FOIA investigations by the Environmental Health Trust indicate that the FCC internally discussed the issue of environmental review related to 5G and that FCC staff penned draft documents on the topic. Yet as far as we know , no action was taken by the FCC to consider environmental impacts.
The FCC refused to release the documents to EHT stating, “We reviewed the records collected and found two emails and three draft documents responsive to your request. These records are being withheld entirely under FOIA Exemption 5.”
In October 2019, Environmental Health Trust invoke the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requesting “any email, records, attachments associated with a proposal or draft proposal for an Environmental assessment (EA) on 5G and/or small cell deployment” between specific FCC staff in 2017.
In response to our request the FCC Office of Engineering & Technology declined from sending any documents and instead stated:
“The Office of Engineering & Technology conducted a search in our office and had the Commission’s I.T. department search the servers to cover emails during your requested time period and/or emails of employees who have since left the agency. We reviewed the records collected and found two emails and three draft documents responsive to your request. These records are being withheld entirely under FOIA Exemption 5.’”
FOIA Exemption 5 protects certain inter-agency and intra-agency records that are normally considered privileged in the civil discovery context. Exemption 5 encompasses a deliberative process privilege intended to “prevent injury to the quality of agency decisions.”2 To fall within the scope of this privilege the agency records must be both predecisional and deliberative.3 Predecisional records must have been “prepared in order to assist an agency decision maker in arriving at his decision.”4 Deliberative records must be such that their disclosure “would expose an agency’s decisionmaking process in such a way as to discourage candid discussion within the agency and thereby undermine the agency’s ability to perform its functions.”5 The records being withheld are draft working products that contain or reflect predecisional discussions between staff at the Commission.”
“We have determined that it is reasonably foreseeable that disclosure would harm the Commission’s deliberative processes, which Exemption 5 is intended to protect. Release of this information would chill deliberations within the Commission and impede the candid exchange of ideas.”
EHT would like to know what the draft documents state in regards to environmental impacts related to 5G.
