This story was produced and originally published by The New Republic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
I don’t know if David Schnare even wrote a resignation letter when he quit his job at the Environmental Protection Agency. But if he did, I want to know what it said.
On April 3 of this year, Huffington Post reporter Ashley Feinberg filed a request for “any and all electronic correspondence” between EPA staffer Millan Hupp and Pruitt. Hupp, who resigned from her job as Pruitt’s scheduler last week, was at the center of many Pruitt controversies, the most famous one being that Pruitt allegedly asked Hupp to find him a used mattress from one of Trump’s hotels. On June 1, Feinberg received an email from EPA saying her request was 1,208th in the queue, with an estimated completion date of September 27, 2019 — 542 days after she filed it.
Another EPA reporter — who asked not to be named to speak freely about her job — said they filed a request for any “policies or guidance” about how the EPA staff should communicate with reporters. That request, submitted July 2017, is 550th in the EPA’s queue. The estimated completion date is September 2019, also 542 days after the original request.
In his letter to Pruitt, Cummings noted that “EPA regulations require the agency to use ‘multitrack processing’ in which simple requests are processed more quickly than complex requests. EPA regulations provide that if the agency determines that a request would be placed in the slower track, the agency would provide the requester with the opportunity to narrow the scope of the request. Guidance issued by the Department of Justice encourages agencies to use multi-track processing so that simple requests are processed more quickly and do not get stuck behind older, more complex requests.”
Nick Surgey, who writes for The Intercept and has broken several big stories about the EPA through FOIA requests, says he has experienced firsthand the agency’s failure to use multi-track processing. “I don’t think any of my requests have actually been determined complex, and most I would say are very simple,” he said. Some of Surgey’s most simple requests—like one for former EPA staffer Samatha Dravis’s resignation letter—are estimated to take more than 500 days. “It’s like when I got to my local pizza place and they say it’s a two-hour wait,” he said. “They don’t know. They just mean, ‘Fuck off.’”