Some of the conferrees on the Farm Bill are back at it -- trying to create a huge hole in the FOIA by blocking the EPA from releasing any information it has collected on any owner, operator, or employee of a livestock operation (the language in the House-passed farm bill is even broader -- barring the release of information on agricultural operations as well as livestock operations). OpentheGovernment.Org has more on this attempt to block important information from being released to the public.
There may be a valid reason to not release information about small family farms, but the language in some of these proposals go way past that point and would create a huge Exemption 3 statute that blocks information that the public deserves to be known from being released via the FOIA.
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