Research Tools: “What Went on in the Trump EPA? Announcing a New FOIA Archive”

From the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI):

On July 13 at 3PM 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.

This latest trove of documents adds to the batch made available when the repository first opened to the public in December 2020, upon the 50th anniversary of EPA’s founding. This venture builds on Freedom of Information Act and state-level sunshine laws that enable organizations to request documents on the inner workings of environmental agencies. Yet FOIA’d documents are often released in thousand-page data dumps with little regard for ease of use or broader accessibility. Through a portal on EDGI’s “A People’s EPA” website, EDGIFOIA collects a growing number of these documents in one place and makes them eminently more searchable than current FOIA portals allow.

Learn More, Read the Complete Announcement, View Selected Documents

See Also: Upcoming Workshop (July 13, 2022) Reveals Documents Showing How the Trump Administration Worked to Hamper the EPA

Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Data Files, News, Open Access