Two months ago, senior fellow Chris Horner at the Competitive Enterprise Institute said the Environmental Protection Agency was behaving the same way as other right-wingers claimed the Internal Revenue Service was behaving: with a bias against conservative groups. In this case the
complaint was that EPA was granting fee waivers on Freedom of Information Act requests to liberal environmental groups while sticking conservative groups with a bill. Horner's research, CEI claimed, revealed "extraordinarily favorable treatment of the same green groups it’s been shown to be collaborating with on its agenda."
The claim was that more than 90 percent of conservative groups' requests for fee waivers were denied and more than 90 percent of green groups' waivers were approved. The EPA responded that the CEI's claims were based on a narrow sampling of requests and that Horner had failed to point out which groups actually had been required to pay fees for their FOIA requests. Horner argued that this was beside the point because conservative groups had had to jump through more hoops. Foxaganda, Breitbart and Republican Reps. David Vitter of Louisiana, Darrell Issa of California, Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma made a stink about it and have called for an investigation. Twelve state attorneys general have filed a joint lawsuit about a denied FOIA request.
Since Horner raised his objections, Politico has found both last month and Monday that CEI's claims are, to be charitable, vastly exaggerated. The latest look at the numbers by Erica Martinson:
But POLITICO found a much more modest disparity after examining records of nearly 700 EPA decisions over 15 months: Liberal requesters received fee waivers 52 percent of the time, compared with a 39 percent rate for conservatives.
And that 13 percentage point gap may still not be evidence of bias. Multiple factors complicate a direct comparison between the liberals’ and conservatives’ results.
For starters, liberal groups made almost eight times as many waiver requests as conservatives. If EPA had approved just four more of the conservatives’ 31 requests, their success rates would have been the same.
All told, from January 2012 to April 2013, Martinson reports, the EPA granted 244 fee-waiver requests and denied 429. Of that total, only 37 requesters who asked for waivers paid any fees, a median of $70.85, the agency says.
Not everyone who thinks there might be EPA waiver bias is on the conservative side of the spectrum. At the Project on Government Oversight, Scott Amey said in his experience, agency bias—by the EPA or any other government operation—tends to arise over "any request that looks like it could be embarrassing or expose waste, fraud or abuse. If an agency wants to protect something, they’re not necessarily concerned with who the requester is.”