by Carey Gillam
Attempts have been made to divorce politics from the regulation of toxic chemicals. When President Barack Obama took office in 2009 he pledged as much, promising in his inaugural address to restore science to “its rightful place” and citing the need for a more “watchful eye” over market forces. Obama’s appointee as EPA administrator, a chemical engineer named Lisa Jackson, made the commitment directly to EPA employees after taking the reins: “The President believes that when EPA addresses scientific issues, it should rely on the expert judgment of the Agency’s career scientists and independent advisors. When scientific judgments are suppressed, misrepresented or distorted by political agendas, Americans can lose faith in their government to provide strong public health and environmental protection,” Jackson wrote in a January 2009 internal EPA memo to employees.
Jackson, whose career included sixteen years as an EPA staffer prior to her appointment, singled out regulation of chemicals as one of many areas in need of reform: “It is clear that we are not doing an adequate job of assessing and managing the risks of chemicals in consumer products, the workplace and the environment. It is now time to revise and strengthen EPA’s chemicals management and risk assessment programs,” she wrote in that memo.6
Under Obama, the EPA, the USDA, and other agencies were ordered to establish policies to protect scientific integrity and outlaw politically driven manipulation. The moves were badly needed, particularly at the EPA, after political interference during prior administrations derailed many determinations of dangers posed by toxic chemicals. A probe by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the George W. Bush administration was involved in delaying EPA efforts to assess the public health risks of several chemicals, forcing EPA scientists to give drafts of scientific assessments to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review before they could be finalized. It was a requirement that ensured many such assessments never were completed. In fact, the OMB worked actively to kill several chemical assessments, the watchdog agency’s investigation found. Making matters worse, the OMB’s reviews of the EPA’s scientific findings were dubbed secret, not to be shared with those most impacted—the public.
The GAO found undue political pressure was contaminating an EPA program called IRIS (Integrated Risk Information System), which catalogues scientific assessments and helps the EPA determine safe levels of chemical exposures. IRIS is “an important source of information on health effects that may result from exposure to chemicals in the environment,” the GAO wrote in its report.7 Investigators determined that though EPA scientists completed 32 draft assessments for chemical risks from 2006 to 2007, because of political interference only 4 were actually able to move forward and be finalized in the IRIS system. At the time of its report, in 2008, the GAO found that the 540 assessments that were completed in IRIS were rapidly becoming outdated, even as the EPA needed to be analyzing hundreds of other chemicals.
The EPA’s IRIS assessment of how much glyphosate is safe for people to consume in food and water on a daily basis, for instance, was last revised in January 1987. The work was based on data provided by Monsanto.8
The revelations contained within the GAO’s audit echoed the complaints of consumer and environmental advocates who had spent years watching the political pressure build and begging for someone to stop it. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) summed up the situation this way:
EPA scientists apply their expertise to protect the public from air and water pollution, clean up hazardous waste, and study emerging threats such as global warming. Because each year brings new and potentially toxic chemicals into our homes and workplaces, because air pollution still threatens our public health, and because environmental challenges are becoming more complex and global, a strong and capable EPA is more important than ever. Yet challenges from industry lobbyists and some political leaders to the agency’s decisions have too often led to the suppression and distortion of the scientific findings underlying those decisions—to the detriment of both science and the health of our nation.9
The UCS, a nonprofit founded in 1969 by scientists and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had more than the GAO audit to support its concerns. One month after the GAO issued its report, in March 2008, the UCS unveiled a devastating indictment of just how far the integrity of government scientists had fallen. The nonprofit surveyed 3,400 scientists at the EPA, the FDA, and several other agencies about their levels of independence. The group found 1,301 scientists who said they feared retaliation if they expressed concerns about “mission driven work”; 688 scientists who reported they were unable to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals if it didn’t adhere to agency policies; and 889 EPA scientists who had personally experienced “inappropriate interference” in their work. Nearly 400 scientists said they had witnessed EPA officials misrepresenting scientific findings; 284 said they had seen the “selective or incomplete use of data to justify a specific regulatory outcome”; and 224 scientists said they had been directed to “inappropriately exclude or alter technical information” in an EPA document. Nearly 200 of the respondents said they had been in situations in which they or their colleagues actively objected to or resigned from projects “because of pressure to change scientific findings.” The UCS concluded: “Political appointees … have edited scientific documents, manipulated scientific assessments, and generally sought to undermine the science behind dozens of EPA regulations.”10
The findings of the UCS survey were not much of a surprise. In 2004, David Lewis, a former senior-level research microbiologist with the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, had gone before a congressional committee of the U.S. House of Representatives to blow the whistle on what he saw as corruption of the EPA’s internal scientific research review process. Lewis, who spent thirty-one years at the EPA before resigning in 2003, said he had knowledge of situations in which the agency showed a “lack of integrity” that “clearly threatens public health and the environment.” He said agency management passed off unreliable scientific data and erroneous conclusions in order to support certain political agendas. “EPA obviously has not achieved a reasonable separation between politics and objective science and fostered an open scientific debate,” he told members of Congress.11
All of that was supposed to change under President Obama. And, for a while, people such as Washington, DC, attorney Jeff Ruch actually thought it might. Ruch had experienced firsthand what it felt like to be blackballed for trying to do what he thought was right as a government lawyer for the California legislature. It was one week before he was to be married, in December 1986, and part of his job at the time was to write an assessment of a state prison building project. Ruch had all sorts of concerns, primarily because the facility was to be located on ground so contaminated it would ultimately warrant the Superfund designation, reserved for the worst of our country’s hazardous waste sites. His bosses wanted no mention of such concerns in his assessment, but he refused to omit them. He was fired. “I saw the fragility of professional ethics in public service,” he recalled. “I also saw many people I thought were friends shrink away from me for fear of being tarred with my brush.”
Ruch went on to work at the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit whistle-blower protection group that exposed him to many people who had also experienced the political pressures that can come to bear on government scientists and other employees as they try to do their jobs. That insight led Ruch to cofound a nonprofit group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, in 1997 to champion the legal rights and integrity of those public employees. One of the group’s top priorities is to combat the manipulation of science at public agencies and shield scientists whose research may run counter to moneymaking corporate interests. “An agency like EPA is constantly saying they’re fine, their scientific integrity is above reproach,” Ruch told me. “But the truth is, these agencies don’t like inconvenient facts.”12
Ruch was heartened to
see Obama’s office call for the establishment of scientific integrity policies at the regulatory agencies. The EPA’s fourteen-page scientific integrity document enacted during the Obama administration sounded sincere. It called on scientific studies to be communicated to the public, the media, and Congress, “uncompromised by political or other interference.” EPA managers were expressly prohibited from intimidating or coercing scientists to alter scientific data, findings, or their professional opinions. Similar policies were put in place at the USDA and other agencies.
But setting policies and following them are clearly two different things, and by the time Obama’s two terms came to a close, PEER was again dealing with a steady stream of calls from government scientists complaining of bureaucratic meddling and censorship. Glyphosate and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), along with the insecticides suspected of causing honeybee die-offs, were all on a list of so-called sensitive subjects that government scientists said they were told they needed to be wary of weighing in on. The integrity policies that were supposed to have been established to protect employees were toothless efforts to paper over problems, with no significant impact, Ruch found.
Less than a month after the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) linked glyphosate to cancer, PEER filed a legal petition with the USDA demanding that the agency do more to protect its own scientists, who increasingly were raising questions about the safety of farm chemicals, including glyphosate. Several scientists had complained to PEER lawyers that their research was being restricted and they were being subjected to retaliation for attempting to talk publicly about work they were doing that conflicted with agribusiness interests. The scientists were too afraid for their jobs to speak out about their complaints at that time, but in the winter of 2015, one did come forward as a whistle-blower. That scientist, an entomologist and agroecologist named Jonathan Lundgren, who had worked for the agency for eleven years, said that USDA managers had blocked publication of his research, barred him from talking to the media, and disrupted operations at the laboratory he oversaw after he tried to point out safety problems with a lucrative class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids that are sold by Bayer, Syngenta, and other big agrochemical companies. Two research reports by Lundgren concluded that farmers received no yield benefit at all in using the high-priced neonicotinoid seed treatments the companies were selling. His research also showed that neonicotinoids exacerbated conditions threatening the disappearing monarch butterfly population, but a supervisor told him the manuscript was “sensitive” and required elevated levels of approval, Lundgren said.
After agonizing for at least two years about whether or not to go public with what had happened, Lundgren filed a lawsuit against the agency in late 2015, resigning his post and putting a name and a face to the bigger problem of an agency under political influence. It was a difficult move for Lundgren, who had been considered a top USDA scientist and was named by President Obama as the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2011.
“There is a lot of fear in government scientists,” Lundgren reflected. “If they don’t fall into line, their science is torn apart and their personal lives are discredited. In my case, everyone that I cared about was either directly or indirectly attacked by the chain of command. Rules are selectively enforced to make the rogue scientist out to be a miscreant. Threats of criminal accusations are levied. These scientists are made an example of.”
After Lundgren left the USDA, he and his wife, Jenna, retreated to a patch of prairie land in rural South Dakota, where Lundgren now conducts his research unfettered by political pressures. A group of area farmers and beekeepers helped him turn an old pole barn into a research facility, and a former dairy parlor where cows once were milked became his office. He spends his time focused on finding solutions for sustainable food systems.
“Drawing attention to oneself by doing controversial research is a quick way to draw ire and retaliation from the chain of command,” he said. “But the world is facing some serious challenges right now, and we need science in areas like pollution, climate change, and our broken food production system. More than ever.”13
A different USDA scientist, a veteran of the agency who specializes in plant health, has yet to find the courage to come forward with his concerns about glyphosate and the agrochemical industry. His work seems only mildly controversial, and it dovetails with that of others who fear the chemical is having long-term harmful effects on soil health. But because it runs directly counter to the positions of Monsanto and other industry players, he doesn’t think he can risk speaking what he sees as the truth. “We have some pretty good research, but the USDA doesn’t want to look at it,” he told me, asking me to keep his identity a secret to protect his job.
When it comes to glyphosate, Monsanto clearly has seen the EPA as more ally than independent authority. A 2013 statement by the EPA concluding “that glyphosate does not pose a cancer risk to humans” has long graced a Monsanto web page, for instance. (The statement, posted in the Federal Register, was made as the EPA agreed to Monsanto’s request to permit more glyphosate use on food crops and was based on data submitted by Monsanto.)
And immediately following IARC’s announcement that its scientists had found glyphosate to be a probable human carcinogen, the company’s expectation of EPA support was clear. Monsanto’s Dan Jenkins, the company’s key liaison to the EPA, scrambled to talk with agency officials, including Rowland, asking if the EPA would “correct the record”14 and e-mailing the agency five pages of information to use in answering questions from the media.15 The document provided guidance on how to discount the various studies showing links to non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) and the tumors found in mice, and glyphosate detections in blood and urine, and it was shared among EPA staffers. The EPA has also dragged its feet on complying with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, failing to release thousands of pages of documents dealing with Monsanto and glyphosate.
It makes sense for Monsanto to seek to sway the agency in any way it can. After all, the EPA’s judgment affects regulation both in the United States and abroad, and it is relied on by many farmers and consumers as the voice of authority on whether or not caution is required in using the chemical or consuming its residues in food and water. Moreover, the agency’s assurances about glyphosate’s safety give Monsanto an ace card in arguing that the individuals who are suffering from NHL and suing the company are wrong to believe their cancers were caused by Roundup.
Exactly how hard Monsanto or its surrogates pressured the EPA over glyphosate is unclear. Monsanto argues there was no improper agenda to push the EPA to issue a positive cancer review for the chemical. But attorneys for the people suffering from NHL say that buried within millions of internal Monsanto documents obtained through discovery is damning evidence demonstrating that the company has enjoyed a tight hold on the EPA for years. Exposing corporate influence is a key part of the legal strategy for those suing Monsanto. But the issue has a much broader significance, of course, because everyone using or consuming the chemical should expect thorough and impartial evaluations by regulators.
Though the story may take years to fully unfold, the early court filings in the Roundup litigation are both intriguing and highly concerning. They point not just to a close relationship between Monsanto and the EPA’s Jess Rowland but to a culture of regulatory corruption and collusion with the chemical industry. One particularly damning document that has turned up—sent anonymously to lawyers for the cancer victims—is a letter addressed to Rowland from a fellow EPA scientist dated March 4, 2013, that accuses Rowland of playing “political conniving games with the science” to favor pesticide manufacturers such as Monsanto. “It is essentially certain that glyphosate causes cancer,” states the letter, which came to light as evidence in the Roundup litigation. “For once do the right thing and don’t make decisions based on how it affects your bonus.”
The letter to Rowland carries the sign-off of thirty
-year career EPA scientist Marion Copley, who left the agency in 2012 and died from breast cancer in 2014 at the age of sixty-six. The letter accuses Rowland of having “intimidated staff” to change reports to benefit industry, and it says that the scientific evidence surrounding glyphosate clearly shows the chemical should be categorized as a “probable human carcinogen,” the same classification that IARC would make two years later. “I have cancer and I don’t want these serious issues … to go unaddressed before I go to my grave,” the Copley letter states.16
Longtime EPA scientist Evaggelos Vallianatos, a gregarious Greek who grew up on a small farm among olive groves in his home country and still speaks with a heavy Greek accent, said Monsanto has a long history of improper influence inside the EPA. During his twenty-five-year EPA stint from 1979 to 2004, he spent most of his time in the agency’s Office of Pesticide Programs, where he saw repeated examples of what he believed to be clearly corrupt practices. It wasn’t just Monsanto; the agency was nearly completely beholden to corporate interests, he remembers. “It’s the pesticide merchants and GMO companies … they are the real decision makers,” he said. “They use their lobbyists to shape national policy by almost buying politicians. It’s this corruption that subverts the EPA. I am not a prophet, but I can see a very dark future if we fail to ban glyphosate and all other neurotoxins and carcinogens in our food and natural world.”17
