Zinke Shits On America As He Leaves: Hands FOIA Controls To Former Koch Brothers Hack
As a partial government shutdown takes a growing toll on national parks and other public lands, environmental advocates are concerned that public records relating to the shutdown’s impacts may be harder to access once it ends. Before Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke departed the agency under a cloud of ethics investigations, he transferred public records requests to a political operative and introduced a proposal to limit new requests in the future.
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Assessing that damage, however, could be made harder by new policies within the Interior Department. During the shutdown, the department filed a rule targeting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which have become a source of contention between the Trump administration and the public. Proposed changes by the department would loosen timelines for the requests and give the agency more time to respond, in addition to increasing the burden on filers to be more detailed and specific in their asks. “The bureau will not honor a request that requires an unreasonably burdensome search or requires the bureau to locate, review, redact, or arrange for inspection of a vast quantity of material,” the proposal states.
Last month, Zinke shifted FOIA requests to Deputy Solicitor General Daniel Jorjani, a former adviser to the conservative Koch brothers. That move came amid a sharp uptick in FOIA requests at the Interior Department, many pertaining to Zinke’s own suspected ethics violations.
In light of both that decision and the shutdown’s ongoing toll on public spaces, the new FOIA proposal is disconcerting to some advocates. Prentice-Dunn expressed concerns that information about the shutdown’s impact on areas like Utah’s Grand-Staircase Escalante could go unanswered despite FOIA requests.
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https://thinkprogress.org/interior-foia-national-parks-shutdown-zinke-trump-a845459d3e07/
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