[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 72 (Friday, May 2, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3738-S3741]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             EPA IN CRISIS

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, for much of last year, as many of us 
will remember, the Senate Judiciary Committee was engaged in a very 
troubling inquiry. We were trying to determine whether the Bush 
administration had fired several U.S. attorneys for political reasons; 
not because they were not good U.S. attorneys but because they were not 
loyal ``Bushies,'' to use the phrase a Department of Justice official 
used.
  That inquiry continues at the Department of Justice, but over its 
course, we already know the incompetence and misjudgments that it 
uncovered have cost numerous Department of Justice officials their 
jobs, and properly so, including former Attorney General Alberto 
Gonzales who made clear that he put loyalty to the President before the 
faithful exercise of that important office.
  Unfortunately, it also cost that proud Department the morale of its 
officials and, to a sad degree, the trust of the American people, many 
of whom have been left to wonder whether Federal prosecutions in this 
country arise from the pursuit of justice or whether under the Bush 
administration they arise from the pursuit of political advantage.
  Here we go again, perhaps. This morning, we awoke to the news that

[[Page S3739]]

the Environmental Protection Agency's regional administrator for the 
Midwest, Mary Gade, was forced to resign in the midst of a heated 
debate over dioxin contamination in waters near Michigan.
  Dioxin is an extremely dangerous chemical. According to a report by 
the Chicago Tribune, Ms. Gade invoked emergency powers last year to 
force Dow Chemical, headquartered in Michigan, to clean up several 
areas saturated with this toxic chemical, a dangerous carcinogen which 
was a byproduct, among other things, of Agent Orange, with which we are 
sadly familiar.
  Ms. Gade later broke off negotiations with Dow Chemical on a more 
comprehensive cleanup, citing concerns that Dow had been reluctant to 
take steps to protect health and wildlife. That put the company in a 
tough position.
  At that point, the Tribune's report says the company asked EPA 
officials in Washington to intervene, although Dow said it had nothing 
to do with Ms. Gade's dismissal. The paper wrote that Ms. Gade said 
that high-ranking EPA officials ``repeatedly questioned her aggressive 
action against Dow.'' It quoted Ms. Gade as saying, ``There is no 
question that this is about Dow.''
  We do not yet know all the details of Ms. Gade's firing or everything 
that may have gone on between her office and Dow Chemical. But from 
everything we have heard and seen so far, it looks like deja vu all 
over again from an administration that values compliance with its 
political agenda more than it values the trust or the best interests of 
the American people.
  Last year, we learned this is an administration that would not 
hesitate to fire capable Federal prosecutors when they would not toe an 
improper party line. Today it seems the Bush administration might have 
once again removed a highly qualified and well-regarded official whose 
only misstep was to disagree with the political bosses.
  Unfortunately, the story of Mary Gade is not only a distressing 
signal that the Bush administration may again be making hiring and 
firing decisions based on political loyalty, it is also a piece of 
evidence in a growing pile of evidence of a troubling and destructive 
force at work within our Government, one with serious consequences for 
our environment, for our natural resources, and for the health of 
Americans, for us, for our families.
  We have also known that the Bush administration was no friend to the 
environment. Over and over again for 7 long years, this administration 
has put forward under false flags policies that would do great harm to 
the environment. Remember the Clear Skies Initiative that would 
increase air pollution? Remember the national energy policy written 
with Dick Cheney by oil industry lobbyists? The Bush approach to 
environmental protection has not only been wrong, it has been 
Orwellian. That pattern continues even to this day.
  Not long ago, President Bush stood in the White House Rose Garden and 
announced what his administration characterized as a ``new strategy'' 
to address climate change. As the distinguished Senator from 
Pennsylvania well knows, Americans all over this country are crying out 
for a bold and visionary plan to tackle the looming threat of global 
warming, a problem that threatens to engulf this Nation and the entire 
world within generations if nothing is done.
  So we looked to the Rose Garden for leadership from our President. 
And what did we find? We found a proposal that was neither new nor even 
a strategy. Instead, the President announced what he called a new 
national goal: voluntary action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 
2025.
  Let me say that again. Voluntary action to reduce emissions by 2025, 
17 years from now, 17 years of increases.
  There are a couple of problems with this approach. First, the obvious 
problem is if you are allowing greenhouse gas emissions to continue to 
rise for 17 years, you are not doing much effectively about them, even 
though overwhelming scientific evidence indicates that unless we take 
immediate action to cut global warming pollutants, we might be too late 
to prevent the most serious impacts of global climate change.
  Mr. President, you and I are in our fifties. We may be gone when it 
gets bad. I have met your girls. I have a girl and a boy of my own. I 
look at the young pages here who are gathered in the well. This will be 
their world, and the responsibility is on us to take action now while 
we can to protect the world in which they will live.
  On that score, President Bush failed again. He literally offered zero 
initiatives, none, that might reduce emissions now or in the future. He 
made it clear that, on what is left of his watch, the U.S. Government 
will never require polluters to make such reductions. As every American 
who is not working in the Bush administration understands, voluntary 
action without strength of will or force of law simply is not enough to 
tackle a problem of this magnitude.

  Finally, even if the President announced this empty so-called renewed 
commitment to fighting global warming, his administration indicated it 
would oppose a specific detailed plan for addressing the climate change 
problem the Senate will likely take up after our Memorial Day recess, 
the Warner-Lieberman plan Chairman Boxer has worked so hard to get out 
of our Environment and Public Works Committee.
  This trifecta of failure from the White House would be laughable if 
it were not that the problem itself is so serious. It raises, actually, 
the distasteful possibility, given this administration's long and 
destructive history of disregard for environmental concerns, that the 
President's new strategy is not just a complete failure, a complete 
nothing, it is actually a stalking horse, intended to prevent real 
progress on climate change, a way to leave this problem, similar to so 
many others, for the next President to have to solve.
  Regrettably, the President's announcement is also a stunning failure 
of leadership in a world community that is quickly growing unaccustomed 
to American leadership--not a good habit for the world to adopt.
  We have known for a long time that politics of special interests is 
at the bottom of this and the Bush White House has repeatedly 
interfered with the decisionmaking process of the Environmental 
Protection Agency and other agencies, in thrall to the checkbooks of 
the oil companies, the gas companies, the chemical companies, the 
timber companies, the coal companies, the auto companies. If you have a 
corporate checkbook, they are for you.
  A couple of weeks ago, we saw new evidence of how deeply this 
corrosive political influence has seeped within EPA, the primary 
Federal agency charged with protecting our environment and our people's 
public health. A report issued April 23 by the Union of Concerned 
Scientists, entitled ``Interference at the EPA,'' is a truly scathing 
indictment of the decisionmaking process at EPA from those who know it 
best, the scientists inside the Agency. The report consisted largely of 
a survey of EPA scientists. It found that 60 percent of those surveyed 
had personally experienced at least one instance of political 
interference during the past 5 years--60 percent of the scientists. The 
report documents, among many other things, that many EPA scientists 
have been directed to inappropriately exclude or alter information from 
EPA science documents, or have had their work edited in a manner that 
resulted in changes to their scientific findings. The survey also 
revealed EPA scientists have often objected to or resigned or removed 
themselves from EPA projects because of pressure--pressure to change 
their scientific findings.
  The conclusion could not be much clearer: EPA is an agency in crisis. 
Once upon a time, anyone working at EPA could be proud of their 
agency's reputation. It was the international gold standard in the area 
of environmental protection. Indeed, for most of its 40-year history, 
all Americans could place their trust in EPA's independent, science-
based leadership to safeguard our natural resources and our public 
health.
  If you go back to the founding of the Agency, in a 1970 press release 
by its first administrator, William Ruckelshaus, he stated this role 
unequivocally:

       EPA is an independent agency. It has no obligation to 
     promote agriculture or commerce, only the critical obligation 
     to protect and enhance the environment.

  Administrator Ruckelshaus was a Republican appointed by President

[[Page S3740]]

Nixon. Yet both he and the President who appointed him intended EPA to 
be immune from political pressure; to be guided by the twin lodestars 
of law and science in discharging that critical obligation to protect 
and enhance the environment.
  In recent years, and especially during the tenure of Administrator 
Johnson, we have seen the EPA's leadership, in cahoots with its White 
House allies, despoil these basic principles of independence and 
scientific integrity. Here are only a few examples from the long bill 
of particulars that indicts the leadership of this once-vaunted agency.
  The George Bush Environmental Protection Agency falsified data and 
fabricated results of studies regarding the safety of the air around 
the site of the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11.
  The George Bush Environmental Protection Agency selectively edited 
Government reports, including the EPA's 2003 report on the environment, 
to support uncertainty in climate change science, placing the 
imprimatur of the Government of the United States on fringe views, 
soundly rejected by the vast majority--essentially the entire world 
scientific community.
  The George Bush Environmental Protection Agency has routinely 
tampered with regulatory and scientific processes to achieve results 
sought by, guess what, industry--at the expense of our public health 
and the environment. For example, in 2004, EPA allowed North Dakota to 
alter the way it measured air quality. That is the way they brought the 
Theodore Roosevelt National Park in compliance with national air 
quality standards, not by cleaning up the air but by allowing them to 
change the way they measured air quality. The George Bush Environmental 
Protection Agency has hidden, suppressed and delayed the release of 
scientific findings in order to affect the impacts of EPA decisions. If 
they have two things going on, if you can slow one down and get the 
other out first, if it is helpful to industry, there they are--as in 
the case of a 2002 report on the effects of mercury on children's 
health that EPA delayed for 9 months and released only after it had 
been leaked to the media.
  The George Bush Environmental Protection Agency has disregarded 
legally mandated scientific and administrative procedures, as in the 
case of the Agency's failure to abide by the Supreme Court's recent 
decision on regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
  The George Bush Environmental Protection Agency has stacked the EPA's 
leadership and its advisory committees with industry allies, removing 
respected scientists who argued for stronger public protections. A 
prime example of this is the removal, at the request of the industry 
lobbying group the American Chemistry Council, of toxicologist Deborah 
Rice from an EPA toxics advisory committee. Dr. Rice had argued for 
more stringent EPA standards for regulating certain chemicals used in 
commercially available plastic products. Not only was Dr. Rice removed 
from the panel, but her remarks on the panel were retroactively 
stricken from the record. EPA essentially took the fact that Dr. Rice 
had ever been on the panel and struck it from the panel's records. 
They, I guess, administratively ``disappeared'' her. It is not the kind 
of thing that happens in the country I know.
  The George Bush Environmental Protection Agency has ignored the 
recommendations of career staff and scientists when they collide with 
White House political imperatives, as in the case of the Agency's 
decision on the so-called California waiver--first time ever not to 
grant the waiver.
  The George Bush EPA has reduced enforcement of environmental 
regulations by opening fewer criminal investigations and filing fewer 
lawsuits against corporate polluters.
  The George Bush EPA has not only failed to protect but sought 
reprisals against agency employees who pointed out problems, reported 
legal violations, and attempted to correct factual misrepresentations 
made by their superiors.
  Amazingly, the EPA's Office of General Counsel has invoked the 
doctrine of sovereign immunity against whistleblowers suing the agency 
because of actions taken by the agency in reprisal for their 
whistleblower activity. And, as a lawyer, as somebody who spent a good 
deal of his life as a government lawyer, it pains me to see how the 
George Bush EPA has had its lawyering literally mocked, mocked by the 
U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal, which, in one case, condemned the EPA's 
defense of its regulation as possible ``only in a Humpty-Dumpty 
world,'' and in another case accused the agency of ``deploying the 
logic of the Queen of Hearts'' from ``Alice in Wonderland'' in the 
agency's interpretation of the law.
  It makes one's skin crawl to see the ways in which EPA's leadership 
under the Bush administration has put the interest of big business and 
their lobbyists before the health and welfare of our environment and 
the American people. This has dire consequences.
  First, in a world that presents complex challenges to our public 
health, to our environment, and to our national security, the elevation 
of corporate interests over independent, science-based decisionmaking 
threatens America's very ability to respond effectively and to provide 
the kind of leadership on complex problems that the world expects and 
that Americans deserve.
  Second, the administration's conduct has demoralized EPA's 
professional workforce--the scientists, the lawyers, the regulatory 
experts to whom EPA owes its reputation as a champion of environmental 
protection. And time and time again during this administration they 
have seen their expert counsel set aside in favor of a partisan 
political agenda.
  Third, President Bush and this administration have compromised the 
faith of the American people in the integrity of their Government. We 
can disagree. This is a Chamber that is built for disagreement. We can 
disagree on policy considerations; we can argue about what the right or 
the wrong decision is to make. But it is a tragedy when we doubt the 
integrity of the process of America's agencies of Government.
  The President's eagerness to do the bidding of the special interests 
and the Administrator's willingness to kowtow to the White House, to 
the detriment of sound public policy, only confirms what too many 
consider fear that the United States of America is no longer governed 
by and for the people.
  When policy is made for special interests and not for public good, 
America is left weaker. No matter our partisan or ideological 
standings, no one in this great Chamber, I hope, would want to do such 
a thing to this great country.
  The Bush administration has done lasting harm both to our environment 
and to the confidence of the American people. Next Wednesday, May 7, at 
9:30 a.m., I will join Senator Barbara Boxer, the chairman of the 
Environment and Public Works Committee, for an oversight hearing to 
look into the actions by this Bush administration and the EPA 
Administrator which seem to be so badly at odds with the 
recommendations of the agency's scientists and the best interests of 
the American people.
  Chairman Boxer--we can be so proud of her--has been dogged, 
relentless in her pursuit of the truth behind the screen of 
machinations of the EPA's leadership and the Bush White House. And her 
leadership will continue to be critical as we try to get to the bottom 
of this issue. We plan to ask the tough questions, and we will expect 
honest answers because the American people deserve an Environmental 
Protection Agency that lives up to that name.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida.
  Mr. NELSON of Florida. Would the Senator yield for a comment and a 
couple of questions?
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I will yield.
  Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I want to commend the Senator 
from Rhode Island for his extraordinary, eloquent, and very insightful 
comment into some of the machinations behind closed doors that we have 
seen going on in this administration that absolutely perplexes the 
mind; that governmental agencies that are set up for the purpose of 
serving the people and protecting the public and, indeed, the EPA is 
supposed to be the Environmental Protection Agency, that they go off on 
these half-cocked ideological ideas.
  The Senator has said it so eloquently. I thank him for it. I thank 
him for his leadership. I thank him for calling attention to the 
hearing that is

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going to be held next week. And as the Senator has been speaking--and I 
have been mesmerized by what he said--completely off the top of my head 
I remember, for example, 3 years ago the EPA decided that it was going 
to do a study in my State, in Jacksonville, FL.
  Now, get this. You will not believe this. It was going to expose 
toddlers to pesticides to see what the effects were. And, of course, 
where do you think those toddlers were going to be? They were going to 
be in a minority neighborhood. It was going to be in a low-income 
neighborhood. And the EPA had concocted this scheme. It was sending out 
these flyers.
  In order to get a household to participate, it said: We want you to 
participate in this study. I cannot remember the amount of money they 
would pay, but they were going to give them a T-shirt; they were going 
to give them a certificate that they completed this process over 
several months; and they were given a camcorder that then, at the end 
of the study, if they successfully completed it, they would keep. And 
the study was, they were going to put pesticides all over this house 
and see what the effects were on these toddlers. This was the purpose 
of the study.
  You could not believe it. I happened to discover it about the same 
time that the chairman of the environment committee--she was not the 
chair then. Senator Boxer was the ranking member. And the two of us 
collaborated. We had a press conference. We blew this thing sky high. 
As a matter of fact, now that it is coming back to me, Senator Boxer 
held up the nomination of the newly appointed EPA Administrator until 
he finally relented and said he was not going to have this study before 
she would allow the confirmation. Yet he ``bumfuddled'' around and 
tried to dodge and weave and not even answer the question. I mean, it 
defies description.
  The Senator from Rhode Island has given a number of examples, and 
that one leapt to my mind. I want to give the Senator from Rhode Island 
another example.
  In the little agency that I cherish so much, the National Aeronautics 
and Space Administration, can you believe that one of the most 
distinguished and noted scientists in that institution of NASA, Dr. 
Hansen, little underlings in the PR department of NASA--and when I say 
little underlings, I don't remember what their job description was, but 
I think they were in their twenties. They had the audacity to go in and 
change the wording on Dr. Hansen's conclusions with regard to a climate 
change study.
  Finally, this came out. Ultimately, his words were restored.
  I will give you another example in that little agency. They have an 
inspector general in NASA who is just running amok. There was a theft 
of a $2 billion rocket design in the NASA computers, and he refused to 
investigate. Then when the rest of us tried to get him dismissed, the 
buddy-buddy club wouldn't allow him to be fired.
  I will give you another example. This will just blow your mind. For 
years, the Florida Everglades have been on the endangered list in a 
list that is kept by the United Nations, a list of the most 
environmentally endangered sites in the world. A third-ranking 
Department of State employee took it upon himself, in a conference in 
New Zealand, to speak and to have the Florida Everglades stricken from 
the list of the most endangered environmental sites, something we work 
on every day in Everglades restoration, in combination, the Federal 
Government with the State of Florida, in trying to restore the 
Everglades to something of what Mother Nature intended.
  These are things that have popped into my mind of what we have seen 
over and over again, of the ideological rigidity, the excessive 
partisanship, which, when you combine the two, is lethal to common 
sense and to protection of the public. Yet that is what we have seen. 
Then when some of us, in our role of oversight, try to start changing 
it and get accountability and responsibility in the executive branch, 
they won't do anything about it. The NASA IG is still there. That 
third-tier Department of State employee was there until he finally 
retired. The EPA Administrator is still there. So here we are.
  I thank the Senator for yielding. I thank him again for his eloquence 
today and for his service to our country in representing his State.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank my good friend from Florida.
  I will close with the following point, which my friend Senator 
Nelson, the distinguished Senator from Florida, calls to mind, because 
of his extraordinarily distinguished service to our country. He was 
willing to put himself at great risk in the extraordinarily challenging 
pursuit of becoming an astronaut for the United States of America. I 
mean, talk about the best and brightest. As we know from many 
tragedies, it is not only an extraordinarily challenging pursuit, it is 
one where you do put your life very much at risk on behalf of the 
progress of this country. He, in that very important way, and I, in a 
much slower way, share an important belief, which is that the 
Government of the United States of America, our American system of 
government which has been passed down to us after a revolutionary war, 
a civil war, two great world wars, the Great Depression, essentially 
intact and, indeed, improving through the decades and generations, is 
one of God's great gifts to humankind. It is now in our hands, 
particularly as we represent our States in this body. It is to be 
treasured. It is to be viewed with respect. It is, indeed, to be viewed 
with reverence.
  The thing that, to me, is worst of all from his politics, from his 
corruption, from his debasement of public service, is the lack of 
respect, the lack of reverence for what we have been given, for what we 
hold in trust for ourselves and future generations. It has never been 
as low as it is now. But the light still burns, and we will continue to 
call attention to the miscreancy that we find. Soon, in January, it 
will be over.
  I thank my friend from Florida and yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida.

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