A nonprofit is suing the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to obtain records that it argues “will inform the public of high-profile ethics revelations at OSTP and media coverage thereof,” including correspondence related to an OSTP event on “climate disinformation.”
In a lawsuit filed on May 5 in the D.C. District Court, Energy Policy Advocates (EPA) stated that it asked OSTP to provide correspondence and other documents it requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Those records include materials that the nonprofit says were produced for Politico’s Alex Thompson and discussed in Thompson’s article on billionaire Eric Schmidt’s influence over the Biden administration’s OSTP.
According to EPA, OSTP’s only response was a request for a minor formatting change.
“OSTP’s failure to simply turn over what it has already processed and produced to another party is inexplicable, at least outside of the White House. There literally is no excuse,” Matthew Hardin, a member of the EPA’s board, told The Epoch Times in an email.
Politico declined to comment on the complaint.
EPA is also seeking emails connected with OSTP’s February event on climate “denialism and delay,” which featured such speakers as Michael Mann.
Hardin characterized that roundtable as “more of a strange than sinister misuse of taxpayer resources, in seeking a social-science answer for why people continue to stand in their way.”
Specifically, EPA requested correspondence related to the event between former OSTP Director Eric Lander and Jane Lubchenco, who’s serving as OSTP’s first deputy director of climate and environment.
Lander, a mathematician and geneticist who leads the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, resigned from OSTP in February after admitting that he bullied his subordinates within the agency.
Lubchenco, a marine biologist at Oregon State University who also belongs to the OSTP’s new Scientific Integrity Task Force, has come under fire for a scientific ethics violation—she edited a paper written by some of her former coauthors, including her brother-in-law, University of California–Santa Barbara marine scientist Steven Gaines.