Less than a year after Internal Revenue Service employees told a Senate hearing about widespread abuse at their agency, their counterparts at the Environmental Protection Agency are going public with their own accounts.
They aren't getting as much media attention. But their complaints reveal how the agency's alleged use of bad science may be harming the environment and wasting taxpayer dollars.
Does it matter?
Seemingly small decisions by the EPA can have a huge effect. Take the EPA's labeling of secondhand cigarette smoke as a Group A carcinogen, for instance. That led many cities and the state of California to ban smoking in public places.
Yet U.S. District Judge William Osteen last month threw out the EPA's claim that secondhand smoke causes cancer. Scientific studies, he said, didn't back up the claim.
It isn't just agency bureaucrats who are mad. Many of those who are most angry are scientists.
A '96 survey of the EPA's Office of Research and Development noted that a "major source of frustration (and insecurity) to ORD employees is that the research direction and even the very existence of ORD is determined by politics" (emphasis in original).
Microbiologist David Lewis, who works for the EPA, is one leading critic. In '96, Lewis published a critical review of EPA science practices in Nature, a respected science journal. A spate of workplace recriminations, such as alleged ethics violations, ensued against Lewis. He later filed suit and won.
"In Lewis' case, you get people who are saying the agency may have gone too far," said EPA spokesman David Cohen. "As long as this agency has existed, there have been very high-profile whistleblowers - most of whom in previous years have always made the argument that the agency wasn't doing enough" to protect the environment.
Lewis counts himself among them. "That message is not getting out there - that we're not just wasting money with bad science, we're (also) putting public health and the environment at risk. And we're operating blind," he said.
In June, a letter in The Washington Times signed by 10 EPA employees, agency contractors and others with agency business stated that "we find the situation so reprehensible that we submit this letter, risking our careers rather than remaining silent."
Those signing, including a few under agency investigation, called themselves "but a few scientists, managers" and others from around the country speaking out against "fraud or waste" and "poor science" at the agency.
A report by the Alexandria, Va.-based National Wilderness Institute in May has helped spawn the ferment. That group advocates free-market solutions to environmental problems.
Provocatively titled "The People v. Carol Browner: EPA on Trial," the detailed account charged that in recent history there's no other example of an "agency's pretenses being so at odds with its practices."
One example in the report involved something simple: asthma inhalers.
Asthma inhalers contain chlorofluorocarbons, which face an eventual total ban under the Montreal Protocol, a treaty that the U.S. signed in '87. However, certain uses deemed essential were exempted until substitutes were found. So far asthma inhalers using CFCs qualify.
But last year, the EPA and the Food and Drug Administration moved to speed up the phaseout of inhalers until they ran into a wall of political outrage.
The EPA also quietly favored switching disposal policy involving inhalers, calling for burning rather than recycling them.
The international accord says CFCs should be destroyed in a way that leads to the release of the least amount into the air. Burning CFCs doesn't do the job, experts say.
"Based on my knowledge of working on three separate trial burn plans for hazardous waste incinerators, (I know) that the people who are experts on incineration within the agency would not support the incineration of CFC materials," said Anthony Datillo, president of EnviroMatrix, a Cleveland-based chemical consulting and lab analysis firm.
An EPA hazardous waste director, Jim Berlow, didn't recall whether CFCs were tested for burnability. "If not, it was viewed that there were other compounds that were even more difficult to burn."
"Typically, it ends up out of stack," Datillo said of CFCs sent for burning. That means CFCs wind up exactly in the wrong place - the atmosphere.
An EPA official who asked not to be named admitted the agency pushed burning CFCs over recycling, citing obligations under the Montreal Protocol. The official added that Congress late last year barred the EPA from urging the burning of CFCs.
But the agency's choice of air pollution over recycling also has hurt business.
Tim Dean heads up Environment First Inc. of Edmond, Okla., a CFC recycler. He says his company has suffered a substantial loss of business due to the EPA rules.
He said, "If you pulled together the people that . . . knew scientific evidence and technology, they'd come forth and say, 'What Mr. Dean says is absolutely right. (Recycling) is absolutely the best course to take.' But so far nobody steps forward."
The few who do invite grief.
For instance, one EPA rule on drinking-water quality requires utilities to tell consumers about cancer-causing agents in their drinking water.
In March, a group of EPA employees calling itself the Edmund Burke Society - after the 18th century statesman who criticized ideological excesses in government - said the EPA should make sure the public knows the risk of getting cancer from the water supply is virtually nil.
The EPA acknowledged that public confusion could make the actual risk worse. Burke Society members suggested in a comments to the agency that the public be told that no documented U.S. cancer cases have been traced to tainted drinking water.
But when group member Alan Carpien in June went to retrieve a copy of the comments from the public docket at the EPA, he found nothing.
"Much to my surprise, I found that the comments had been removed from the public file approximately three months earlier without my consent or knowledge," said Carpien, an EPA lawyer.
Removing comments from an agency's docket is illegal. They were restored after Carpien protested.
Or take the case of Sharyn Erickson.
Erickson began serving as a contract specialist in the EPA's Atlanta regional office in '89. She was reassigned in '95 to what she termed "a nonexistent position" as information resources coordinator.
Erickson had warned early in the '90s that Superfund site cleanup contracts were written in a way that would lead to what she calls an impossibility of performance.
Contracts can "open the government to unlimited liability because the contractor can sit there churning out research year after year trying to meet" strict contract specifications, and the government's "liable for every penny of it," she said. EPA documents confirm the agency knew the problem existed.
"The problem is you have scientific people doing contracting who don't understand contracting principles," she added.
Early on, Erickson set out to alert colleagues of this problem in performance-based contracting. A "design team" that she belonged to vetted contracts for possible liability. Her work won praise - and a bonus -from the EPA.
But starting in mid-'93, her job was slowly shifted to more menial duties. In March '95, the EPA's inspector general opened a criminal probe of her. Soon she was reassigned. Erickson says the contents of her desk, including some personal items, were confiscated.
No criminal case is open against Erickson, an EPA official told the Cypress, Texas-based trade newsletter Environmental Insider in June. Yet closing a criminal probe usually means a report has been written. IBD's requests for a copy of the report have not been answered.
The EPA's own Science Advisory Board said in a budget report it was "disturbed to note that the research budget is declining both as a percentage of the overall agency budget and in real purchasing power."
Comments on this posting?
Click here to post a public comment on the Trash Talk Bulletin Board.
Click here to send a private comment to the Junkman.
Copyright © 1998 Steven J. Milloy. All rights reserved on original material. Material copyrighted by others is used either with permission or under a claim of "fair use." Site developed and hosted by WestLake Solutions, Inc.
Material presented on this home page constitutes opinion of Steven J. Milloy.