RE: Question for 21 September: Can we trust the EPA?

[Rich Puchalsky <rpuchalsky@att.net>]

Well, I know I shouldn't touch this one, but I'll be honest.

EPA as an institution is dysfunctional in ways that have nothing to do with individual low-level EPA staff, who are generally hardworking and dedicated.  EPA comes under a lot more pressure from industry than from environmental groups, because industry has the money to tirelessly lobby everyone involved.  I've been at public comment meetings where I was the only environmental group representative and there were 20 industry people there.  Since EPA tends to weight comments by volume, these kinds of meetings usually result in concessions to industry.  Industry is also practiced at interfering through other parts of the government.  For instance, all EPA data collection forms must be approved through OMB, the Office of Management and Budget.  Industry routinely lobbies OMB to try to demolish the TRI program, and EPA almost always has to give something away every few years when the TRI forms must be renewed.

One of EPA's common activities, in response to pressure, is to reorganize.  The office called OPPTS was doing fine with TRI; everyone involved had a high level of expertise.  So higher-ups at EPA decided to create a new Office of Information and put TRI within it.  Half the TRI staff was lost, plus, of course, little work got done while the lengthy reorganization occured.  While the old office thought about how to get data to people, the new one thinks about how to avoid angering industry by presenting "incorrect" data that industry submitted in the first place, and about how to restrict the presentation of raw data so that only the conclusions that industry wants to be drawn can be drawn.

Another example is the Facility Identification projects.  EPA realized that people should be able to identify the same facility across the different EPA databases.  So they started a project called FINDS to do this.  FINDS didn't work well because different EPA program managers didn't want to modify their individual databases to work together.  So FINDS was replaced by something else, which was replaced by something else -- there were 4 or 5 iterations, I think -- and finally we're back to an approach that's very much like FINDS, except that we're still being told to "give it time to work" because in theory it's a new program instead of a recycled old one.

So the answer to this question is, not particularly.  In fact I assume that this very discussion will probably lead to some sort of reorganization that will end up jettisoning a lot of the progress already made in favor of some new structure that presents mainly noncontroversial information.  I'd guess that as a result of this, we're going to see lots of puff pieces on how people can recycle their trash, and that the kinds of things like the pesticide health effect information that Sue Darcey has been asking for will be rejected as something that should not be given out because it is "too complicated" for people to understand, and because it would take a long time to design a nice Web interface for it that ensures that the proper disclaimers are given away along with the data.

I still think that this discussion is valuable, but mainly as a way for us to educate each other, not because I think that anything good is going to be done with the results of it.

The above opinions are purely my own, and do not represent those of any of the organizations that I work for or with.