The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is right
about one thing: the public should hold it accountable for how its
programs work. The EPA said as much last month in a press
release announcing its participation in ExpectMore.gov, which
"provides the public with candid, easy to understand assessments of
federal programs," including approximately forty-three from
EPA.
So why did this huge, wasteful federal agency
stonewall a small, information-seeking consumer advocacy
organization and flout the law in the process?
On August 23, 2005, the American Council on Science
and Health (ACSH), a non-profit group that debunks unscientific
claims, and the Washington Legal Foundation (WLF), a public interest law firm, jointly filed a petition under the
Information Quality Act (IQA) calling on the EPA to eliminate "junk
science" from the process by which it determines whether a substance
is likely to cause cancer in humans. IQA requires the federal
government to ensure the "equality, objectivity, utility, and
integrity" of information it dispenses to the public -- and to
explain itself in a timely fashion when petitioned about regulations
that fail to employ the best available science.
EPA routinely declares chemicals "carcinogens" --
implying a likelihood of a health threat to humans -- based solely
on the creation of tumors in lab rodents through the administration
of superhigh doses that are irrelevant to ordinary human exposure
levels. Rat tests do not even reliably predict effects in
rats' close relatives, mice, let alone effects in humans -- though
similar effects in multiple species might be an indicator of a
genuine problem. As ACSH has explained in its report America's
War on "Carcinogens", declaring substances "carcinogens" --
when they should more properly be called merely "high-dose rodent
carcinogens" -- is a chief source of health panics, junk-science
lawsuits, activist crusades against chemicals, and the waste of
resources from unnecessary abatement, cleanup, and product
recall/reformulation/replacement.
The ACSH/WLF petition requested that EPA comply with
the IQA by eliminating guidelines indicating that a substance may be
labeled a "likely" human carcinogen based solely or primarily on the
results of animal studies. The petition notes that the great
majority of toxicologists agree this practice is scientifically
unsound.
The law permits EPA, if it so chooses, to adopt
policies that err on the side of caution when faced with genuinely
equivocal evidence regarding a substance's carcinogenicity, but
the IQA does not permit EPA to distort the evidence itself in
furtherance of such policies. EPA commits such distortion
through its guidelines' use of "default options" -- its purported
right to assume, without regard to the scientific evidence, that
tumors in lab rodents indicate that much smaller doses can cause
cancer in humans. Erring on the "safe side" in regulatory
decisions does not, we argue, permit EPA to falsely claim that such
regulated substances truly are "likely to be carcinogenic to
humans."
The EPA's own IQA guidelines allow them either
forty-five or ninety days from our August 23 filing to respond or to
ask for an additional ninety days to resolve the matter. Not
surprisingly, they chose the ninety days. Still, shortly after
the ninetieth day, they informed us they needed an additional sixty
days. Then, on January 20th, three days before the new
deadline -- and nearly five months after our petition was filed --
the EPA asked for a third extension, informing us that they needed
"additional time" -- another sixty days -- to complete their
review. If only the EPA held themselves to the standards to
which they hold everyone else -- imposing fines on companies slow to
comply with EPA edicts. At a typical EPA fine rate of $25,000
per day, the agency would owe ACSH about $3,000,000 -- and with each
day they delayed, the EPA was harming consumers and industry by
using shoddy science to regulate or ban products that were used
safely for years. We should indeed expect more from the
EPA.
Finally, in early March, two weeks before their
final self-imposed deadline, EPA replied with a dodge, claiming that
their Risk Assessment Guidelines are not statements of scientific
fact -- and thus not covered by the IQA -- but merely statements of
EPA policy. One might have hoped that science and policy would
go together at the world's most powerful regulatory agency.
WLF is appealing on behalf of ACSH, filing a request for
reconsideration with the EPA.
Jeff Stier, Esq., is an associate director of the American
Council on Science and Health. A copy of the ACSH/WLF petition
can be found at: http://wlf.org/Litigating/casedetail.asp?detail=368 . Information on the filing of the petition and EPA's
repeated delays in answering can be found at: http://www.acsh.org/healthissues/newsid.1167/healthissue_detail.asp
.
