In a legal opinion, the Government Accountability Office, a congressional agency, said the EPA violated publicity and anti-lobbying restrictions in its use of the social media platform Thunderclap to urge support for its Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule. “Specifically, EPA violated the publicity or propaganda prohibition though its use of a platform known as Thunderclap that allows a single message to be shared across multiple Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr accounts at the same time. EPA engaged in covert propaganda when the agency did not identify EPA’s role as the creator of the Thunderclap message to the target audience,” said a GAO summary of its 26-page report.
“EPA also violated anti-lobbying provisions though its hyperlinks to certain external Web pages in an EPA blog post. Both of the external Web pages led to appeals to the public to contact Congress in support of the WOTUS rule, which taken in context, constituted appeals to contact Congress in opposition to pending legislation,” said the GAO.
Republican lawmakers hope to bar the EPA from implementing WOTUS by adding a rider to the catch-all government funding bill that must be passed before Congress adjourns for the year. The rule, which defines the upstream reach of the Clean Water Act, also is under challenge in federal court and has been suspended by court order.
“GAO’s finding confirms what I have long suspected, that EPA will go to extreme lengths and even violate the law to promote its activist environmental agenda,” said chairman Jim Inhofe of the Senate Environment Committee. Inhofe requested the GAO review.
The New York Times, which said it was first to report the EPA activities, said the GAO concluded that the agency ran afoul of two rules: “Federal agencies are allowed to promote their own policies, but they are not allowed to engage in propaganda, which means covert activity intended to influence the American public. They also are not allowed to use federal resources to conduct so-called grass-roots lobbying – urging the American public to contact Congress to take a certain kind of action on pending legislation.”