President Bush expands influence over regulatory agencies

http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2007/apr/policy/jp_guidance.html

President Bush expands influence over regulatory agencies
Scientific assessments by environmental agencies could be delayed.

The Bush Administration's campaign for regulatory reform has now taken aim at guidance documents, a potpourri of messages from federal agencies that tell businesses how to implement regulations. A new directive from President Bush orders agencies to submit significant guidance documents for review by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It's uncertain how broadly OMB will interpret its new authority. Yet the directive set off a firestorm of alarm among environmental and public-health advocates, who say that an aggressive White House could impede or change agency guidance.

Executive Order 13422, issued by President Bush on January 18, 2007, is accompanied by OMB's Final Bulletin for Agency Good Guidance Practices. These two documents boost White House control over a wide range of regulatory activities.

During the Bush Administration, OMB has often operated under the public radar by issuing documents that attack environmental science; it appears to be the White House's favorite approach toward weakening environmental and public-health regulations, says David Michaels, an epidemiologist at George Washington University. "This was clearly written to target risk assessments by the EPA," Michaels says.

The new order fits this pattern that includes a draft bulletin proposing overhauls to agency risk assessments, issued in 2006, and the 2003 guidelines for agencies on how peer review of regulatory science should be conducted, critics say.

Beginning in July, federal agencies will have to prove the need for new regulations on the basis of specific failures of the free market, such as lack of competition preventing the provision of safe alternatives to toxic substances. Each agency head must designate a political appointee within the agency to control the writing of new rules.

Environmental advocates say they are concerned that the new order will significantly slow down EPA's work. "The bulletin could be used to interfere with chemical assessments for EPA's Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) and the National Toxicology Program's Report on Carcinogens," says Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. OMB has already taken from the IRIS staff at EPA the assessments for formaldehyde, ethylene oxide, and trichloroethylene, Sass says.

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runaway train . . .

K&R

for OMB

A friend of mine who works closely with some EPA folks says that the EPA has been butchered by bushco. That the EPA is running on skeleton staffing and political appointees will soon fill most of the workforce.

Impeachment. Now.