"The head of the National Weather Service retired last week after an internal investigation found that the agency had reallocated millions of dollars without required congressional approval."
The federal Data.gov, while not perfect, has grown over three years especially strong in datasets from federal agencies that deal with the environment, energy, natural resources, health, and science. Many of them are downloadable, so that you can crunch them on your own computer. Several are map layers or geo-tagged in some way. See a few randomly chosen examples here.
"Florida's top state wetlands expert has been suspended after she refused to issue a permit on a controversial project -- one that she said her boss was willing to bend the rules to approve."
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"A federal appeals court [Tuesday] upheld a landmark $3.4 billion settlement concerning the Interior Department's mismanagement of American Indian trust accounts."
"An Aug. 30, 2011, e-mail exchange among Environmental Protection Agency officials, obtained by the Center for Progressive Reform under the Freedom of Information Act, provides a glimpse into how agency officials thought the White House failed to adequately capture their work on anti-pollution rules opposed by Republicans and industry officials."
Here are some recent reports by the Congressional Research Service related to the environment/energy beat. Congress does not release them to the public. We again thank the Federation of American Scientists' Government Secrecy Project for doing so.
OMB sat on the Office of Government Information Services recommendations for over a year, until a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in March 2012 demanded OMB release the recommendations, which finally happened April 24th. However, no recommendations for legislative change were included. Nobody knows what, if any, legislative recommendations OGIS may have originally proposed.
Now there is research proving what reporters have known all along, thanks to a survey from the Society of Professional Journalists. SPJ commissioned work by survey research professionals who canvassed newsgatherers during January-February 2012. Here are some of the findings and a link to the full report.
For reporters wanting to pry open the worm-cans of local environmental stories, EPA's new GIS tool lets you map Environmental Impact Statements project information against a rich backdrop: layer after layer of geographic, demographic, environmental, and economic context. And, it can be used in conjunction with EJView, EPA's environmental justice online mapping tool.
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