Huh - EPA Can't Find Any Records Of Scott Pruitt's Task Force Designed To Gut New Source Review

[hatrack]

EPA can't find written evidence of a task force designed to overhaul the agency's New Source Review permitting program that former Administrator Scott Pruitt described to a congressional panel in late 2017.

"There is a task force internal to the agency to address NSR steps going forward in 2018. It is a very important area as you have indicated," Pruitt told Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) during a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment.

EPA now says, however, there is no record of the task force's membership or purview. "A search of the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation and the Office of the Administrator for records responsive to your request produced no responsive records," Elizabeth White, director of EPA's Office of the Executive Secretariat, wrote this week in reply to an E&E News' Freedom of Information Act request filed shortly after Pruitt's testimony.

Pruitt resigned under pressure last July; he did not reply to an email yesterday sent to an intermediary asking whether the task force was ever created. EPA press aides also did not respond to questions about the task force's existence and the lack of documentation. But the episode falls into a pattern of Pruitt initiatives that left behind little or no discernible paper trails. "It's very much in keeping with the presidential strategy of making grand, sweeping announcements before there's an actual plan to go forward with them," said Kevin Bell, staff counsel for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), an advocacy group that has repeatedly clashed with the Trump administration over records issues.

EDIT

https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/07/12/stories/1060730305

[FBaggins]

1. Understandable... but untrue

Naturally... readers who see "A search... for records responsive to your request produced no responsive records" will assume that the EPA is saying that there are no records of the task force.

Instead... this is the administration's relatively recent (about a month old?) strategy of denying FOIA requests. If there's something they don't want to release, the new rule says that they can just say that there's "nothing responsive".

So it very likely isn't that there are no records of the "task force" (or that the conclusion that it doesn't exist is reasonable)... it's that they don't want to turn over the records.