The Panel flatly tellsthe administrationtheir plan is’fundamentallyflawed’.
Science Panel Rejects Bush Administration Changes to Chemical RulesBy Cliff Montgomery – Feb. 8th, 2007Last year the Bush Administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposed a revamping of the rules by which federal agencies decide whether chemicals and other products pose human health risks. This was a controversial move, to say the least. Administration officials decided to counter concerns by running the plan past the prestigious National Research Council.On Jan. 11th, the council issued a crisp response: a 324-page report which curtly says, “Throw it out and start all over,” because the plan is “fundamentally flawed.”According to the Federation of American Scientists, a government watchdog group based in the scientific community, the reply was “an uncommon victory for the objectivity of the scientific advisory process.”The OMB responded by saying that it would not implement the proposed new policy on regulatory risk assessments.Last January the OMB issued its proposal to prescribe new, centralized procedures for performing regulatory risk assessments.But “the proposed (re)definition of risk assessment in the OMB bulletin departs without justification from long-established concepts and practices,” the panel said.The council added that under the proposed changes, “agency risk assessments are more susceptible to being manipulated to achieve a pre-determined result.”The panel agreed with OMB that there is room for improvement in federal risk assessments and that further guidance would help. However, it concluded that the OMB plan “would not accomplish its stated goal of enhancing the technical quality and objectivity of federal risk assessments,” according to a committee news release. The council recommended that the OMB bulletin be withdrawn.Echoing concerns raised by everyone from scientists and consumer groups to agency heads, the council–part of the congressionally chartered National Academies–flatly told the OMB to limit itself to outlining guiding principles, and leave the details to experts in the nation’s scientific agencies.John Ahearne, director of the ethics program at Sigma Xi, an international scientific honor society, who chaired the review committee, said that in his decades of work on such reviews for the National Academies, he could not recall any previous instance when the conclusion was to reject a government proposal outright.”We had expected that we would review the bulletin in detail, then recommend some modifications and improvements,” he told the Washington Post.”We began our review of the draft bulletin thinking we would only be recommending changes, but the more we dug into it, the more we realized that from a scientific and technical standpoint, it should be withdrawn altogether,” Ahearne is quoted as saying in the committee press release.The controversial “draft bulletin” was released last January by the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which has enormous control over how much money regulated industries must spend to ensure that their intended actions will not harm the public or the environment.Ahearne told the Post that among its problems, the plan too narrowly defines an “adverse health effect” as “a fundamental impairment or lesion”; this, he says, ignores the public health goal of preventing–and not merely responding to–injury and sickness. He added that the OMB proposal offers few protections for “sensitive populations” such as children or pregnant women, which usually are the very groups health professionals use to determine acceptable risk levels for the public.Consumer activists cheered the committee report.”The scientific community has rejected this extreme effort to put economists instead of scientists in charge of public health,” said Rena Steinzor, a director of the Center for Progressive Reform, an academic think tank that studies regulatory issues.
