Whether it’s pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord or weakening regulations on clean air and water, the Trump administration has ushered in an unprecedented takeover of our democracy.
Now, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is trying to hide the widespread damage it’s doing, at the behest of polluting corporations, to longstanding health and environmental protections. The EPA is trying to change its rules — without any public input — on what information it will or won’t make public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Their goal is to make it easier to gut environmental protections by making it harder for people to know what’s happening. And all so that Big Polluters that fuel destruction of our environment and our communities can rake in even more profits with impunity.
FOIA is a critical tool that ensures people can access important information about what government agencies are up to. It helps ensure that government employees, who work for all of us, are acting more transparently, and with accountability.
This latest move to hide the actions of the EPA is unacceptable, and threatens our right to know what our government is doing on our behalf. Take action and demand that Congress safeguard our right to know what Trump’s EPA is doing. That way the EPA can’t hide the extreme actions it is taking to undermine critical environmental protections to the benefit of corporate interests.
At the same time that the administration is restricting our access to information, the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned more than 40 years of FOIA precedent by ruling in favor of corporate secrecy over the public’s right to know.
The solution is to pass a law safeguarding our right to know, which would undo the damage of the Supreme Court ruling, and make it harder for the EPA to hide its extreme actions. A bipartisan group of senators has recently introduced the Open and Responsive Government Act of 2019 to do just that by safeguarding FOIA requests and ensuring the public’s right to information. This law, with the support of prominent Democrats and Republicans, goes a long way in addressing the secrecy and corporate influence that is a hallmark of the Trump administration.
