-: My name is Nicholas Whittenburg.
I'm a 2007 undergrad, B.A. in Political Science
and graduated from law school in 2011.
I'm an attorney adviser at the United States
Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C.
I'm on detail to the White House Office of Science
and Technology Policy.
So at EPA, a lot of the litigation I worked on
was FOIA-based and it was in the office of pesticides.
And my new role, it is more of a general council position,
dealing with overarching legal issues that can arise
and it could be ethical questions,
it could be working on speeches, it could be working with
procurement law, it could be working on FOIA requests
that come in, which is kind of a nice palate of options
that kinda come day to day.
We work together with fellow lawyers and our law clerks
and our staff and our experts,
to work on a particular quest.
We work with the requester to identify what information
they're looking for.
We work with our E-discovery folks
to collect that information.
If there's other information that's not electronic,
we look to find that as well.
We then work as a team to review that and then we have
production schedules, it could be monthly.
That way we're working with requestors to make sure
their needs are met and it's a reasonably fashion
to meet that as well.
And that happens daily, where various organizations
have different requests and so we kinda have to
be flexible to their needs.
Being on detail means you're at the complex.
I work in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building,
right across from the White House on the campus.
It's a fairly large campus.
I think somebody's told me there's a couple thousand people
from all the various, individuals, career, political,
security, so it's very exciting just to see
the moving pieces happen right in front of you.
You know, there could be a nine to five day,
but sometimes there's a seven to seven day.
Or maybe something on the weekend comes up.
It's just having the communication tools that you need
to work on, and maybe that could be something
late at night comes across and you wanna make sure
your clients get the information they need
in a timely fashion.
But most the time, individuals appreciate
that you have an external life, but just ensuring
that communication is given so you can understand
what's going on both ways.