Ethics Newsline®

WASHINGTON
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) circumvented the standard rule-making process when drafting new guidelines for mercury emissions, blocking required scientific studies and drafting the rule with portions of text written by energy industry advocates, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

The revelations have forced EPA administrator Michael Leavitt to announce a review of the proposed rule and the process that created it.

Many environmental regulators, both Republican and Democratic, said the process of drafting the mercury rules violated accepted standards and appeared to have been driven not by science, but by politics.

Bush appointee Jeffrey Holmstead, who heads the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, and his senior advisor, William Wehrun, told EPA staffers that the normally required studies on the effects of mercury were not to be performed. Both men formerly worked as attorneys for Latham & Watkins, a national law firm representing large coal-fired utility plants, which wanted lenient regulations, noted the Times.

“I was floored,” one participant, who has served several administrations, told the Times. “We pointed out that the studies were required that the data runs were promised to a federal advisory committee.”

After being promised the research, that committee — a 21-member advisory panel tasked with making recommendations on evaluating the science behind mercury regulations — was effectively disbanded by the EPA.

“We were cut off without any warning or explanation,” panel co-chair John Paul, the Republican director of the Ohio Regional Air Pollution Control Agency, told the Times.

The Bush administration, packed with former energy industry executives, chose a process “that would support the conclusion they wanted to reach,” Paul charged.

The EPA then drafted the provisional rule for mercury emissions, slated to become effective in December, with portions of text written by Latham & Watkins and by West Associates, an energy industry advocacy group, according to the Times.

“I think it is outrageous,” Russell Train, a Republican who headed the EPA during the Nixon and Ford administrations, told the Times. “The agency has strayed from its mission in the past three years.”

Those charges echo separate reports released earlier this month by two groups of scientists alleging that politics instead of science are driving many of the Bush administration’s decisions, affecting policy and quality of life for decades to come.

EPA head Michael Leavitt last week said he now has asked for recommendations of needed studies — the same information that staffers say they were barred from gathering last year, according to the Times.

Former EPA head Christie Todd Whitman, who oversaw the agency while the mercury regulations were drafted, said she “did not know that we were cutting a process short or shortchanging the analysis.”

Taking fire, the EPA last week also admitted that its proposed regulations, which predicted a 70 percent drop in power-plant mercury emissions by 2018, ignored the agency’s determination that such a reduction would not be reached until 2025, if ever.

“What our models now show is that we wouldn’t get there as soon as we expected we would,” Jeffrey Holmstead, the Bush appointee accused of blocking the normal studies, told the Washington Post last week.