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News & Analysis | REG•WATCH Blog | Press Room
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Linking Tobacco to Risk Assessments
Tobacco industries employed scientists “to convince public health officials not that cigarettes were safe, but that there was not yet sufficient evidence of their danger to justify limiting places where tobacco could be smoked,” according to Environmental and Occupational Health Professor David Michaels. Now, under laws like the Data Quality Act, manufacturing doubt to keep harmful substances in the air and on the market is common practice. In a great Op-Ed for the Baltimore Sun, Michaels links the historic example of the tobacco industry manufacturing uncertainty to keep people smoking with OMB’s new bulletin on risk assessment. Michaels explains how OMB’s onerous new risk assessment guidelines for agencies create another way to use uncertainty as an excuse to not regulate:
Except when political appointees override the judgment of career
federal scientists (as when a White House staffer rewrote an
Environmental Protection Agency report on global warming to highlight
scientific uncertainty), the nonpolitical staff at regulatory agencies
can generally see through these crude efforts to create doubt. And
Congress has refused to pass the Bush administration's attempts, such
as the initiative with the Orwellian name "Clear Skies," to weaken
environmental laws.
Clearly frustrated, the White House is making a run around Congress to
change the way the agencies conduct risk assessments, the studies that
form the basis for health protections. The Office of Management and
Budget has proposed mandatory "guidelines" that would require agencies
to conduct impossibly comprehensive risk assessments before issuing
scientific or technical documents, including the rules polluters have
to follow.
What appears at first blush to be good government reform is in fact a
backdoor attempt to undermine existing environmental laws. If this is
successful, the uncertainty manufactured by polluters will be written
into federal risk assessments, providing the justification to weaken
public health protection.
Posted by Genevieve Smith
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