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.

The White House released a report in 2004 that invited industry to nominate regulatory protections to be weakened or eliminated, and in that report OMB offered its own list of rollbacks. One of the rollback demands on the White House's own hit list was a call for EPA to be looser with its Safe Drinking Water Act authority to grant "economically disadvantaged drinking water systems" variances from safe drinking water standards.

After all, god forbid that poor communities be entitled to the same level of safe drinking water that everyone else enjoys.

Now EPA has bent to OMB's will. A March 2 Federal Register entry that proposes allowing small drinking water systems to serve us water with up to three times the maximum contaminant levels! The standard of affordability that would open the way to variances would also change: the proposed rule would count spending as little as $100 per year (which NRDC notes is a mere 0.25% of median household incomes) on drinking water as unaffordable.

Here's a tasty example: if your drinking water system (which may be owned by a distant corporation rather than your local government) has arsenic in the water at 29 parts per billion -- well over the standard of 10 parts per billion that the Bush administration threatened to roll back until the public cried out -- it can be considered safe.

Learn more about what's at stake from NRDC's safe drinking water program.

Posted by Robert Shull, 01:03:18 PM