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babylonsister

(171,035 posts) Tue May 15, 2018, 05:45 PM May 2018

White House Thought Burying a Report About Poison Drinking Water Was a Great Idea

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/white-house-buries-contaminated-drinking-water-study

Levin Report
White House Thought Burying a Report About Poison Drinking Water Was a Great Idea
It was an apparent attempt to—wait for it—stave off a “public relations nightmare.”
by Bess Levin

May 14, 2018 6:47 pm

Imagine, if you will, that you are working for the federal government, and a report from the Department of Health and Human Services comes across your desk revealing that chemicals used by big business and the military, which have seeped into water supplies from New York to Michigan to West Virginia, endanger human health at much lower levels than the E.P.A had previously deemed safe. You’d probably want to make sure that Americans currently coming in contact with said water were notified about the study immediately, and that cleanup of the contaminated sites began right away—first because it is very obviously the right thing to do, and second because the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, and its associated public health issues, is still fresh in people’s minds. To most people, the proper course of action would be pretty self-evident! And then you have the Trump administration, whose first impulse is typically to respond in the least responsible, most corrupt, and flat-out dumbest way possible.

Politico reports that several months ago, a H.H.S. unit called the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (A.T.S.D.R.) was all set to publish a federal study showing that a certain class of toxic chemicals linked to thyroid defects, problems in pregnancy, and certain cancers poses a risk to humans even at low levels of exposure. According to the report, the chemicals are present at dangerous levels near military bases, chemical plants, and other sites in multiple states. But when the White House got wind of the report, it worried that revealing its findings would freak people out and put pressure on the E.P.A. and Department of Defense. “The public, media, and Congressional reaction to these numbers is going to be huge,” an unidentified White House aide said in an e-mail forwarded on January 30 by James Herz, a political appointee who oversees environmental issues at the Office of Management and Budget. “The impact to E.P.A. and [the Defense Department] is going to be extremely painful,” the e-mail continued. “We (DoD and E.P.A.) cannot seem to get A.T.S.D.R. to realize the potential public relations nightmare this is going to be.”

The same day that Herz forwarded the e-mail, Nancy Beck, deputy assistant administrator for E.P.A.’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, suggested that the study be sent to the O.M.B.’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs to “coordinate an interagency review,” saying it would be a “good neutral arbiter” of the argument between H.H.S./A.T.S.D.A.R. and the groups wanting to keep the study on the down low. “OMB/OIRA played this role quite a bit under the Bush Administration,” Beck wrote, alluding to the fact that the Bush administration routinely put pressure on government agencies to downplay the risks of toxic chemicals. And now, nearly four months later, the study has yet to be published, and H.H.S. has told Politico it has no scheduled date to release it.

While the parties vying to keep the report unpublished cited “public relations” concerns, they were also presumably aware of the monetary cost associated with dealing with contaminated water. As Politico notes, the H.H.S. document, a toxicological profile, would not carry regulatory weight in and of itself, but could dramatically increase the cost of cleanup at sites like chemical-manufacturing plants and military bases, the latter of which have used foam containing the chemicals in question across the country. It stands to reason they also knew that the chemicals have cost manufacturers billions, with 3M Co. paying out more than $1.5 billion alone to settle lawsuits related to water contamination and personal injury claims. For Donald Trump and Scott Pruitt, for whom industry profits take precedent over both human and environmental health, that is obviously an aggression that cannot stand. Judith Enck, a former E.P.A. official during the Obama years, said that while “scientists always debate each other,” by law, “A.T.S.D.R. is the agency that’s supposed to make health recommendations.” Otherwise, some science-suppressing hacks who prioritize enriching themselves and their buddies might hijack the process!

In a statement, Pruitt’s chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, claimed that by suppressing the study, the E.P.A. was simply helping “ensure that the federal government is responding in a uniform way to our local, state, and Congressional constituents and partners,” saying that the agency “is eager to participate in and, contribute to a coordinated approach . . . to ensure that the federal government is responding in a uniform way to our local, state, and Congressional constituents and partners.”