Southern Environmental Law Center v. Council on Environmental Quality

In a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Southern Environmental Law Center in 2018, the federal district court for the Western District of Virginia ordered the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to produce unredacted versions of a number records related to CEQ’s advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) for amendments to the the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations. The court concluded that CEQ had not demonstrated it would suffer “a reasonably foreseeable harm” from unredacted production. The records included spreadsheets tracking and analyzing comments, draft ANPRM fact sheets, meeting agendas, and emails and meeting invitations regarding CEQ’s process for managing comments.

In an environmental organization’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), a Virginia federal court denied the organization’s motion for a preliminary injunction enjoining CEQ from closing the comment period on proposed amendments to the NEPA regulations. The FOIA request at issue in the case was for records related to the advance notice of proposed rulemaking for the NEPA regulations. The court concluded both that FOIA did not grant it the injunctive power to take such action since doing so would disrupt the statutory scheme of the Administrative Procedure Act.

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