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Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Risk Assessment Update

• OMB Watch and NRDC invited to present views to NAS panel. When Graham released his swansong proposed bulletin, he also commissioned an NAS panel to peer review it. At the panel’s invitation, OMB Watch and NRDC argued against the bulletin as yet another excessive burden that would prevent agencies from producing the information (such as IRIS values and National Toxicology Program assessments of carcinogenicity) and regulatory safeguards that the public needs. (More information will be available next month, when the advocacy and scientific communities file comments on the bulletin.)

• House leaders call for broader scope of NAS peer review. Apparently concerned by the possibility that the NAS panel would be essentially forced to endorse the proposed bulletin by a constricted charge, several leading Democratic members of the House sent NAS a letter urging a broader review of more fundamental questions, such as whether there is even a need at all for such a one-size-fits-all approach for risk assessments.

• EPA forges ahead with its own burdensome approaches. Inside EPA reports that Graham acolyte George Gray, recently installed as EPA’s science chief, has delayed the risk assessment of a drycleaner solvent while he pushes for an internal EPA version of the OMB bulletin — using scientific uncertainty as an excuse to force IRIS values to be reported as ranges rather than a point estimate of toxicity. Defeating the OMB bulletin may not be, then, the last word on administration efforts to distort risk assessment.