From Watchdog to Lapdog: An Insider's History of the EPA

By Evaggelos Vallianatos, AlterNet. Posted May 30, 2009.

Finally, Reagan's vice president, George Herbert Walker Bush, put the icing on the cake, making the EPA a servant of the polluters. He launched a corporate give-away that he called "regulatory relief." He demanded that the entire government reorganize to facilitate the business of America's business.

The EPA breathed a premature sigh of relief in the 1990s with Bill Clinton in the White House.

In an Orwellian spectacle, in 1996, Republicans and Democrats in Congress and Democratic managers at EPA celebrated the abolition of the Delaney Clause, which prohibited carcinogens in processed food.

When it comes to processed food, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is the king. But in the case of the Delaney Clause, the EPA took the leadership in dismantling it. It simply had become unbearable to know that each time EPA regulators approved the use of a cancer-causing chemical for food, they violated the Delaney Clause.

The EPA first funded the Academy of Sciences to study the "paradox" of allowing cancer-causing sprays on "raw agricultural commodities," the vegetables and fruits we eat, but forbidding cancer-causing residues on processed food. The report of the academy recommended doing away with the Delaney Clause on the speculative grounds that the number of people dying from eating sprayed food would be insignificant.

Just like the insults on our health from eating food laced with carcinogens and neurotoxins are additive, so are the political and corporate effects on the integrity of EPA. A child brought up eating America's conventional food is headed for trouble. In the same fashion, science, an objective way of making decisions, becomes diffuse and biased, the immediate victim of having polluters dictate policy and write the laws and regulations of EPA.

With polluters pulling the strings, science is no longer science at EPA, because both its data and rules are fixed to support a predetermined decision. Political EPA has also facilitated this transition with shutting down most of its laboratories and libraries, outsourcing the analysis of data coming from the "regulated" industries. The EPA's "scientists" cut-and-paste or paraphrase the industries' conclusions for their own.

By the time George W. Bush took over in 2001, there was no more than the skeleton of the EPA in place. The Bush people, motivated by the plunder of public wealth and by the apocalypse, dismissed nature outright. That's why Bush did nothing about global warming. Like James Watt, Reagan's secretary of the interior, Bush expected Jesus to come down.

This also explains why the Bush administration weakened the Endangered Species Act and the laws protecting nature and our health. The White House forbade the EPA from bringing into compliance with the law old coal-burning factories, resulting in about 40,000 American deaths every year from the toxic emissions of these power plants.

In addition, the Bush administration undermined the Montreal Protocol, a global treaty designed to protect the earth's ozone layer from chemicals like methyl bromide, which farmers use in the growing of produce like strawberries, tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. Methyl bromide was to be phased out by 2005, but the EPA and the USDA cooked the data for a "critical use" exemption of no less than 8,942 tons for 2005, more than double the amount granted to the 25 members of the European Union.

So did the EPA accomplish anything of value? We should be grateful to the EPA for its early work of banning DDT and several other poisons and cleaning the air and water from many hazards. The EPA also provides the model of what could still be done to improve the quality of life for both humans and animals.

President Barack Obama would do well to depoliticize the EPA. Ideally, Obama and Congress ought to invent an EPA modeled after the Supreme Court so that it is beyond the reach of the White House, politicians and industry.

This means the EPA administrator would be a person of great scientific knowledge and moral integrity. The president would nominate him or her to the Senate for confirmation and service for no less than 20 years. The budget for the EPA should also be set aside with no possibility the White House and Congress might interfere with the decisions of EPA.

Environmental protection is human protection, in addition to being a moral act. It is a last-ditch effort to save the earth from its human masters.

That's why a new EPA, carefully crafted to repair and uphold the integrity of threatened ecosystems while protecting us from our own technics and poisons, could be America's greatest contribution to its own well-being and survival and that of the planet.

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Evaggelos Vallianatos, a former EPA analyst, is the author of This Land is Their Land and The Passion of the Greeks.

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