The Treasury Department has not responded to a public records request in months, and now it is being sued .
Protect the Public Trust wants the Treasury Department’s email communications with more than 30 left-leaning groups concerning tax policy and climate change. These groups include the Center for American Progress, the Sierra Club, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
PPT made multiple edits to its Freedom of Information Act requests ostensibly to help the Treasury Department make the search more reasonable. But for the past eight months, the federal department, with “over 100,000 employees across the country and around the world,” has been unable to find one person even to respond.
“Over a year has passed since PPT first submitted its requests and over 250 days have passed since Treasury acknowledged receipt of the Combined Request, yet Treasury still has not made a determination with respect to it,” a lawsuit filed Friday reads.
Simply ignoring a request instead of issuing a denial is part of a broader trend, according to a FOIA expert who spoke to the Washington Examiner.
“Unfortunately, nowadays it's becoming more and more common across the federal government, particularly, but also at the state [and] local level,” David Cuillier said in a phone interview. “It's really disconcerting.”
Cuillier runs the Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida . He also teaches about and researches public information and serves on the federal FOIA Advisory Committee .
“Ten years ago, on average, when you ask for a public record from our government, you’d get it about half the time, which still isn't very good, but now the federal level’s down to about 10% of the time,” Cuillier said, calling the low percentage “outrageous.”
He said the response rate has been in “steady decline” for “20, 30 years.”
“We’re getting to the point where it’s almost down to zero,” Cuillier said.
Protect the Public Trust provided specific search terms after the Treasury Department asked for clarification. Government agencies sometimes ask questions just to draw out the process, Cuillier said.
“It’s happening more and more as agencies learn how to game the system,” he said. “Delay is denial, and they know that.”
“We’re seeing all sorts of shenanigans with weird responses and denials that defy common sense,” the FOIA expert told the Washington Examiner. He said this specific request is fairly straightforward as it is easy enough to pull emails.
He suggested, based on his experience, that politically charged requests are more likely to get denied.
In this case, a “conservative group” is “asking for information ... regarding environmental groups,” which suggests a “political agenda,” he said.
However, it “doesn’t matter who is in charge,” Cuillier said, because both political parties favor secrecy with public records.
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While the Treasury Department has not responded in months, its initial responses do suggest there must be records to provide.
After all, it told the requesters in October 2023 that “performing a search using the keywords [PPT] provided would result in voluminous records which may not be responsive to [PPT’s] request,” according to the lawsuit.
Matt Lamb is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is an associate editor for the College Fix and has previously worked for Students for Life of America and Turning Point USA.
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