Blog Archives – Page 3 of 20 – Environmental Data and Governance Initiative

July 22, 2022July 22, 2022Blog

EDGI’s Response to the EPA’s Announcement it Will Retain its Online Archive

Tuesday July 19, 2022, after recently announcing the planned sunsetting of portions of its online archive, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency updated their Web Archive website with an announcement that the archive in its entirety will remain online until at least July 2023. The EPA stated that they extended the timeline “to assess the use of archive content and to continue to analyze, inventory, and transition key content to our main website.” This comes after EDGI and other environmental groups sent an open letter to the agency, urging them to keep this critical public resource online.

July 6, 2022July 19, 2022Blog

Upcoming Workshop Reveals Documents Showing How the Trump Administration Worked to Hamper the EPA

EDGI, Toxic Docs, and Sierra Club are collecting thousands of internal government documents on the environment obtained by public interest groups through […]

July 5, 2022July 19, 2022Blog

What Went on in the Trump EPA? Announcing a New FOIA Archive

On July 27th at 1PM EST, Merlin Chowkwanyun of Toxic Docs, Chris Sellers of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, and Elena Saxonhouse of the Sierra Club will publicly debut a cache of internal documents from the Trump administration detailing what it did to hamper the efficacy of the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s the latest addition to a project we’re calling EDGIFOIA, an initiative of EDGI, Toxic Docs, Sierra Club, and other environmental and open government groups to pool documents from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests over the past few years into a single, easily searchable repository. The repository includes documents revealing behind-the-scenes maneuvering of Trump’s first EPA administrator, deliberations that led to the dismantling of the Clean Power Plan, and the many firms that took advantage of the agency’s receptiveness to industry.

June 30, 2022June 30, 2022Blog

EDGI’s Response to the Supreme Court ruling on West Virginia v. EPA

Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled to limit the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to carry out and enforce the Clean Air Act. In West Virginia v. EPA, it ruled that the defunct Obama Administration Clean Power Plan exceeded the powers granted by the act, arguing the agency lacked “comparative expertise” to determine how the law should be executed without clear legislation from Congress. The ruling invoked a new “major questions doctrine” that agencies lack the ability to determine “major questions” without “clear” statutory authority. The doctrine likely opens a wide array of regulatory actions–by the EPA and other federal agencies–up to legal challenge.