Publication Items

The U.S. Department of the Interior is not winning many awards for openness. A House subcommittee recently took up the complaint that Interior's Office of the Solicitor would not even honor the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) ombudsman's office with a response to repeated letters.

The Senate-passed bill contains an explicit exemption from permits and fees for newsgathering. A House energy bill, now going to conference to be reconciled with the Senate bill, contains no newsgathering exemption. But that's not the end of the story. Image courtesy of NPS.

U.S. EPA on April 29, 2016, posted on its website the 2015 "final" report by its Cancer Assessment Review Committee on the widely used herbicide glyphosate, sold commercially by Monsanto as Roundup. But on May 2, the report vanished from the EPA site.

The language, in the report accompanying the bill, declares that employees of the marketing boards are "not government employees," and "urges the USDA to recognize" that such boards are exempt from FOIA. Image: © Clipart.com.