Obama’s EPA scandal begins
to see the light of day
Freedom Outpost – Tim Brown –
5/24/2013
A
letter was sent by Republican Senators David Vitter (R-LA), Jim Inhofe (R-OK),
and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) along with Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) to
Acting EPA Administrator Bob Perciasepe last Friday. They have accused the
agency of continuing to make conservative think tanks and state and local
governments pay full price for obtaining documents under the Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA), but routinely waiving those fees for environmental
groups.
“This disparate treatment is
unacceptable, especially in light of the recent controversy over abusive
tactics at the Internal Revenue Service, which singled out conservative groups
for special scrutiny,” the legislators wrote.
They specifically pointed
out that, according
to the data, ninety-two percent (92%)
of fee waivers granted by the EPA were requests from environmental groups.
“The startling disparity in
treatment strongly suggests EPA’s actions are possibly part of a broader effort
to collude with groups that share the agency’s political agenda and
discriminate against states and conservative organizations,” they alleged. “This is a clear abuse of discretion.”
The committee reviewed over
1,200 pages of EPA correspondence between January 1, 2012 and April 26, 2013
and discovered that the EPA “manipulated
the FOIA fee waiver process. Among the groups that had their fees waved
were National Resources Defense Council, EarthJustice, Public Employees for
Environmental Responsibility, Sierra Club, and National Wildlife Federation.
In contrast EPA denied ninety-three percent of the
requests from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think
tank. Overall fee waivers were only granted to other think tanks twenty-seven
percent of the time. The EPA also
denied nearly every request for a fee waiver from states and localities.
Issa and the Republican
senators claim that “This is a clear abuse of discretion.”
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