A couple months ago I posted about how the EPA overruled its own experts and denied California’s plan to address greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks. Well this pattern of using politics, rather than science, to create rules and justify actions by the EPA has infected the agency to a dangerous degree, according to a new report. The Union of Concerned Scientists, concerned about how the EPA’s decisions “have too often led to the suppression and the distortion of the scientific findings underlying those decisions,” took on the task of investigating the treatment of EPA scientists and how their work was used. After a comprehensive survey of over 1500 EPA scientists, UCS found that 60% of the had encountered at least one instance of political interference in the previous five years. Of the scientists who had been with the EPA for at least 10 years, 43% say that the interference has gotten worse in the last half decade.

The report on the investigation, which was released last week, shows a chilling pattern of scientists’ conclusions and recommendations being edited improperly, being misrepresented by EPA officials, and being changed to weaken or transform the results. The pattern of the Bush EPA was to politicize the agency rather than allow it to perform its intended functions. Other examples of the extent of this interference include:

18 percent of scientists had “personally experienced frequent or occasional edits… that change the meaning of scientific findings”

22 percent had “personally experienced frequent or occasional selective or incomplete use of data to justify a specific regulatory outcome.”

42 percent knew of “many or some cases in which commercial interests have inappropriately induced the reversal or withdrawal of EPA scientific conclusions or decisions through political intervention”

43 percent knew of “many or some cases in which EPA political appointees were inappropriately involved in scientific decisions

31 percent personally experienced “frequent or occasional statements by EPA officials that misrepresent scientists’ findings.

The UCS went further to illustrate its survey’s findings with actual examples of political interference. The report is ripe with a number of instances in which the White House, OMB or EPA political appointees tried to influence or override the science involved in the EPA’s work.

The [Office of Management and Budget] OMB has recently stepped beyond its role in reviewing the EPA’s policies to review and manage the actual science underlying them…

In 2007 OMB analysts manipulated scientific knowledge about mortality arising from exposure to ground level ozone… The OMB has also interfered in the scientific basis for EPA policies on a rule regulating formaldehyde pollution from plywood plants… and a 2006 decision not to tighten the ambient air quality standards for fine particulate matter…

The Clean Air Mercury Rule (CAMR) that was issued by the EPA in 2005, consisted of rules that, according to former director of the Air Enforcement Division “were hatched at the White House; The Environmental Protection Agency’s experts simply were not consulted at all.” Who did the Bush White House rely on to develop the CAMR proposal? They had “significant input from power companies and utilities affected by the rule. The proposal lifted several paragraphs verbatim from memos prepared by Latham & Watkins, a law firm representing the utility industry.”

How about with regards to climate change?

In June, 2003, the New York Times reported that the White House had tried to substantially alter the section on climate change in the EPA’s draft report on the Environment… Administration officials… demanded that the EPA remove reference to a temperature record covering 1000 years, statements referencing numerous scientific studies showing that human activity is contributing significantly to climate change, and a summary statement that “climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment.”

Arguments refuting the scientific consensus on climate change were inserted by the American Petroleum Institute.

There are many more examples of political interference by the Bush Administration in the work, findings and reporting by EPA scientists, which I will address in later posts. What this report robustly illustrates is the depth of the interference, the lengths that the White House would go to to politicize the science, and the harm that was and is being caused by the Bush Administration and their desire to put business and politics well above the protection of the nation’s environment and the well-being and health of its citizens.  While this is not a surprising conclusion, what is shocking is the extent of their success.

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