On June 13, 2025, Sierra Club filed a new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to bring greater transparency to the actions of the agency’s political appointees, some of whom came to the agency straight from the fossil fuel industry or one of Elon Musk’s companies. In March, Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program (ELP) requested calendars and correspondence from 30 new political appointees, including Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and embedded DOGE staffers, among others. Although FOIA has a 20-working day deadline for agencies to determine how it will respond,
the Department of Energy has neither provided a single document nor committed to a timeframe for responding. This failure to respond is a violation of FOIA.
Prior to his appointment to DOE, Secretary Wright was the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, a leading oil and fracked gas company. He has been an outspoken critic of policies aimed at curbing climate change and the transition to renewable energy. Under Wright’s leadership, DOE recently made a streak of consequential decisions that will increase climate and health-harming pollution, raise energy bills, and stymie the clean energy jobs boom that the Inflation Reduction Act had initiated. For example, the agency has sought to extend the life of uneconomic coal-fired power plants on the verge of retirement, roll back energy efficiency standards, and cancel financing for green manufacturing projects. The documents requested include Wright’s and other political appointees’ email and text correspondence with a long list of industry and outside influencers and will help shed light on the agency’s activities and influencers.
ELP ramped up its Freedom of Information Act work this year in response to the second Trump Administration. During Trump’s first Administration, ELP’s FOIA work was crucial in exposing numerous scandals and the role of backdoor industry conversations. Sierra Club ELP attorneys Elena Saxonhouse and Andrea Issod, and Managing Paralegal David Abell developed our strategy in designing and submitting the underlying FOIA requests and overseeing all litigation in our FOIA campaign.