A watchdog group is taking the Department of Energy to court over the agency’s push to cull its backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests.
American Oversight, which mostly targets Republicans, filed the lawsuit last week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The nonprofit organization took issue with DOE’s plan to close pending FOIA requests if the petitioners don’t indicate whether they’re still interested in the requests.
The proposal could lead to hundreds of requests being closed without the petitioners’ knowledge, which American Oversight argues would be outside the law and a blow against government transparency.
“The Trump administration doesn’t get to invent new hoops for the public to jump through to obtain lawfully requested government records,” said Chioma Chukwu, the group’s executive director, in a statement.
