Public Is Redacted (3/25/02)
by Dean Hartwell
In response to court
orders, the Bush Administration recently released over ten thousand documents
about Vice President Cheney's task force on energy. Among them were letters and
electronic mails from energy industry executives to the White House.
Unfortunately, most of the documents were redacted, or censored.
Several organizations, among them the Judicial Watch (which routinely sued the
Clinton Administration), filed lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) to force the Bush Administration to reveal communications that may have
influenced its policies. Because of the redactions, the very purpose of these
lawsuits was negated.
A handful of the papers hinted at what might be in the rest of the stack. One
of them, a memo prepared by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers for the
Administration, declared that the policy of requiring car manufacturers to
increase fuel efficiency was “ineffective.” Not long afterwards, the Cheney
task force declined to raise fuel efficiency standards.
Similarly, the company Citco asked the White House to use federal power to stop
the states from promoting their own fuel standards. In his task force, the Vice
President called for the EPA to handle that.
Likewise, a group of utility companies told the Bush Administration that they
favored trading “environmental credits” as a policy of curbing plant pollution
instead of fines. The Cheney task force agreed with this assessment as well.
We don’t need the rest of the documents to figure it out that leaders in the
energy industry have influenced President Bush’s policies. We do need to
determine for ourselves whether this one-sided influence is an acceptable way
of making policy. I, for one, long for an Administration that picks up more
ideas from John and Jane Citizen and less from the executives of Citco.