Biden Admin
House Hearing Explores GAO “Scandal-pause” Revelations
Following up on this post, yesterday the House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee held a hearing into the Biden-Harris Department of Energy politicizing U.S. energy security and national security by “pausing” permitting for certain new exports of liquified natural gas. The subcommittee pressed for answers to the questions raised by GAO’s work and specifically referred on multiple occasions to DoE’s stonewalling…
House Oversight to Take Testimony on Political Nature of LNG ‘Pause’ Scandal Uncovered by GAO
Per a press release issued at the end of last week, tomorrow (Wednesday, December 4, 2024) at 4 pm: Interestingly, given how GAO has affirmed the political nature of this clearly major decision (reflected in the hearing’s title) with such far-reaching impacts, the Subcommittee will inquire into the role of John Podesta, now serving in the State Department role of…
Confessing to the Error of Biden’s Ways
Chris Horner, a lawyer for GAO in many open records cases as well as amicus briefs informing the courts what is actually going on with the regulatory onslaught we are seeing, had a piece in Monday’s Wall Street Journal combining both topics. This item built on Horner’s most two recent Journal pieces, “The EPA Defies the Supreme Court” (August 2023)…
UPDATES on FOIA’d Emails Suggest More Biden Administration Politicking with Federal Programs
As part of GAO’s running tally of document productions on this matter: UPDATE: November 15, 2024 production is here. UPDATE: November 21, 2024 production is here. UPDATE: A supplemental, November 27, 2024 production following challenges to certain redactions is here.
LNG “Pause” Scandal: GAO Files Notice with Court of Bloomberg Reporting
GAO filed a Notice of Supplemental Authority about this reporting by Bloomberg into the administration’s hurried effort to seal its (previously) stealth effort to stitch-up, before the January inauguration, a policy restricting exports of liquified natural gas (LNG) to non-FTA countries, grounded in a false pretext. From the filing:
“Borders on bad faith”; “too clever by half”; “gamesmanship”
Brief filed slamming DoE stunt suddenly deciding there are no LNG pause studies after all In the latest development involving the LNG “pause” scandal outed by GAO litigation under the Freedom of Information Act, GAO has filed its Reply to the Biden-Harris Department of Energy’s Opposition to GAO’s Motion for Judgment on the Pleadings, and Memo in support thereof. With…
WSJ Lead Editorial Cites LNG Scandal Outed by GAO
Today’s lead Wall Street Journal lead editorial, titled “The Harris Disguise, Energy Edition,” airs the LNG “pause” scandal outed by GAO litigation under the Freedom of Information Act. From the piece: Recall that in January the Energy Department imposed a moratorium on LNG permitting after a TikTok campaign made the issue a cri de coeur. Energy claimed the pause was…
House Oversight Committee Presses DoE on LNG “Scandal-pause” Exposed by GAO
The Washington Free Beacon reports on a letter submitted by the House Committee on Oversight & Accountability seeking answers to questions raised by GAO’s Freedom of Information Act litigation most recently noted here. Excerpting the story: In court filings cited by the Oversight Committee leaders and reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, the Department of Energy acknowledged in September that…
Biden-Harris DoE Dons a Big, Beautiful ‘Kick-me’ Sign on LNG Scandal-pause
A ‘tell’ giving “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” a run for its money The biggest scandal waiting to happen in policy—first revealed here, reported on by the Daily Caller here and updated by GAO here—is the Biden-Harris Department of Energy freezing exports of liquified natural gas exports purportedly because it needed to conduct a…
Update on the LNG Scandal-pause
Following up on this post, GAO sees this article in the Daily Caller both items detail GAO’s effort to formally ‘out’ to the public the Biden-Harris administration having buried an assessment of liquified natural gas exports which concluded they are a good and very beneficial thing. Whether and why in the world a bunch of activist political appointees would do…
Yes, Louisiana, there is a Scandal-“Pause”
DoE court filing supports claims of buried 2023 study, LNG “pause” based on a lie In a recent court filing, after months of stalling and flouting numerous legal obligations and deadlines the Biden-Harris Department of Energy, through its lawyers at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, let slip something it had spent a year, including three months…
GAO Told You So
This WaPo piece today is more notable for the context in which the violations come than the violations themselves, and recalls GAO’s previous caution: The inquiry reported immediately above was into something completely different, “contact between the agency’s top air official and Harvard University, his former employer.” GAO noted, on numerous occasions, Mr. Goffman’s approach to applicable legal limitations. These…
EPA: They Are Who We Thought They Were
GAO had occasion to read the USEPA’s brief filed in the D.C. Circuit in Commonwealth of Kentucky v. EPA, a matter in which over half the states have sued the Agency challenging its decision to suddenly and dramatically tighten a primary National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for soot. This rule was pre-announced in March 2022 as one of the…
UPDATES: FOIA’d Emails Suggest More Biden Administration Politicking with Federal Programs
GAO has discerned some possible further politicking with and (surprise!) pen-and-a-phone scheming within the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid. Further cross-checks are underway to confirm whether what appears to be is in fact the case but, for the moment, GAO is refreshing this post with more, recent document productions from CMS, here, here and here. Previously, GAO posted: See here for updates…
Is the Biden LNG-export “‘Pause’ to Study” a Cheap Fake?
Sources say January 2024 “pause” to study the impacts of LNG exports is based on a fib; that the macroeconomic study was in fact already produced, in 2023, but gave ‘wrong’ answer and was buried Today, Government Accountability & Oversight (GAO) filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Energy, over DoE’s failure to provide even the…
More SEC “Climate Risk” Machinations
GAO has filed a motion in one of it’s federal FOIA cases styled as GAO v SEC (23-3268), in which it points out various findings about that “independent Commission’s” ideological advocacy as part of the Biden administration’s “whole of government” approach to imposing a never-enacted “climate” agenda. Items noted include: Background relating to the FOIA request that was at issue…
Window on the Bay State
President Biden has nominated former Massachusetts Undersecretary of Energy and Climate Solutions, Judy Chang, to be a FERC Commissioner. Ms. Chang is possibly best well-known for a 2018 comment staking out the position that because New England would move away from natural gas within the next five years it was irresponsible to invest in pipelines. At the time—let alone six…
GAO Brief on Biden’s Backdoor Climate Rules Cited in WSJ
The case against this abuse has been building for some time. Following up on the details summarized in this Wall Street Journal editorial in the Spring of 2021, this op-ed last summer, and this post announcing GAO’s amicus brief in Kentucky et al. v. EPA et al., late last week the Journal ran an editorial by attorney for GAO Chris Horner…
Biden EPA Finalizes “Suite of Rules” to Force Power Plant Retirements…Just Beating Pressure Groups’ Deadline
Today, April 25, 2024, the Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized its unconstitutional “suite of rules” being imposed to force premature retirement of politically disfavored sources of electricity generation. Also, GAO just obtained a copy of this letter to the EPA. It turns out the pressure groups really, really wanted the Agency to make sure to “finalize and implement the strongest…