The EPA’s catch-us-if-you-can game with Congress is not the norm, Senate environmental committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D-CA) said in kicking off this morning’s hearing (airing on C-Span), declaring, “In all my years in the House and the Senate, I’ve never seen such disregard and disrespect…. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
She went on to describe what her staff had to do to actually take notes on the EPA staff’s recommendation on California’s greenhouse gas waiver, even producing a visual aid. The documents with “sensitive” information on them had been covered with white tape, she said, and her staff had to pull it off to see — a task which took 5 1/2 hours to review 46 pages (read what they said here). She produced a visual aid, a heap of the tape; saying “this is what they did to us.”
Update: Here’s the transcript:
SEN. BOXER: In my many years in the House and in the Senate — and I’m very pained to say this, as chairman of this committee — I have never seen such disregard and disrespect by an agency head for Congress and for the committees with the responsibility for oversight of his agency.
***
EPA has failed to fully respond to our requests for information, which I’ll go into in the question time. I’ve never seen anything like it. We asked for the documents. First, we didn’t get them when they were promised, and then we were told that the EPA staff would have to look over the shoulders of our staff, and our staff had to pull off pieces of tape off these documents to find out what Administrator Johnson was advised by his staff.
(To staff) Do we have that tape here?
STAFF: (Off mike.)
SEN. BOXER: We’re going to show you that.
Imagine — and it took the staff five and a half hours of time to transcribe 46 pages. This failure to cooperate with the Oversight Committee is unacceptable and must be corrected. The mission of the EPA is to protect human health and the environment. The administrative decision does neither.
The people who pay the administrator’s salary have a right to know how he came to a decision that is so far removed from the facts, the law, the science, the precedent, state’s rights, and all the rest that goes with it.
***
I said before I’d show you the kind of lack of cooperation we had. Colleagues, this is the tape. This is the tape that was put over — finally administration had a way to use duct tape, a very — this administration — this is what they did to us. They put this white tape over the document, and staff had to stand here — it’s just unbelievable — and pull off — out of the sentences here. I mean, what a waste of our time.
This isn’t national security. This isn’t classified information, colleagues. This is information the people the people deserve to have. And this is not the way we should run, you know, the greatest government in the world. It does not befit us.
