Report Blasts EPA’s Science,
Accuses Agency Of Corruption

WASHINGTON — The National Wilderness Institute has asked the United States Attorney General to investigate the Environmental Protection Agency.

Last month, Congressmen David McIntosh, R-Ind., and Richard Pombo, R-Calif., along with the National Wilderness Institute, issued a report charging EPA administrator Carol Browner of misusing science for political ends and flouting federal law by issuing illegal rules and intimidating and harassing employees who question agency policies.

The report reveals a disturbing and steadily worsening pattern of behavior at the agency, and it includes clear documentation of its charges. So far, the "popular press" has paid it no attention.

In the NWI report, "The People versus Carol Browner: EPA on Trial," Dr. Bonner Cohen, who authored the paper, accused high-level EPA officials of corrupting agency rules to silence whistleblowers, creating and submitting backdated documents to federal courts, requesting agency scientists to lobby Congress in violation of federal law, overseeing the creation of a tax-exempt group to circumvent state and local governments in violation of existing agreements, violating the Congressional Review Act, and establishing unwritten and unpublicized rules.

"The pattern of abuse documented in the report is strongly reminiscent of the bullying Congress has uncovered at the IRS," says Cohen, editor of EPA Watch. "None of this misconduct is even remotely related to protecting our environment."

The EPA has become a rogue agency driven by self-interest, agrees Rob Gordon of the NWI.

"The Justice Department needs to conduct a thorough investigation of the alarming and wide-ranging abuses detailed in the NWI report," says Pete Hutchison with Landmark Legal Foundation, which represents NWI.

Landmark and NWI are also asking the EPA's Inspector General to launch an internal investigation and report its findings to Congress.

Whether NWI’s charges will receive an honest hearing before an internal investigator or even at Janet Reno’s Justice Department is open to question, inasmuch as Justice itself was a party to at least one espisode of wrongdoing, but they found a sympathetic ear in Rep. McIntosh, chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs.

"The report ... is one of the most troubling documents I have read since becoming chairman," notes McIntosh. "What emerges from the report is a pattern of abuse on the part of EPA officials who have somehow gotten it into their heads that they are accountable to no one."

He likens the findings to those of abuse within the IRS. "What the National Wilderness Institute’s report clearly shows is that the IRS is not the only troubled federal agency. The misconduct on the part of EPA officials described in the report is completely unacceptable, and I can assure you that hearings into these matters will be held."

The report itself is blunt and outspoken. Beginning with its introduction, it lays most of the blame for EPA’s excesses on Administrator Carol Browner, a longtime protege of Vice President Al Gore and a skillful political manipulator entirely at home within the ethically challenged culture of the Clinton administration.

"Few observers fully appreciate the kind of moral corruption Browner’s tenure has fostered within EPA," writes Cohen in his opening pages. "A look behind EPA’s walls reveals a culture where — as is to be expected when power goes virtually unchecked — ends justify means, and abuse, even of the agency’s own employees, is an everyday occurrence."

The report goes on to relate in detail how EPA brass ordered employees to lobby Congress in direct violation of federal laws specifically prohibiting such activities. When that effort began to look risky, the agency instead funneled taxpayer funds — and its lobbying effort — into an "environmental awareness" newsletter and arranged to have it distributed by the National Parent Teachers Association.

The agency has also amassed a record of refusing to deal with Congress since the Republican Party gained the majority in the 1994 elections, the report says.

One example is a dual standard for approving "detailees," EPA employees assigned to help congressmen sort out agency-related issues. Since 1995, the report reveals, only one of the many requests for "detailees" filed by Republicans has been honored, whereas every request filed by Democratic congressmen has been approved. EPA has used various excuses for denying detailees to the Republicans, including complaints about budget cuts at the same time that it was telling Democrats their detailees imposed "negligible" budget impacts.

The agency has also borrowed a page out of the White House playbook on stonewalling to suppress damaging information. As just one example, the report recounts the case of an EPA memo describing a whole array of proposed taxes the Clinton administration intended to impose on "greenhouse" gases. The House Commerce Committee sought the memo beginning in January of 1995, only to be met with a variety of excuses, stalls and delays.

It took 23 months, until November 1996, to pry the document out of EPA’s hands, and only then did the committee discover why Browner’s crew had battled so hard to hide it: in addition to listing more than three dozen highly objectionable taxes the administration intended to impose, it contained a detailed "action plan" explaining how the taxes would be levied without the participation or approval of Congress.

Browner, Gore and their cohorts clearly recognized that the new taxes could never be passed into law, even in a Congress dominated by fellow Democrats, as it was when the scheme was hatched. They apparently chose instead to impose the levies by bureaucratic fiat and dare Congress to repeal them, whereupon Bill Clinton would veto the repeal bill. The veto would require a two-thirds vote of both houses to overturn, and the administration presumably felt confident of retaining enough votes to prevent that.

That the agency uses "junk science" to back up many or most of its decisions is widely recognized and has been for years. What is different about the Browner regime, the report contends, is the lengths to which EPA will now go to punish critics of that junk science and other questionable actions. That is particularly true of critics from within the agency itself, who are especially threatening because of their access to data and documents exposing EPA’s machinations.

The report reveals in detail two such cases and refers to "at least nine" others.

Dr. David L. Lewis, a veteran of almost three decades with EPA, found out first-hand what happens to loyal employees who dare to criticize their bosses. Writing in the British scientific journal Nature in 1996, Lewis discussed problems within EPA’s scientific departments and outlined needed reforms.

Within weeks, agency brass retaliated by accusing Lewis of violating agency rules and even the federal Hatch Act, an anti-lobbying law EPA officials themselves routinely violate when it serves their purposes (the PTA pamphlets, for instance). Alarmed, Lewis sought protection under the "whistleblower" act; the Justice Department investigated and found his superiors in violation of at least a half-dozen federal laws against retaliation.

Incredibly, EPA appealed those findings, arguing in effect that it was permitted to harass Lewis on the grounds that the agency’s rules don’t have to be based on sound science, and thus his criticism was unwarranted. Further investigation prompted by the ill-chosen appeal revealed a long and sordid chain of high-level connivances in the case, and last fall, EPA was forced to back down, pay Lewis’s legal bills and even promote him.

"True to form," the report adds as a final note on the case, "EPA has since denied Lewis his promotion."

Contempt for science and its own employees isn’t EPA’s only problem, the report continues; it also cares little about complying with proper regulatory procedure.

In one example, the agency failed to comply with a basic requirement that it document certain "factual findings" before issuing a ruling. When a staffer pointed out the deficiency, a superior dismissed the problem as insignificant, adding that the necessary document would be drafted, signed and fraudulently backdated.

That started a chain of deceptions, coverups, perjuries and payoffs that eventually expanded to include the Reno Justice Department among the violators. The injured party in that case wasn’t a helpless employee, however, but the State of Wisconsin, and EPA has not yet wiggled its way out of it.

The NWI report focuses on several other specific examples of EPA misconduct and hypocrisy, including Browner’s loudly trumpeted claim that the agency’s strangling new "clean air" regulations were intended to save the lives of asthmatic children — at the same time that EPA was proposing to abandon thousands of those very same asthmatic children — and adults — by banning their lifesaving inhalers.

In his conclusion, Cohen writes: "These abuses cannot be dismissed as the regrettable but unavoidable glitches that plague all large bureaucracies. The events described on the preceding pages of this report didn’t just ‘happen.’ Instead, they were the result of conscious acts undertaken by high-level EPA officials over a protracted period of time and directed toward achieving specific ends.

"EPA’s disregard for the rights of its own employees, its contempt for the legislative branch that provides its funding, and its indifference to the real needs of the thousands of far-flung communities and businesses it regulates — all are forcing renewed attention on an agency that is clearly out of control."