The Interagency Working Group on Ursine Infrastructure Intrusion was convened on May 14. There was no press release, no Federal Register notice, and no charter filed under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which its composition may or may not require.
We know it exists because of a records request that came back almost entirely blacked out.
One word survived
The response ran to fourteen pages. Thirteen were redacted in full. The fourteenth was a meeting agenda with every line item withheld except a single word in the header.
The word was "seasonal."
It is not clear what it modified. The agency cited exemptions covering deliberative process and critical infrastructure, both of which are routine and neither of which requires it to explain the choice line by line.
"A fourteen-page release with one word in it is not a document. It's a signal that a document exists."
A transparency lawyer who reviewed the response at our request
What can be established
Four agencies have confirmed participation when asked directly: Energy, Interior, FEMA, and the Fish and Wildlife Service. Two others declined to confirm or deny. A seventh agency initially confirmed, then called back the following day to say the confirmation had been given in error.
The group meets weekly. Its output, according to two people with knowledge of the process, is a single assessment document that has been through at least four drafts and has not been released in any of them.
The nineteen-month restoration figure that has circulated in recent coverage comes from the third draft. We have not seen the fourth.
Asked when the assessment would be published, a spokesperson for one participating agency said the working group's product was "predecisional" and that no publication date had been set.