By Rich Kozlovich
Mike McDaniel published this piece, Another DOGE priority: Sue and Settle, saying:
Sue and Settle is a great scam for lawyers and greenie Luddites in government and the private sector determined to return the world to a pristine, per-industrial state.....
He goes on to show just how corrupt and profitable this has been for these irrational, misanthropic, and morally defective green activists, and really big winners, their attorneys, who've racked up 18 million dollars between 2013 and 2022. In 2018 the Director of EPA at that time made it clear the first Trump administration's position was: “The days of regulation through litigation are over.” Unfortunately, as was noted in the Buckeye Institute news release the Biden administration did away with that:
........federal regulators are sometimes “only too happy to face collusive lawsuits by friendly ‘foes,’” Grossman told the Subcommittee that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency entered into “more than sixty such settlements” in the first term of the Obama Administration alone, forcing the EPA to publish more than one hundred new regulations “at a cost to the economy of tens of billions of dollars.” Upon entering office, Grossman noted that the Trump Administration ended the abuse of sue and settle, declaring, “The days of regulation through litigation are over.” Unfortunately, the Biden Administration quickly revived the practice.
This has been going on for many years, here's my Sue and Settle file, going back to 2011. In 2012 my now passed friend Alan Caruba posted this article, The Courts and the EPA showing the depth of corruption behind all this saying:
The EPA actually encourages environmental groups to sue in order to enter into consent decrees to “settle” the case in a manner they prefer. For decades, environmental groups have reaped millions in taxpayer dollars by accommodating the agency in this fashion. A case in point is the Environmental Defense Fund that received $2.76 million in grants over the last decade while at the same time suing the EPA over various issues.
In 2015 Time for Congress to defund "sue and settle", saying:
In July, Representative Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) took on the little known radical environmentalist scam known as “sue and settle” where a green group acting in cahoots with the EPA or U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sues the Agency demanding that they apply the law in a new, expanded way that increases the agency’s jurisdiction............The Westmoreland defund amendment to the Interior Department appropriation bill would have rolled back this abuse of taxpayer funds by denying the payment of attorney fees in ‘sue and settle’ cases. This action is needed to stop this Obama Administration orchestrated expansion of executive power....... (Editor's note: The link to the original article no longer works and it appears the original is now gone. All that's left is my link and the paragraphs I posted. RK)
For 40 years I was an exterminator, this was a problem for decades. One of the many problems with EPA is it's filled with green activists who've actively colluded with the environmentalists. While during the first Trump administration they attempted to do away with this corruption it never goes away because these green moles at EPA merely hunker down until the political climate changes and then start all over again.
These sue and settle scams gave the greenies what they wanted, money and destructive power over America's economy, and it gave EPA what it wanted, power the Congress never voted on, or intended for them to have. The Loper Bright v. Raimondo ruling that overturned the Chevron Doctrine, is a massive gift to those who wish to end this insanity.
The solution is getting rid of the EPA. My passed friend Dr. Jay Lehr was one of the founders of EPA and said it had been taken over by radicals and hadn't done anything worthwhile since 1980 and put together a five year plan to dismantle it. As time has gone by I realized that plan, with some variations, was workable to dismantle all these federal agencies. All that it takes is vision and courage
Posted by Rich Kozlovich at 10:14 AM Email ThisBlogThis!Share to XShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest
Labels: My Commentary,
Sue and Settle
Showing posts with label Sue and Settle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sue and Settle. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 28, 2025
End Sue and Settle, Forever!!!
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Improving the Interior Departments Science and Policies
H. Sterling Burnett @ Heartland Insititute
The U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) is taking a page out of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) playbook, to improve the transparency behind the science used to develop regulations on the millions of acres of public lands it controls, and the legal actions it takes in response to lawsuits filed against it.
On September 11, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke signed a Secretarial Order promoting transparency and accountability in consent decrees and settlement agreements, aimed at ending secret “sue and settle” deals with activist plaintiffs.
Zinke’s order comes almost a year after the EPA issued rules ending such agreements at the agency.
DOI reports from January 1, 2012 through January 19, 2017, Interior entered into more than 460 settlement agreements and consent decrees, resulting in the payment of more than $4.4 billion to plaintiffs, while keeping key provisions of these agreements secret. In President Barack Obama’s last year in office, Interior entered into 96 such agreements or decrees, costing taxpayers more than $1.7 billion.
Although consent decrees and settlements may sometimes be a prudent way to avoid costly litigation in cases DOI is likely to lose, Zinke notes, “concerns have been raised” DOI has used secret settlement agreements to undermine the safeguards Congress established to ensure public input into policymaking.
Order 3368 requires DOI to file public notice of all litigation, proposed settlement agreements, and consent decrees in the Federal Register. Another provision establishes a process for public input before Interior can approve a settlement with significant policy implications or large payouts.
The order requires DOI to establish a publicly accessible “Litigation” webpage linked in the federal Office of the Solicitor’s homepage. Entries on this page must include the names of the parties involved in litigation, the case number, the date filed, the court where the complaint was filed, and the statutory or regulatory provisions at issue in the complaint.
By December 11, 2018, the Solicitor’s office must begin compiling, and the Chief Information Officer to begin posting, a searchable list of final judicial and administrative consent decrees and settlement agreements governing DOI’s actions. The summaries must include a brief description of each decree or agreement, details of any attorney fees or costs paid, and a link to the text of the decree or agreement.
Also, within 15 days of receiving service of a complaint or petition for review of a law or regulation, the Solicitor must notify any state or tribe possibly affected by a pending complaint or petition, except when the state or tribe is a party to the petition.
An example of how this may work comes from EPA’s website, which now includes a page titled “Notices of Intent to Sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,” providing details of nearly 300 notices of intent to sue, mostly from citizen groups plus a few from state and local governments, with a separate table listing about 380 active environmental cases, and a third table providing details of 15 finalized consent decrees and settlement agreements.
In another pro-transparency, pro-accountability move, in the last week of September, DOI followed EPA’s lead once again, implementing a new policy intended to improve the transparency, integrity, and quality of the science its agencies use to make decisions. Going forward, officials may use only scientific studies or findings the underlying data for which are publicly available and reproducible, with few exceptions. EPA proposed a similar policy earlier in 2018.
DOI’s policy covers the science used by the wide variety of bureaus under its jurisdiction, including the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey, affecting the science used to shape policies ranging from endangered species determinations and protections—such as the decision to list polar bear populations as endangered based on speculative future risks from climate change even while their numbers are increasing—to decisions about grazing, hunting, mining, and oil and gas production on public lands and offshore. Under the new policy, the climate science used to justify any future actions by DOI to close public lands or offshore areas to oil and gas development, or impose more stringent limits on greenhouse gas emissions from those operations, would now be open to review by the public, including outside scientific auditors.
Announcing the policy, Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt said the order is intended to ensure Interior “bases its decisions on the best available science and provide[s] the American people with enough information to thoughtfully and substantively evaluate the data, methodology, and analysis used by the Department to inform its decisions.”
People have a right to know what their government is up to, yet under previous presidents the science used to justify regulations and policies and the terms of settlement agreements at DOI often blindsided local, state, and tribal governments, industries, public land lessors, and private land owners adjacent to public properties, imposing huge costs on them with little or no notice, based on science hidden from public view. This was unfair, amounting to regulation behind closed doors.
These orders should improve the transparency and soundness of DOI’s policies by giving the general public, we who pay DOI’s bills and for whom they are supposed to work, some input into its decisions.
Trump’s DOI is giving the government back to the people, or at least ensuring we have oversight of and influence on it. Only environmentalists and crony capitalists who historically, in secrecy, have wielded inordinate power over government policy could be opposed to that. Every other department and agency should adopt similar policies.
The U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) is taking a page out of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) playbook, to improve the transparency behind the science used to develop regulations on the millions of acres of public lands it controls, and the legal actions it takes in response to lawsuits filed against it.
On September 11, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke signed a Secretarial Order promoting transparency and accountability in consent decrees and settlement agreements, aimed at ending secret “sue and settle” deals with activist plaintiffs.
Zinke’s order comes almost a year after the EPA issued rules ending such agreements at the agency.
DOI reports from January 1, 2012 through January 19, 2017, Interior entered into more than 460 settlement agreements and consent decrees, resulting in the payment of more than $4.4 billion to plaintiffs, while keeping key provisions of these agreements secret. In President Barack Obama’s last year in office, Interior entered into 96 such agreements or decrees, costing taxpayers more than $1.7 billion.
Although consent decrees and settlements may sometimes be a prudent way to avoid costly litigation in cases DOI is likely to lose, Zinke notes, “concerns have been raised” DOI has used secret settlement agreements to undermine the safeguards Congress established to ensure public input into policymaking.
Order 3368 requires DOI to file public notice of all litigation, proposed settlement agreements, and consent decrees in the Federal Register. Another provision establishes a process for public input before Interior can approve a settlement with significant policy implications or large payouts.
The order requires DOI to establish a publicly accessible “Litigation” webpage linked in the federal Office of the Solicitor’s homepage. Entries on this page must include the names of the parties involved in litigation, the case number, the date filed, the court where the complaint was filed, and the statutory or regulatory provisions at issue in the complaint.
By December 11, 2018, the Solicitor’s office must begin compiling, and the Chief Information Officer to begin posting, a searchable list of final judicial and administrative consent decrees and settlement agreements governing DOI’s actions. The summaries must include a brief description of each decree or agreement, details of any attorney fees or costs paid, and a link to the text of the decree or agreement.
Also, within 15 days of receiving service of a complaint or petition for review of a law or regulation, the Solicitor must notify any state or tribe possibly affected by a pending complaint or petition, except when the state or tribe is a party to the petition.
An example of how this may work comes from EPA’s website, which now includes a page titled “Notices of Intent to Sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,” providing details of nearly 300 notices of intent to sue, mostly from citizen groups plus a few from state and local governments, with a separate table listing about 380 active environmental cases, and a third table providing details of 15 finalized consent decrees and settlement agreements.
In another pro-transparency, pro-accountability move, in the last week of September, DOI followed EPA’s lead once again, implementing a new policy intended to improve the transparency, integrity, and quality of the science its agencies use to make decisions. Going forward, officials may use only scientific studies or findings the underlying data for which are publicly available and reproducible, with few exceptions. EPA proposed a similar policy earlier in 2018.
DOI’s policy covers the science used by the wide variety of bureaus under its jurisdiction, including the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey, affecting the science used to shape policies ranging from endangered species determinations and protections—such as the decision to list polar bear populations as endangered based on speculative future risks from climate change even while their numbers are increasing—to decisions about grazing, hunting, mining, and oil and gas production on public lands and offshore. Under the new policy, the climate science used to justify any future actions by DOI to close public lands or offshore areas to oil and gas development, or impose more stringent limits on greenhouse gas emissions from those operations, would now be open to review by the public, including outside scientific auditors.
Announcing the policy, Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt said the order is intended to ensure Interior “bases its decisions on the best available science and provide[s] the American people with enough information to thoughtfully and substantively evaluate the data, methodology, and analysis used by the Department to inform its decisions.”
People have a right to know what their government is up to, yet under previous presidents the science used to justify regulations and policies and the terms of settlement agreements at DOI often blindsided local, state, and tribal governments, industries, public land lessors, and private land owners adjacent to public properties, imposing huge costs on them with little or no notice, based on science hidden from public view. This was unfair, amounting to regulation behind closed doors.
These orders should improve the transparency and soundness of DOI’s policies by giving the general public, we who pay DOI’s bills and for whom they are supposed to work, some input into its decisions.
Trump’s DOI is giving the government back to the people, or at least ensuring we have oversight of and influence on it. Only environmentalists and crony capitalists who historically, in secrecy, have wielded inordinate power over government policy could be opposed to that. Every other department and agency should adopt similar policies.
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