FERC Stone Wall of Anti-Transparency Rhetoric Hiding Stuff?

After making repeated attempts to determine how much influence environmental advocacy groups are exerting over federal energy policy including what level of assistance progressive agency appointees are providing them, a transparency project that is now a year old scored a direct hit during a May 4^th Senate hearing.

That was when Sen. Josh Hawley, R-MO, questioned Allison Clements, a commissioner with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), about the “closed-door” meetings she had with the funders of a left leaning grantmaking institution known as the Energy Foundation. That Foundation was Clements’s client immediately before she took the position as FERC Commissioner. Hawley inquired about emails and text messages obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that show Clements briefed an EF “funders event” that delved into her agency’s 2022 priorities, specifically in her view addressing “FERC as an opportunity.” Hawley asked Clements “who are the donors that attended that session?”

In response, Clements told Hawley fundraising did not occur at the meeting in question. Instead, she described the event as a “convening of foundation staff from across the country” that resulted in “straightforward, above the board conversation about 2022 priorities” that were subject to her ethics agreement. Clements also insisted that she only gave her standard “stump speech.” However, one email after the event thanked her and declared “[w]e greatly enjoyed having an hour to discuss these thorny issues.” That email showed that participants included the litigious, pro-renewable energy activist groups Sierra Club, EarthJustice, and Natural Resource Defense Council (another former Clements employer).

Clements also said she had “an open-door policy” and meets with “all kinds of stakeholders.” Hawley countered by pointing out that the FOIA emails show the event was advertised “as a funders’ only session.” He again asked Clements: “who were the funders?” Clements agreed to provide a list of attendees and said there was no money raised at the meeting.

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Just before his time expired, Hawley asked Clements if she thought it was appropriate to speak to advocacy groups at a
“donors only” session.

Clements responded by saying she thinks it is appropriate for her to speak to foundations that have an interest in the energy sector.

Hawley questioned Clements as part of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s latest oversight hearing of FERC.

“I’m concerned now, by what you describe as a pattern, practice of speaking to donor groups that have financial interests in the industry you are regulating,” Hawley told Clements.

A Washington-based nonprofit called the Institute for Energy Research (IER) obtained the FOIA records cited during the hearing after filing more than a dozen FOIA lawsuits against FERC beginning in May of last year. The emails, Zoom calls, Zoom chats, Microsoft Team chats, text messages, calendar records, and phone bills the nonprofit has produced through litigation provides insight into how climate activists have burrowed into FERC. But it has been slow going…

In its most recent court filing in late April, IER alleges that “FERC has not demonstrated that it conducted a search reasonably calculated to gather all responsive records.” IER also claims the agency has not justified its withholding of certain information under FOIA’s exemption rules. IER’s transparency efforts have been stymied by what the April filing describes as “FERC’s stone wall of anti-transparency rhetoric” in its correspondence denying access to information about FERC operations…

Apparently, there is no denying that FERC has declined to release a substantial number of documents responsive to IER’s information requests. In July 2022, FERC stated that it concluded its obligations to fulfill certain requests at issue at that time. However, “the absence of certain records,” specifically involving Clements’s interactions with former employers NRDC and SustainableFERC, motivated IER to “pressure-test the sufficiency of these responses,” with yet another FOIA, according to a March court filing.

What happened next is revealing.

FERC produced a “supplemental production” that doubled the number of responsive records. “Those documents which, we were told, FERC discovered after matters were long-ago closed happened to include the eye-opening materials about Clements’s close working relationship with her former clients,” Horner said.

What gives?

The March filing says FERC attributed its previous opaque response to “an inadvertent processing error.” The “supplemental production” included “many records reflecting Commissioner Clements’s close interactions with former clients,” according to the March filing. IER in turn has described FERC’s actions, in pleadings filed with the courts, as “ongoing examples of FERC serially delaying the public’s ability to understand in a timely way FERC’s operations… part of a broad and continuing pattern of delaying its responses to IER’s FOIA requests and seemingly for political purposes, i.e., because of an uncomfortable convergence of embarrassing information about its operation”.

The House letter asked Clements to turn over any ethics documentation no later than May 22, 2023.

Kevin Mooney is an investigative reporter with both the Commonwealth Foundation and the Heritage Foundation. The full article, with more details, was originally published at Real Clear Energy and is partly reposted here with permission of the author.