Center for Biological Diversity v. U.S. Bureau of Land Management

The federal district court for the District of Columbia directed the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) to undertake additional searches for records in response to Center for Biological Diversity’s (CBD’s) requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for records of discussions and correspondence related to President Trump’s March 2017 executive order directing the Secretary of the Interior to lift the moratorium on the federal coal leasing program. The court agreed with CBD that the absence of drafts of then-Secretary Ryan Zinke’s order implementing the executive order, along with the absence of Secretary-level communications about the order, gave rise to “material doubt” about the adequacy of the agency’s declarations regarding the searches it conducted. The court determined that DOI must either supplement its declarations or take additional steps to confirm it completed an adequate search for Secretary-level communications and drafts of the order, including by requesting that Zinke search his own files and asking him whether he used additional personal platforms beyond the email address already searched to conduct agency business. In addition, the court concluded that FOIA obligated DOI to take additional steps to search Zinke’s government-issued phone. The court rejected CBD’s contention that DOI should undertake a specific search of Trump transition team records but directed DOI to clarify the extent to which its searches encompassed and identified correspondence between DOI and the transition team, or to expand its search to include such records.

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