January 2025: During the week following President Trump’s inauguration, ELP attorneys worked in close coordination with attorneys at partner organizations to submit a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to various federal agencies in an effort to protect critical environmental data from being destroyed or discarded. We prioritized comprehensive requests to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy.
With these FOIA requests, we are seeking to preserve priority datasets, statistics, worksheets and public-facing tools from being deleted or otherwise made inaccessible to the public. Under the FOIA statute, agencies have a “duty to preserve records”, meaning that once the information is requested, it cannot be destroyed or deleted.
Senior Attorney Andrea Issod explains the importance of these requests: “The American people have a right to continued access to the valuable data and information their tax dollars help compile, no matter who might be president. This information is critical to the work being done to protect public health, avoid the very worst of the climate crisis, and grow the clean energy economy. We will continue to pursue these and all other avenues available to us under the law to protect the public interest and our planet.”