Jennifer Sass's Blog
NRDC testified at Congressional hearings today on Science Under Siege at the U.S. EPA
September 18, 2008
Posted by Jennifer Sass in Health and the Environment
Today, I provided testimony before the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, at hearings entitled: Science under Siege: Scientific Integrity at the U.S. EPA about political interference with Agency scientists, in their efforts to assess and regulate hazardous chemicals.
Throughout the eight years of the Bush Administration, NRDC and others have documented the science under siege at the EPA, to expose the cozy relationship between the regulatory agency and the industries it is tasked with regulating. Not content to simply undermine health standards for a host of toxic chemicals one-by-one, Administration officials have also attacked the foundational process for assessing the risks of toxic chemicals, the EPA Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) program that assesses hazardous substances.
Yesterday, two letters were sent to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, one from environmental and health groups, and another from toxicologists relaying concerns with the White House imposed changes to the EPA IRIS chemical evaluation process.
The importance of having timely, robust, reliable chemical assessments on the IRIS database was evident in the testimony today of Mr. Daniel Parshley of the Glynn Environmental Coalition in Georgia. The Office of the Inspector General (OIG), at the request the Glynn Environmental Coalition, has reviewed claims that a Glynn County, GA Superfund site contaminated with Toxaphene, a toxic persistant legacy chemical that was banned in 1990 in the U.S., is receiving inadequate clean up. At the heart of the dispute is a testing method that fails to detect most of the toxic congeners and degradation products of toxaphene, thus underestimating the extent of contamination. Use of the biased testing method was approved by a closed partnership between EPA Region 4, the Georgia Environmental Protection Division (GaEPD) and Hercules, Inc. that failed to include community representatives. Both the OIG and a previous review by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (2002), have recommended that EPA should discard this flawed method in favor of established tests that identify toxaphene degradation products. Mr. Parshley came all the way to Washington to ask Congress to help his community get justice. They want clean up, so their children won't have to live and go to school near a toxic dump site.
NRDC is asking Congress to defend our public servant scientists as the Nation's brain-trust, and to require IRIS health assessments to be reviewed in an open process, without inappropriate political interference. It is the least that Mr. Parshley's community and others like his across the country deserve!
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