In a 2-1 ruling last Tuesday, a federal appeals court rejected Vice President Dick Cheney’s request to keep documents about his energy task force secret. The decision upholds a lower court ruling that ordered the limited release of documents in a discovery process. Justice Department lawyers defending Cheney then approached the D.C. Court of Appeals to halt that order. The Court of Appeals agreed with the lower courts ruling, stating that current laws would safeguard genuinely privileged information.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is releasing the 2001 Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) today, June 30th, just one day shy of the July 1st reporting deadline for 2002 data. As part of the unveiling, EPA will also release their analysis of the latest TRI data and conduct various briefings for the press, congressional offices, environmental community and industry representatives. In addition to being the latest public release of TRI data the 2001 TRI also marks the first year that releases of lead will be reported and potentially the last year that mining companies report their toxic releases.

The recent decision by the General Accounting Office (GAO) to drop its lawsuit against Vice President Dick Cheney likely further weakens the agency’s ability to get information from an already overly secretive administration. The GAO lawsuit set an important precedent as the first time in GAO’s 81 years that the agency sued the Executive Branch in order to obtain information. This raised the struggle for transparency and accountability in government to a new level.

The Georgetown Environmental Law & Policy Institute (GELPI) recently released a paper that responds to criticisms of environmental right-to-know programs and explains how industry’s proposed “procedural” reforms threaten to undermine them.