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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The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) filed a motion in a pending Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case against the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) asking the court to bar CEQ from closing the comment period on its proposed National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations until CEQ provides documents requested by SELC in 2018. The FOIA request sought records related to the advance notice of proposed rulemaking that CEQ issued in June 2018. In its motion, SELC argued that a preliminary injunction was necessary “to stop CEQ from making unprecedented sweeping changes to the regulations that implement NEPA before it has provided SELC and the public a full and complete opportunity to understand and participate in the rulemaking process.” SELC said the proposed rule was “unprecedented in scope” and would, among other things, “remov[e] the requirement that federal agencies consider long term, widespread impacts like climate change.”