This afternoon, Congressman Brad Miller (D-NC), Chairman of the House Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, will hold a hearing on recent revisions to the IRIS assessment process. IRIS (the Integrated Risk Information System) is EPA’s premier database of toxicological profiles for dangerous chemicals. The profiles are used for everything from setting cleanup standards at Superfund sites to determining liability in toxic tort suits. The problem is, IRIS only contains profiles for 548 chemicals. On average, 700 new chemicals enter commerce each year. Because IRIS numbers can serve as a cornerstone in the risk assessment/risk management process, an extensive database would greatly benefit policymakers in their daily work to protect public health.
We wanted to see whether some well-known toxins are adequately covered in the IRIS database, so we looked at the number of hazardous air pollutants that are listed in the Clean Air Act but missing from IRIS. We found that 17 percent of the chemicals have no profile at all. More remarkably, for a full two-thirds of the chemicals listed in the Clean Air Act, there is no data point in the IRIS database for the most relevant toxicological value needed to devise controls for toxic air pollution – the inhalation reference concentration (full report, press release)
Full textOn Tuesday, Representatives Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak sent a letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg asking the agency to re-examine its assessment that bisphenol A (BPA) does not pose health risks to consumers. The FDA responded that it was already planning on doing so, and that a new decision would be released within "weeks, not months" (AP, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel).
Full textThe Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel continued its impressive BPA reporting Sunday with disturbing revelations about former FDA political appointees' utter disregard for the agency's career scientists. Using the Freedom of Information Act, the Journal-Sentinel uncovered e-mails showing that high-level officials went to industry lobbyists for advice about new research on bisphenol A (BPA) before asking FDA career staff.
In one instance, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's deputy director sought information from the BPA industry's chief lobbyist to discredit a Japanese study that found it caused miscarriages in workers who were exposed to it. This was before government scientists even had a chance to review the study.
"I'd like to get information together that our chemists could look at to determine if there are problems with that data in advance of possibly reviewing the study," Mitchell Cheeseman, deputy director of the FDA's center for food safety and applied nutrition, said in an e-mail seeking advice from Steven Hentges, executive director of the trade association's BPA group.
BPA is a chemical used to make clear and rigid plastics -- everything from water bottles to dental fillings to DVDs. Its ubiquity in commerce translates to pervasive levels of human exposure: it is found in the urine of 93 percent of Americans.
Full textCPR President Rena Steinzor and Policy Analyst Matt Shudtz submitted formal comments this week to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) with policy recommendations for separating science from politics.
Back on March 9, President Obama issued a memorandum on scientific integrity, which outlined broad principles on the subject and requested that John Holdren, the director of OSTP, draw up a series of specific policy recommendations. CPR Member Scholars wrote a letter to Holdren with initial recommendations, and suggested opening the process to formal public comment. On April 27, the White House announced that they were doing just that.
The comments submitted by Steinzor and Shudtz on Wednesday give recommendations in response to each of the six broad principles that President Obama set out. Below is a summary of their recommendations.
Full textThis morning, the Center for Progressive Reform's Rena Steinzor testifies before the House Science and Technology Committee's Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. In her remarks, she calls on the White House to reshape the role of the director of OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs -- the so-called regulatory czar. All too frequently OIRA has been the place where protective regulations go to get weakened or killed, and Steinzor argues forcefully that there's a better role for the OIRA director: a defender of federal regulatory agencies and their missions, rather than an impediment to regulation. Full text
President Obama addressed the National Academy of Sciences this morning at the group's annual meeting. Not since John F. Kennedy addressed NAS in 1963 has a president found the time to directly engage with the people whose ingenuity and hard work is directly responsible for many of the greatest improvements in our daily lives. And he did it within his first 100 days. He told a packed house that the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over, and maybe his trip to the NAS building -- and its timing -- show that he's serious. Full text
The Bush Administration earned its reputation for being contemptuous of science. From suppressing an EPA global warming report so as not to put the federal government's imprimatur on the scientific consensus that climate change was real and human-caused, to simply refusing to open an email containing formal scientific findings inconvenient to its policy objectives, the Bush crowd took manipulation of science to previously unknown extremes. But as CPR President Rena Steinzor points out, the Bush Administration didn't invent the practice. Science and scientists have been under political pressure from a variety of sources and in a variety of ways for quite some time now. Full text
CPR President Rena Steinzor and Member Scholar Wendy Wagner authored an op-ed in Monday's Austin American-Statesman and Cleveland's Plain Dealer with recommendations for President Obama's initiative for "science integrity." On March 9, the President had instructed the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop a plan to achieve a goal of "ensuring the highest level of integrity in all aspects of the executive branch's involvement with scientific and technological processes." Steinzor and Wagner write that the plan should be broad enough to address more than just the dirty science of the Bush Administration. Full text
Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholar Dan Rohlf blogs on Senator James Inhofe's battle for scientific integrity: The Associated Press reported last week that the Commerce Department's inspector general is looking into who leaked a draft of the Bush Administration's plans to prevent federal agencies from considering the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on species protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, expressing concern over what he termed a serious abdication of duty by the government official or officials who leaked the document to the National Wildlife Federation last summer, called for the investigation. Full text
Center for Progressive Reform Policy Analyst Matthew Shudtz blogs on President Obama's scientific integrity task force: Monday was a good day for our nation's science policy. At the same time he announced that the federal government will abandon misguided restrictions on stem cell research, President Obama unveiled an effort to promote a sea change in the way political appointees will treat the science that informs so many federal policies. Full text