For Immediate Release
February 8, 2012

WASHINGTON DC — The Institute for Energy Research called for greater transparency at the Department of Interior in a letter yesterday to Secretary Ken Salazar, and today IER follows up with a letter to Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), asking him to join efforts to promote a more accountable government through revamped data publication practices for energy resources on federal lands.

Previously, Rep. Markey cited IER in a January 26th letter to Acting Administrator Howard Gruenspecht at the Energy Information Administration. IER’s letter to Rep. Markey suggests that reporting errors at EIA are “the direct result of a more troubling pattern of bureaucratic and programmatic errors at the Department of Interior.”

“Rather than blaming the non-partisan EIA, [Rep. Markey] might want to turn [his] careful attention to the real culprit: a federal department so convoluted in its organization, inconsistent in its methodology, and incoherent in its reporting that not even experts at other federal agencies are able to decipher its data,” wrote IER President Thomas Pyle in the letter to Markey.

“I hope [Rep. Markey] will join the call for better data transparency at the Department of the Interior. Although Americans hold different views about the need to increase domestic energy production, we can agree that bureaucratic opacity serves no one.”

To read IER’s letter to Rep. Markey, click here.

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