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Old Mar 17th, 2004, 03:59 PM        Is there ANYTHING this adminsitration won't Politicize?
EPA staff say mercury proposal was politicized
Agency's specialists reportedly rebuffed

By Tom Hamburger and Alan C. Miller, Los Angeles Times, 3/17/2004

WASHINGTON -- Political appointees in the Environmental Protection Agency bypassed agency professional staff and a federal advisory panel last year to craft a rule on mercury emissions preferred by the industry and the White House, several longtime EPA officials say.


The officials say they were told not to undertake the normal scientific and economic studies called for under a standing executive order. At the same time, the proposal to regulate mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants was written using key language provided by utility lobbyists.

The Bush administration has said that the proposed rule would cut mercury emissions by 70 percent in the next 15 years, and is tied to the president's "Clear Skies" initiative. But critics say it would delay reductions in mercury levels for decades at a risk to public health, while saving the power and coal industries billions of dollars.

Studies designed to address such questions are the ones that were not conducted.

EPA veterans say they cannot recall another instance when the agency's technical specialists were cut out of developing a major regulatory proposal.

The administration chose a process "that would support the conclusion they wanted to reach," said John A. Paul, a Republican environmental regulator from Ohio who cochaired the EPA-appointed advisory panel and who says that its 21 months of work on mercury was ignored.

"There is a politicization of the work of the agency that I have not seen before," said Bruce C. Buckheit, who served in major federal environmental posts for two decades. He retired in December as director of the EPA's Air Enforcement Division, partly because he felt enforcement was stymied. "A political agenda is driving the agency's output, rather than analysis and science," he said.

Russell E. Train, a Republican who headed the EPA during the Nixon and Ford administrations, said, "I think it is outrageous."

Buffeted by criticism about the mercury proposal from both inside and outside the agency, EPA Administrator Michael O. Leavitt in recent days has called for additional analysis. EPA staff members say they have been asked to suggest possible comparative studies, much like the analysis they say they were ordered not to conduct last year.

"The process is not complete, nor is the analysis," Leavitt said in an interview Monday. "I want it done well and I want it done right and I want it done in a way that will maximize the level of reductions," based on the available technology.

Leavitt noted that while the EPA expressed a clear preference for a more flexible, market-driven plan, its proposed mercury rule also includes an alternative approach requiring all plants to install pollution controls.

Christie Todd Whitman was the EPA administrator when the career employees say they were told not to conduct the analysis. She left the agency in June. "I did not know that we were cutting a process short or shortchanging the analysis," Whitman said in an interview Monday. Had she heard such allegations, she said, she would have intervened.






Okay, when someone who worked for NIXON says this administrations conduct is outrageous I think things have gone too far. This administration is DANGEROUS! DANGER, WILL ROBINSON, DANGER, DANGER!
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