Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute sued the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) for flouting the Freedom of Information Act. CEI’s Chris Horner asked OSTP to produce work-related emails that OSTP’s Director, John Holdren, stored in an email account at his former employer, the environmental-pressure group Woods Hole Research Center. OSTP has resisted producing them.
What is ironic about this is that OSTP’s Director, soon after taking office, lectured OSTP employees about not conducting official business using private email accounts, and about the need to forward all work-related communications to their agency email account in order to comply with federal record-keeping laws. (See May 10, 2010 Memo from OSTP Director John Holdren to all OSTP staff, Subject: Reminder: Compliance with the Federal Records Act and the President’s Ethics Pledge, at 1, available as Exhibit B to the letter at this link.)
Apparently, the longer an official is in power, and the less he fears losing power, the less he cares about government transparency and the rule of law. The complaint is reposted immediately below.
Complaint filed in CEIv. OSTP on 05-05-14
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OSTP Director Holdren is the official who made the bizarre and counterintuitive claim that global warming is resulting in more severe winter cold, a claim that climate scientists and climatologists like Judith Curry and Pat Michaels say is bunk:
http://www.openmarket.org/2014/05/05/cei-files-lawsuit-against-office-of-science-and-technology-policy/
Peer-reviewed scholarly articles also suggest that Holdren’s claim was wrong, as this correction petition under the Information Quality Act explains:
http://cei.org/legal-briefs/data-quality-act-request-ostp-about-holdrens-polar-vortex-comments
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