Caucus and Staff Reports :: June 11, 2009

Nipping IRIS in the Bud: Suppression of Environmental Science by the Bush Administration's Office of Management and Budget

Report by the Majority Staff of the
Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the
Committee on Science and Technology
House of Representatives
to Subcommittee Chairman Brad Miller

June 11, 2009

By the end of the Bush Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) process was broken. What began two decades ago as an initiative at EPA to establish a reliable database on what science said about the risks of particular chemicals devolved by the end of the Bush Administration into a tortured round of interagency bickering, mediated and even stimulated by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). As a result of the IRIS process breaking down, public health offices across the country and around the world, as well as concerned citizens, were left without the reliable, expanding, up-to-date database of chemical risks that they had come to rely upon.

The Bush Administration’s OIRA used its position at the top of the Executive branch to force EPA to undergo a multi-year, interagency review ostensibly designed to establish a new process for creating new or updated IRIS database entries. At the same time, OIRA both supplied detailed scientific challenges to proposed IRIS entries and coordinated scientific comment from agencies across the government. OIRA’s own scientific comments on proposed listings included detailed editorial comments that would have changed the import and meaning of the scientific findings in EPA’s documents. All of this was done in secret, without any acknowledgment to the public or the Congress that OIRA was calling the shots. IRIS was broken, not by accident, but through conscious, sustained effort from officials in OIRA. ...

Read the complete Staff Report

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