violating EPA’s pollution standards during the Trump administration. A GAO ...
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