Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, sent April 28 and made public April 29, enters Day 14 today without an OMB response on the request for documents about the $928 million payment to TotalEnergies and roughly $1.9 billion in total Trump-administration payments to offshore-wind developers. [1] The paper's Thursday brief at Day 13 put the silence alongside seven other institutional clocks running without a court filing; Friday's Day 14 hardens the structural one-week pattern into a structural two-week pattern.
The Antideficiency Act mechanics in the letter are unchanged: the Judgment Fund covers losses in litigation, there is no underlying litigation, the Department of the Interior did not have an appropriation to pay developers to abandon construction, and Whitehouse called for a GAO referral while Representatives Raskin and Huffman run a parallel House Judiciary investigation. [1]
What is new on Day 14 is what is not new — the administration has not produced a public legal memo defending the funding mechanism, OMB has not responded to the documents request, Total has not produced the documents the senator requested by April 23, and the institutional rebuke is now older than the 90-day OIRA review window President Clinton wrote into Executive Order 12866. The silence is the answer.
-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington