Contractors are a powerful force in many corners of the environment and energy beat, and their trade associations are often players in the regulatory and legislative dealmaking that can shape US policy.

In response to deep cuts in its budget, EIA announced that it would not be able to compile and publish products like its ongoing estimates of US oil reserves. In fact, EIA will not even be able to continue its investigation of whether speculators are driving up oil prices.

A former employee of a restaurant in Acadia National Park won a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit over records the National Park Service had refused to release, about a 2008 incident when he was among those detained by Park Service police.

If you spend a lot of time researching things on the Internet as part of your reporting, the online Data Science Toolkit, which is especially handy with geographic data, and a book by Pete Warden could make parts of your job a lot easier.

Denial of news media access to Gulf beaches has been an issue since the Deepwater Horizon disaster. There's tussling over access to (and interpretation of) scientific information on possible impacts of the spill on the Gulf ecosystem. And The Guardian obtained >30,000 pages of BP in-house memos FOIA'd by Greenpeace, which suggest BP was working hard to influence the results of the research it was paying for.

A top Wisconsin Republican party official on March 17 filed a request under the state's freedom-of-information law for emails written by University of Wisconsin's William J. Cronon, after the professor blogged about the American Legislative Exchange Council, an anti-regulatory group that lobbies state legislatures.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse tool, based on documents filed in court through existing systems like PACER, will help both FOIA lawyers and you.

The draft policy, released recently by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), barely addresses media access. It leaves this to the purview of the Commerce Department Public Communications Policy — which has not changed since the last year of the Bush administration.

The intrepid Mac McClelland, who covered the spill and secrecy at its peak for Mother Jones, went back to see if anything had changed. But BP's cops tried to stop her.

AP reported President Barack Obama received an award "for making the government more open and transparent — presented to him behind closed doors with no news coverage or public access allowed." The event offered evidence that Obama's minders may be the worst enemies of his presidency — and that the PR pros are badly fumbling the PR ball.