Archives for 2017

President Trump to appoint a new watchdog for the Intelligence Community

As we have argued previously, one of the most troubling aspects of President Obama’s legacy was his failure to nominate permanent Inspectors General (“IGs”) at many agencies across the federal government.  Without presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed leadership, there is always a real danger that IG offices will lack the necessary commitment to transparency and accountability in government.  As Senator Ron Johnson has commented, “acting” IGs—who are typically career civil servants—risk being “not truly independent [because] they can be removed by the agency at any time; they are only temporary and do not drive office policy; and they are at greater risk of compromising their work to appease the agency or the president.”

When President Obama left office, twelve agencies lacked an IG.  Since taking office, President Trump has steadily moved to remedy this dearth of leadership.  Last month, we praised the President for nominating five individuals to some of these watchdog vacancies.  Now, we can sound another note of accomplishment following the White House’s announcement today that it intends to name Michael Atkinson as Inspector General of the Intelligence Community.  Although this post only became vacant shortly after President Trump took office—the former IG, Charles McCullough, retired in March 2017—it is a vital one, particularly in the current political climate.  Mr. Atkinson, who studied law at Cornell University, currently serves as the Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s National Security Division.  He previously worked in the Department’s Fraud and Public Corruption Section.

We reiterate our hope that the White House will continue its efforts to find IGs for all current vacancies, such as those at the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.  The Department of the Interior, sadly, continues to lack a permanent IG since the previous watchdog left office 3,175 day ago.  These large agencies have substantial budgets, and presidentially-appointed IGs will provide an important internal check on waste, fraud, and abuse.

Ryan P. Mulvey is Counsel at Cause of Action Institute.

 

Federal Records Law Must Keep Pace with Evolving Technology

Technology develops faster than law.  This maxim has implications across society, but one place it has particular purchase is in federal recordkeeping and the public’s right to access government information.  The two primary federal statutes that require government to preserve records and then allow the public to access those records are the Federal Records Act (“FRA”) and the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”).  Federal agencies, unfortunately, do not always live up to their obligations under these laws and government-oversight organizations turn to the courts to seek relief.  The public’s right to sue under the FOIA is well established.  However, courts rarely compel agencies to fulfil their FRA obligations.  My organization, Cause of Action Institute (“CoA Institute”), is currently involved in two important FRA lawsuits that may shape the future of agency obligations under the FRA for decades to come, as information technologies continue to change.

Both lawsuits arose from Secretaries of State failing to preserve their emails in compliance with the Federal Records Act.  Former Secretary Hillary Clinton’s email travails are well catalogued.  But former Secretary Colin Powell also used a non-governmental email account to conduct official government business.  The factual difference between these two cases is that while Secretary Clinton primarily used a personal email service with a server in her basement, Secretary Powell used an AOL account.  But Secretary Clinton also used a BlackBerry email account for the first two months of her tenure as Secretary of State.  So, from these two cases the same legal issue arises: what is an agency’s FRA obligation to recover unlawfully removed federal email records that are housed on commercial email servers?

This question is important to the future of federal recordkeeping law and public access to information because we are already seeing an explosion of non-email methods of electronic communication.  Some of these methods of communication store information locally, such as on a phone or computer, and some store them on commercial servers.  For example, FOIA requesters have been battling for access to text messages for years, agency employees use various forms of instant messaging while at work, and we’ve now seen the rise of the surreptitious use of phone applications such as Signal and Confide that do not always preserve the communications.

In Armstrong v. Bush, the D.C. Circuit recognized two cognizable private rights of action under the Federal Records Act.  First, a plaintiff may bring a case against an agency if that agency does not have the requisite recordkeeping policies in place or if the policies are insufficiently clear so that an employee does not know what type of records he is required to save.  Second, a plaintiff may bring a case to compel the head of an agency or the Archivist of the United States to recover records that have been unlawfully removed from the agency.  If the agency head or Archivist is either unable or unwilling to perform that duty, then the FRA requires them to “initiate action through the Attorney General for the recovery” of those records.  To our knowledge, no such referral to the Attorney General has ever occurred.

At stake in CoA Institute’s Clinton and Powell cases is whether a plaintiff can force the agency head and Archivist to refer the matter to the Attorney General when, through their own actions, they have failed to recover all the missing records.  In both cases the State Department asked representatives of Secretaries Clinton and Powell to recover the unlawfully removed records and return them to the agency for historical preservation and for response to FOIA requests.  In both cases those representatives responded that they were unable to obtain copies of the records that were housed on BlackBerry and AOL servers, respectively.  The State Department and Archivist have responded in the ongoing suits that those efforts are sufficient and that they are not required to use legal process or refer the matter to the Attorney General for more forceful efforts at record recovery.

CoA Institute’s case related to Secretary Clinton has already been to the D.C. Circuit once and the appellate court held that the agency is only absolved of its Federal Records Act obligations if it can establish the “fatal loss” of the records in question.  The State Department and Archivist have not made a sufficient affirmative showing that BlackBerry, and AOL in the case of Secretary Powell, do not have, and cannot recover, these email records.  They have offered no statements from either company or detailed efforts by those companies to recover and return the federal records.

Whether the district court compels the current Secretary of State and Archivist to make such an affirmative showing or requires them to refer the matter to the Attorney General for him to attempt record recovery could set an important precedent.  This decision will shape the future of agency responsibilities under the Federal Records Act and the public’s ability to have access to its government’s information as communications technology continues to change.

James Valvo is counsel and senior policy advisor at Cause of Action Institute.  He is counsel in both cases discussed in this article.  You can follow him on Twitter @JamesValvo.

CoA Institute Urges Supreme Court to Hold EPA to Task

Section 321(a) of the Clean Air Act contains an explicit requirement that the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) conduct “continuing employment evaluations” related to Clean Air Act implementation or enforcement.  What this means is that the EPA needs to continually do an analysis of how many jobs will be lost, if any, including whenever it considers new regulations.  This allows the EPA, Congress, and the public as a whole to evaluate whether the loss in American jobs is worth the overall benefit to American lives.  If a regulation, for example, has virtually no impact on environmental well-being, but would cost 30,000 jobs, a rational person would conclude the benefits of the regulation simply aren’t worth the cost.

Of course, most analyses are never this clear cut, which is why we need solid science and transparency from the EPA.  And that’s why Congress required it.  As we detail in our brief, EPA administrations past and present have confessed to not conducting these studies.  Similar requirements extend to a number of other environmental statutes and, to the knowledge of Cause of Action Institute, the EPA has only conducted one such study in the past three decades.  Very recently, the EPA publicly admitted this and indicated its willingness to finally comply, but hasn’t yet released any specifics.

The Murray Energy case centers on employment evaluations required under the Clean Air Act.  A federal court in West Virginia ordered the EPA to comply with the statutory mandates of Congress, castigating the agency for its willful disobedience.  The Fourth Circuit, however, sided with the EPA and ruled that Congress’ edict was too murky to be viewed as “mandatory” and was thus “discretionary.”

Murray Energy has asked the Supreme Court to reverse the court below, and Cause of Action submitted an amicus brief supporting this effort.  Our brief makes the following point: Congress specifically said that the EPA shall conduct the continuing employment evaluations.  Not may, or if something happens, or if the EPA deems it expedient, but shall.  The Fourth Circuit effectively read the mandatory language out of the statute, denying Murray Energy relief because the Circuit court believed it was too complicated to enforce.   That’s not how mandates work. We’re hopeful the Supreme Court will agree, grant review of the case, and reverse the Fourth Circuit’s error.

Eric Bolinder is Counsel at Cause of Action Institute

CoA Institute Sues OMB, Compelling it to Take Transparency Policy Seriously

Cause of Action Institute (“CoA Institute”) has sued the White House Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) for failing to respond to two petitions for rulemaking that CoA Institute submitted to the agency.  These two petitions—both aimed at increasing government transparency—were filed during the Obama Administration but were ignored. One petition for rulemaking focused on the OMB’s outdated Freedom of Information Act fee guidelines while the other focused on an executive order related to earmarking. We hope these lawsuits will spur the Trump Administration to action to increase the public’s ability to know what its government is up to.

Petition for Rulemaking on OMB’s Outdated FOIA Fee Guidelines

The Freedom of Information Act requires agencies to produce records on a reduced fee schedule if the requester qualifies as a “representative of the news media” or other favored category.  The FOIA requires agencies to issue records free of charge if the information is in the public interest and the requester has a means to distribute it.  Unfortunately, agencies often use these fee provisions as a mechanism to block requesters that are doing rigorous oversight of the agency.

As information technology advanced over the past two decades, Congress recognized that journalism was changing in fundamental ways and that citizen journalists and nonprofit organizations were just as vital to conducting government oversight as the traditional news media.  That’s why, in the Open Government Act of 2007, Congress provided a statutory definition of a “representative of the news media” that expressly noted that “as methods of news delivery evolve (for example, the adoption of the electronic dissemination of newspapers through telecommunications services), such alternative media shall be considered to be news-media entities.”[1]

But the FOIA also requires OMB to develop and maintain guidelines on FOIA fee issues and it requires agencies to conform their regulations to OMB’s guidelines.  In 1987, OMB issued its one and only guidance document on FOIA fees and in that document it requires “representatives of the news media” to work for organizations that are “organized and operated to publish or broadcast news to the public.”  The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) attempted to use this outdated standard against CoA Institute to deny us a preferable fee status and thus drive up the cost of our oversight of that agency.  We took the FTC to the D.C. Circuit and won.  The opinion in that case explained that the “organized and operated” standard was no longer proper.[2]

Yet ten years after Congress changed the statutory standard and two years after the D.C. Circuit directed that the “organized and operated” standard was no longer viable, dozens of agencies still employ it and OMB still has not updated its 1987 FOIA fee guidance.

In an effort to spur OMB to reform its outmoded guidance and to move all agencies toward compliance with the statute, CoA Institute filed a petition for rulemaking with OMB in June 2016.  The agency has not responded to that petition and we were forced to sue to bring the issue to resolution.

Petition for Rulemaking on Executive Order 13457

In 2008, President George W. Bush issued Executive Order 13457 to pressure Congress to reform its profligate earmarking practices.  The order required, inter alia, that executive-branch agencies proactively disclose any attempts by members of Congress or their staff to influence discretionary spending decisions the agencies were making.  President Bush directed OMB to ensure that agencies complied with the order.

Through an investigation, CoA Institute was able to establish that OMB understood Executive Order 13457 to apply to both legislative earmarks (i.e., spending directives in statute and committee reports) and executive branch earmarks (i.e., efforts by outside forces to pressure agencies to make certain spending decisions).  CoA Institute’s investigation also revealed that very few agencies were complying with the order; the Department of Energy was a notable exception.

In an effort to spur the Obama Administration to implement Executive Order 13457, CoA Institute joined with Demand Progress and filed a petition for rulemaking at OMB asking it “to issue a rule ensuring the continuing force and effect of Executive Order 13457, Protecting American Taxpayers From Government Spending on Wasteful Earmarks[.]”  More than two years have passed since we filed the petition and OMB has not responded.

Conclusion

The White House Office of Management and Budget sits at a unique place in the federal administrative state.  It has the opportunity to put in place and require adherence to cross-agency rules that can increase or decrease government transparency.  Ensuring that FOIA fees are not improperly used to block agency oversight and requiring proactive disclosure of congressional attempts to influence agency discretionary spending decisions are two ways OMB can make a difference.  CoA Institute has filed suit today to compel them to take these responsibilities seriously.

James Valvo is counsel and senior policy advisor at Cause of Action Institute.  He was instrumental in crafting both petitions for rulemaking and the lawsuit discussed in this post.  You can follow him on Twitter @JamesValvo.

[1] 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(A)(ii)

[2] Cause of Action v. Fed. Trade Comm’n, 799 F.3d 1108 (D.C. Cir. 2015).

Cause of Action Institute Sues White House OMB Over Failure to Act on Transparency Rules

Washington, DC – Cause of Action Institute (“CoA Institute”) today filed a lawsuit against the White House Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) for failing to act on two petitions for rulemaking submitted well over a year ago. Both petitions ask OMB to take its transparency obligations seriously and enact rules that would promote public disclosure of agency records.

The first petition requests that the Office of Management and Budget update its fee guidance for Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) requests. OMB’s fee guidance is outdated and now conflicts with both statutory and judicial authorities. The FOIA law requires OMB to establish these guidelines and requires every agencies’ fee rules to conform to OMB’s guidance. The FOIA Advisory Committee and the Archivist of the United States have also recommended that Office of Management and Budget update this guidance.

The second petition relates to protecting taxpayers against wasteful executive branch earmarks. Previous administrations have required agencies to disclose congressional efforts to meddle in agency spending decisions, an effort first started under President George W. Bush’s Executive Order 13457. The Trump administration has yet to address this issue.

CoA Institute Counsel and Senior Policy Advisor James Valvo: “It does not appear the Trump administration has any plans to finalize these rules, which would go a long way to promoting government transparency. FOIA requesters are often deterred due to high costs agencies charge to produce records. In recent years, the courts have clarified that many groups beyond traditional journalists are now eligible for news media fee waivers. Updating OMB’s FOIA guidance to reflect this broad definition is critical. This lawsuit is a great opportunity for the Trump administration to show its leadership on transparency issues.”

The lawsuit can be found here

For information regarding this press release, please contact Zachary Kurz, Director of Communications at CoA Institute: zachary.kurz@causeofaction.org

Transparency Groups: Finalize Release to One, Release to All FOIA Policy

Cause of Action Institute and Sunlight Foundation file petition to advance rule that would promote broad disclosure of agency records

Washington, DC – Cause of Action Institute (“CoA Institute”) today joined the Sunlight Foundation in filing a petition for rulemaking demanding the Trump administration move forward with a rule to promote government transparency and broad public disclosure of agency records. The Release to One, Release to All rule, first proposed by the Obama administration, mandates that agencies make records produced in response to Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) requests also publicly available on the agencies’ websites, with certain limited exceptions. CoA Institute also led a broad coalition of government transparency organizations in sending a letter to the White House Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) and Department of Justice Office of Information Policy urging action to finalize the rule.

CoA Institute Counsel and Senior Policy Advisor James Valvo: “‘Release to One, Release to All’ is a great way to increase the amount of government information in the public sphere. When agencies release information under FOIA, with limited exceptions, it is prepared for release to the public. The Obama administration has already run the pilot program and the Department of Justice has already accepted public comment on the policy. It’s time to finalize it.”

Sunlight Foundation Deputy Director Alex Howard: “Despite multiple requests for updates from the Justice Department over the past year, it does not appear the Trump administration has any plans to finalize and promulgate this policy, or even answer basic questions about why it has stalled. Our petition compels the Trump administration to either move forward with disclosure and implementation, or explain why they don’t believe the policy is workable. The ‘Release to One, Release to All’ policy for the Freedom of Information Act has broad support within the transparency community, and we deserve an explanation as to why progress has ground to a halt after months of analysis, planning and responsive feedback to a request for public comment.”

On June 30, 2016, President Obama directed a review of the feasibility of such a FOIA policy. More than ten months have passed since the January 1, 2017 completion deadline for that review. Despite this analysis and gathering public comments, progress on the rule has now halted completely without explanation.

For these reasons, CoA Institute led a group of 22 organizations in sending a letter to the White House and Justice Department urging them to take the next step in finalizing the policy.

The letter states:

“Release to One, Release to All” is sound public policy that would increase government transparency and leverage the existing investment in FOIA disclosures… Placing this information in the public domain would allow the public to know what type of information is being requested, to search these prior productions for information relevant to their own purposes, and, perhaps, decrease the number for future requests or facilitate future requesters making more informed and targeted requests. What’s more, placing these information resources into the public domain has the potential to create unknown benefits, such as analyses of patterns in FOIA requests and harnessing of the information for other uses… We urge you to take the next step and finalize the policy.

The petition for rulemaking can be found here.
The letter can be found here.

For information regarding this press release, please contact Zachary Kurz, Director of Communications at CoA Institute: zachary.kurz@causeofaction.org

Newest TIGTA Review Shows Broader Extent of Political Targeting by IRS

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a proposed consent order settling a federal case in which scores of organizations allege that the IRS violated their rights to free speech, free association, and equal protection of the law when it screened their applications for tax-exempt status on the basis of their names and policy positions alone. In the consent order the IRS admits its process was wrong and the Court will declare that “discrimination on the basis of political viewpoint in administering the United States tax code violates fundamental First Amendment rights.” That’s a spectacular settlement and a welcome outcome for the plaintiffs. But it will not end the IRS’s continuing practice of preparing sensitive case reports for supervisory review whenever an application or request for information might “attract media or Congressional attention.” The Internal Revenue Manual provisions that authorize sensitive case reports are where the scandal of political targeting by the IRS began. And until those provisions are withdrawn, cases and requests that an administration considers “sensitive” but outside the terms of the new consent order may still get special treatment within the IRS.

In a 2013 Audit Report, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (“TIGTA”) found that the IRS “inappropriately identified specific groups applying for tax-exempt status” whose applications would receive special scrutiny. Over a two-year period beginning in May 2010, the IRS inappropriately identified those groups “based on their names or policy positions instead of developing criteria based on tax-exempt laws and Treasury Regulations.” The result was a process by which the IRS demanded and examined additional information from these groups after labelling them “Tea Party cases,” and the ensuing controversy was dubbed the “IRS Tea Party targeting scandal.”

In its new 2017 Review, published earlier this month, TIGTA recounts how the IRS developed and used 17 “selection criteria” between 2004 and 2013 to identify which groups and applications for tax-exempt status deserved extra attention. Politicians and media outlets are claiming that the 2017 Review proves there never was an “IRS Tea Party targeting scandal” because the IRS also used names and policy positions to select progressive, liberal, and Democratic-affiliated groups for heightened scrutiny. A Washington Post headline sums up the revisionist interpretation:  “Four years later, the IRS tea party scandal looks very different.  It may not even be a scandal.”

This 2017 Review provides new information, disclosing that the IRS sometimes used names and political positions alone as selection criteria for heightened scrutiny of tax-exempt applications instead of the organization’s activities and the requirements of the Internal Revenue Code and related regulations. The initial 2013 Audit Report was limited to two years of IRS practice beginning in May 2010 because that was “the first date that [TIGTA was] informed that the Determinations Unit was using criteria which identified specific organizations by name.” 2013 Audit Report at 9 n. 20.  Yet the 2017 Review shows that the same kind of “inappropriate” practice began at least five years earlier, and neither the new 2017 Review nor the early press and political commenters recognize the significance of this revelation.

Yes, as the early reactions suggest, two of the overtly partisan criteria identified in the 2017 Review are tied expressly to the Democratic Party and “progressive” partisans.  But the IRS first used these criteria to choose applications for heightened scrutiny way back in 2005 and 2007, during the George W. Bush administration.

At the end of 2007, the IRS selected applications from groups named in the “Emerge network of organizations” whose purpose “was to train women to run as Democratic candidates for public office.” By September 2008 the IRS highlighted the “Emerge” criterion in an e-mail alert and training.  Up to 12 applications may have been affected by the Emerge criterion, either initially or upon subsequent review.

In October 2005 the IRS began using the “Progressive” criterion, identifying “the word ‘progressive’” and the “Common thread.”  In April 2007, the IRS noted further that the groups “appear as anti-Republican” with “references to ‘blue’ as being ‘progressive.’”  Up to 74 applications may have been affected by the Progressive criterion.

These two criteria are no small potatoes. Together, the Emerge and Progressive criteria may have played an inappropriate role in more than half (96 of 181) of the applications considered in the 2017 Review.

Two other criteria identified in the 2017 Review are overtly partisan for the other side. Just before the 2010 mid-term elections, the Obama IRS looked for “Pink Slip” and “We the People” in names or titles as proxies for Tea Party groups to select tax-exempt applications for special examination. And in the run up to the 2012 general election in which President Obama was re-elected, the IRS began using “Paying the National Debt” to identify applications for extra scrutiny, a criterion which overlapped with “We the People.”

So, reporters and politicians who claim that the IRS’s inappropriate use of names and policy positions was never a scandal are ignoring the important chronology revealed in the new 2017 Review. By claiming that this selection process was not scandalous because goose and gander got the same sauce without considering who applied that sauce and when, they are condoning politically influenced tax decisions at the IRS so long as the law allows presidents of both political parties to harass their political opponents. But wrongs on both sides don’t make a right. As John McGlothlin of Cause of Action Institute opined last week in “The Hill,” the 2017 Review shows that “neither side focused on the larger point – that citizens from both sides of the political spectrum, were being denied their rights.”

Politics periodically infects tax enforcement and administrations of both parties have used political targeting by the IRS. But as Cause of Action Institute has discussed many times, the larger point is that the IRS and Congress have turned blind eyes to the identifiable, current provisions in the Internal Revenue Manual that allow such meddling. So inappropriate political targeting by the IRS remains a threat under the agency’s own regulations, even now under President Trump. Leviathan’s nature is to flee reform, so let’s hope Congress exercises its power to tame that beast, and soon. Without those reforms, the IRS can and inevitably will continue to use  inappropriate, politically-charged criteria in enforcement, investigatory, and compliance decisions, to evade congressional reforms, and to avoid accountability.

Mike Geske is counsel at Cause of Action Institute.