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By Anthony Adragna and Ben Lefebvre | POLITICO
Chairman Raúl Grijalva said on Friday Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee are considering issuing subpoenas to obtain information from the Interior Department that officials there have declined to provide.
“Those are discussions that are occurring, but I can’t give you a timeline or if we have an okay from everybody at this point,” Grijalva told POLITICO.
Since taking control of the House, Democrats have complained that the Trump administration has refused to provide information needed for them to conduct oversight. Grijalva has said Interior officials have been unresponsive to his requests for information on the agency’s restructuring that it filed in 2017 with the White House, as well as documents about its handling of public information requests.
Multiple Natural Resources subcommittee chairmen expressed openness toward ratcheting up the pressure through subpoenas and other tactics to address what they saw as stonewalling by the agency. It’s also a sign, they said, that the Trump administration’s resistance to congressional oversight extends beyond high-profile issues such as Russia investigation and the President Donald Trump’s taxes.
The Interior Department did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
