US General Election 2016

The president on Monday acknowledged that American farmers may be hurt by Chinese tariffs.

"But I tell you, our farmers are great patriots. These are great patriots. They understand that they’re doing this for the country. And we’ll make it up to them. And in the end, they’re going to be much stronger than they are right now," Trump said.

• The economy gained a net 11.6 million jobs. The unemployment rate dropped to below the historical norm.
  
• Average weekly earnings for all workers were up 4.0 percent after inflation. The gain was 3.7 percent for just production and nonsupervisory employees.
  
• After-tax corporate profits also set records, as did stock prices. The S&P 500 index rose 166 percent.
  
• The number of people lacking health insurance dropped by 15 million. Premiums rose, but more slowly than before.
  
• The federal debt owed to the public rose 128 percent. Deficits were rising as Obama departed.
  

• Employment growth slowed by 12 percent. Nevertheless, the unemployment rate kept dropping, reaching a 17-year low. The number of job vacancies rose, also to a nearly 17-year record.
  
• Economic growth picked up to a 3.2 percent annual rate in the July-September quarter from 1.5 percent for all of 2016.
  
• Restrictions in the federal regulatory rulebook continued to grow, but at less than half the pace during the two previous administrations.
  
• The number of coal mining jobs, which Trump promised to bring back, went up by only 500. Manufacturing jobs grew just a bit faster than total employment.
  
• Real weekly wages rose 1.1 percent. Corporate profits and stock prices hit new records.
  
• The number of people without health insurance went up — by 200,000 according to a government survey, and by 3.2 million according to a more recent Gallup poll.
  
• The U.S. trade deficit that Trump promised to bring down grew instead, getting 11.5 percent larger.
  
• The number of people on food stamps, which Trump wants to cut, grew by nearly 3 million.
  
• The federal debt rose nearly 3 percent; projected annual deficits worsened.
  

In March 2017, Scott Pruitt, the new administrator of Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, appeared on CNBC and said that carbon dioxide was not known to be a major factor in climate change. “I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,” Pruitt said, adding, “there’s a tremendous disagreement about the degree of the impact” of “human activity on the climate.”

Based on what?

The next day, a group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the EPA, asking for any agency documents that Administrator Pruitt may have relied on to come to his conclusions. Since Pruitt’s words contradicted scientific evidence shared by the EPA before the administrator took office, PEER's request might turn up some recent document that indicated Pruitt had new information.
Instead, the EPA stalled and refused to provide any information to PEER. The employee group then sued the agency.

On Tuesday, a US District Court Judge for the District of Columbia issued a memo (PDF) saying that the EPA must comply with PEER’s request by July 2, offering any EPA documents that helped Pruitt come to the conclusion that he shared on CNBC last year. If certain documents can not be provided, an explanation for their absence must be provided by July 11.

In the Tuesday memo, Judge Beryl A. Howell described a slew of excuses used by the EPA to justify a refusal of PEER’s request. The EPA contended that PEER’s FOIA request was overly broad, that it was actually “an impermissible attempt to compel EPA and its administrator to answer questions and take a position on the climate change debate,” and that complying with the request would be burdensome.

In its own explanation to the court, the EPA argued that complying with PEER's FOIA request “would require EPA to spend countless hours researching and analyzing a vast trove of material on the effect of human activity on climate change” which amounted to “a subjective assessment upon which reasonable minds can differ.”

“Epistemological smokescreen”

Judge Howell disagreed with these characterizations, calling the Agency’s objections “hyperbolic” and saying claims that PEER’s FOIA was unclear “both misplaced and troubling.”

“The agency asks ‘how is one to even know precisely what documents one relies on in forming one’s beliefs?’” the judge wrote in her brief. “As the plaintiff points out, however, nothing in the FOIA request seeks information ‘about Administrator Pruitt’s beliefs or how they were formed.’” Instead, the FOIA only requests any agency documents that the administrator relied on to formulate his public statement.

The judge also called it “particularly troubling" that the EPA argued that evidence for a factual statement by the Administrator can be unknowable. “EPA’s strained attempt to raise an epistemological smokescreen will not work here to evade its obligations under the FOIA,” Judge Howell wrote.

The judge also accused the EPA of engaging in “a thinly veiled effort to make the request more complex and burdensome than it is.”

Howell concluded: “When the head of an agency makes a public statement that appears to contradict ‘the published research and conclusions of’ that agency, the FOIA provides a valuable tool for citizens... Compliance with such a request would help ‘ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society.’”