"I thought by and large we supported the EPA and that its risk assessment could be modified to move forward," said Dr. Henry Anderson, the chairman of the scientific advisory board and a physician with the Wisconsin Division of Public Health. "That movement to shuttle the issue to the National Academy of Sciences was nothing like what we had in mind."
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How Environmentalists Lost the Battle Over TCE
THE NATION
First of two parts
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday March 31, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 71 words Type of Material: Correction
Risks of solvent: Due to an editing error, an article in Wednesday's Section A about the regulation and dangers of the industrial solvent trichloroethylene, or TCE, quoted Alex A. Beehler, the Pentagon's top environmental official, as saying: "We are all forgetting the facts on the table. Meanwhile, we have done everything we can to curtail use of TCE." Beehler actually said, "We are all for getting the facts on the table."
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By 2004, the matter was out of the EPA's hands. The National Academy of Sciences received a $680,00 contract from the Energy Department to study TCE -- a decision dictated by a working group at the White House. The briefings to the national academy on how to evaluate TCE were given by White House staff as well as the EPA.
The White House originally formed the working group -- made up of officials from the Pentagon, Energy Department and NASA -- in 2002 to combat the EPA's assessment of another pollutant, perchlorate. That group stayed in business to fight the TCE risk assessment. The group was co-chaired by officials in the Office of Management and Budget and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The officials declined requests for interviews.
Given the controversy and stakes involved, the issue was bound to end up with National Academy of Sciences, said Peter Preuss, director of the National Center for Environmental Analysis, the EPA organization that produced the 2001 risk assessment. "It got very difficult to proceed," Preuss said.
The lead author of the 2001 health risk assessment, V. James Cogliano, agreed that the findings ran into trouble when Defense Department officials went to the White House. "Most of it was behind the scenes," said Cogliano, now a senior official at the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France.
He added: "The degree of opposition was not surprising given the degree of economic interests involved."
The political maneuvering marked a significant change, Cogliano said. In the 1980s, Defense Department officials accepted every possible safeguard recommended by the EPA for incinerators to burn nerve gas and other chemical weapons, he recalled.
At that time, Defense Department officials said, "You put in every margin of safety, because we want to be sure it will be safe," he said. "There was no argument. There is a different spirit today."
Every health risk assessment is also getting more technically complex and more bureaucratically difficult, Preuss said.
