EPA Playing Fast, Loose, and Possibly Illegal, With WOTUS
29th January 2016
In an effort to further promote their Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule, the EPA may have violated the Financial Services and Government appropriations Act of 2014, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). How they broke the law; through their use of government funds for “unauthorized publicity and propaganda” and the use of “indirect or grassroots lobbying”. To put it simply, the EPA used government funds, designated for other purposes, to orchestrate false support for their new land grab.
In a thinly veiled attempt to spin their rule into something more presentable, they used a crowd speaking website known as Thunderclap. The EPA set up an initial page and support goal, and when that goal was reached, Thunderclap would send out a tweet previously made by the EPA that would be automatically sent out by the campaign supporters, and thus spreading the message. Thunderclap estimates the EPA’s message reached almost 2 million people. The GAO argues that since the EPA did not take responsibility for the tweets themselves, they violated the statute.
They didn’t stop there either; they continued their grassroots campaign through the use of two outside websites in favor of the rule. Through the use of hyperlinks, the EPA allowed and promoted travel to websites, for the Surfrider Foundation and National Resources Defense Council, with opinions and blogs that would attempt to trick people into being in favor of the rule. This collusion clearly is against the statute, and even though the EPA didn’t directly post, they sent traffic to these sites, once more likely violating the statute.