The Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General announced that it would grant a request from the Senate to look at Scott Pruitt’s use of multiple email accounts.
In a letter sent on May 2 to Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) and Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), the IG said that it would grant the Senators’ request to look at whether EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s use of the email accounts was in violation of the Federal Records Act.
Carper and Merkley had sent a letter to the IG back in April with the request saying that they were concerned that the use of multiple email accounts was being done to withhold information from Freedom of Information Act requests to shield it from the public.
The IG noted in its letter, however, that the Senators’ request is not a very high priority, especially due to a lack of funding and its current workload.
“We have to determine whether we have sufficient resources-people, time and funds-to do a project in a timely fashion and whether it would preclude our doing other crucial work,” wrote Arthur Elkins Jr. “The fact is that the OIG has been funded at less than the levels we deem adequate to do all of the work that should be done, and we therefore have to make difficult decisions about whether to accept any given potential undertaking.”
A copy of the IG’s letter is included below.
2015-05-02 EPA IG Letter Re: Pruitt Emails
