Stop me if you’ve heard this one… objective researchers find a public-health threat, new safety regulations were drafted, Bush gets lobbied, and the tougher regulations are weakened and ignored. In a story that should surprise no one, it’s happened again.
After massive underground plumes of an industrial solvent were discovered in the nation’s water supplies, the [tag]Environmental Protection Agency[/tag] mounted a major effort in the 1990s to assess how dangerous the chemical was to human health.
Following four years of study, senior EPA scientists came to an alarming conclusion: The solvent, [tag]trichloroethylene[/tag], or TCE, was as much as 40 times more likely to cause cancer than the EPA had previously believed.
The preliminary report in 2001 laid the groundwork for tough new standards to limit public exposure to TCE. Instead of triggering any action, however, the assessment set off a high-stakes battle between the EPA and Defense Department, which had more than 1,000 military properties nationwide polluted with [tag]TCE[/tag].
By 2003, after a prolonged challenge orchestrated by the Pentagon, the EPA lost control of the issue and its TCE assessment was cast aside. As a result, any conclusion about whether millions of Americans were being contaminated by TCE was delayed indefinitely.
The LA Times, in the first of a two-part series on what happened, detailed the fiasco today. As Kevin noted, one of the Pentagon officials who pushed the White House into ignoring the EPA’s research explained why the administration’s environmental researchers and scientists needed to be ignored.
But Raymond F. [tag]DuBois[/tag], former deputy undersecretary of Defense for installations and environment in the Bush administration, said the Pentagon had not been willing to accept whatever came out of the EPA, though it cared a great deal about base contamination.
“If you go down two or three levels in EPA, you have an awful lot of people that came onboard during the Clinton administration, to be perfectly blunt about it, and have a different approach than I do at Defense,” DuBois said.
Yes, those underhanded Clinton-era scientists may have asked the administration to limit the public’s exposure to TCE. What were they thinking?