Finally, a federal judge has ordered energy regulators to declare what documents they have responsive to inquiries involving potential ethics violations with implications for American consumers, and when they plan to release them.
Deadlines for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to comply with Freedom of Information requirements in two cases involving its senior officials, including former chairman Richard Glick, have come and gone in recent weeks.
“Really, they have just been gaming the judicial system,” Horner said in an interview. “The law is clear that the public have a legal right to timely production, but FERC remains highly selective in what they release and needlessly dragging matters out with dribs and drabs, with at most tens of documents every few months while claiming to be swimming in thousands requiring processing. FERC refused for months to reveal even how much they are withholding.
“Fortunately,” Horner continued, “by pressing FERC to get specific one court has now forced the commission to say, after seven months, ok, really there were only 89 records at issue. Not thousands. So much for that excuse. Indeed, the rest of FERC’s intemperate filing strongly suggest the reason FERC has stonewalled IER requests is that it is unhappy about IER’s requests.”
Although Congress established FERC as an “independent agency” in 1977, heavy interaction between FERC’s senior officials and White House climate operatives suggest otherwise, as does correspondence between Commissioner Allison Clements and her aides with Clements’ former employers and clients the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sustainable FERC, and the Energy Foundation.
IER’s FOIA records have attracted the attention of congressional figures who were already inquiring about potential conflicts of interest on the part of Commissioner Clements. On March 17, 2022, then-minority members of the House Oversight and Reform Committee sent a letter addressed to Clements inquiring about disclosures she made and did not make to FERC or to the Office of Government Ethics. At the time, her husband was employed by a solar energy company based in Washington D.C.
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