The committee's name changes consistently to put emphasis on concepts such as "oversight," "reform," "accountability" depending on the party in charge. Image: Katherine Welles/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffThe issue of how responsive agencies are being to requests from Congress has arisen again, this time between the House Oversight and Accountability Committee and the EPA, although for the time being the committee has called off a planned hearing to press agency officials about it.
Complaints of incomplete responses, or lack of any response, has been a running issue this year with Republicans in control of the House and a Democratic administration. The same was true when the roles were reversed during the last two years of the Trump administration with Democrats in control of the House.
In a letter to the EPA, chair James Comer of Kentucky wrote that since early in the year the committee has sent five separate requests for information but its “frustration” with the response led to scheduling a hearing. The agency had failed to provide a witness for a hearing and had “flooded our offices with thousands of pages of nonresponsive documents, the overwhelming majority of which were publicly available or grossly outdated in some cases.”
However, he said that after a hearing on “failures to comply with multiple Committee requests” was scheduled, the EPA “finally provided documents partially responsive to an outstanding request. In addition to this responsive production, EPA has now committed to providing additional responsive productions.”
“The Committee appreciates this sudden “show of good faith” by EPA after months of failing to adequately respond to our requests,” he wrote He added, though, that the hearing is being postponed with the expectation that the Committee will continue to receive substantive information from EPA responsive to our requests and that EPA will honor the recent commitments it has made.”
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