Environmental Protection Agency employees have faced several challenges recently, according to an article by Sheila Kaplan in Politics Daily.
In her article, she cited the preliminary findings of a scientific advisory board and said EPA staffers “have been forced to ignore relevant science, have lacked key monitoring data on human health and environmental impacts, and have worked without crucial information needed to protect the public.”
Kaplan said the Committee on Science Integration for Decision Making is continuing to work on its investigation of the issue, but has posted draft summaries on the EPA Web site. The summaries, according to Kaplan, include 73 interviews with 450 EPA employees. She called it “an unusual bottom-up examination that could bring sweeping changes to the 40-year-old federal agency.” She said some staffers traced the problems of the EPA back to the Bush administration, but others said the obstacles are “longstanding and continue to this day.”
The EPA has what Kaplan dubbed an “enormous mandate,” which includes protecting air, water, land and human health from pollutants in the environment. In Kaplan’s overview of the interviews, she said “the interviews overall portray an organization that has been hobbled by political pressure to avoid damaging industry; has lacked sufficient scientists in regional offices; has been slow to act against known hazards, and has had a tendency to let products with harmful pollutants enter the marketplace and the environment without first ensuring their safety.”
Prior to the review of the EPA, a former agency official accused President George W. Bush of having “pressured agency employees to water down concerns of global climate change,” according to Kaplan. In response to this, the committee was launched by Stephen L. Johnson in 2008. Johnson served as agency chief in Bush’s second term.
The committee, which Kaplan said is informally called the Science Advisory Board, interviewed the scores of EPA employees around the country between October 2009 and February 2010. Kaplan said that the across-the-board findings were that EPA staffers were frustrated by the slow pace of decisions that included the banning or restriction of supposedly hazardous chemicals. Other problems employees were concerned with were the decline of EPA monitoring of human health and environmental impacts, the nation’s water supply, poor sewage treatment and the lack of recruitment and training of scientists, according to Kaplan.
The investigators are expected to hold a public meeting in September, in which they will discuss their findings, Kaplan said in her article. They will later issue a formal paper that includes recommendations for agency changes.
Source: GreeningDetroit.com
Author: Jennifer Griffin, Contributing Writer and Public Relations, GreeningDetroit.com