{"id":2577,"date":"2013-03-05T12:29:23","date_gmt":"2013-03-05T17:29:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/nanotechnology\/?p=2577"},"modified":"2024-02-12T11:01:28","modified_gmt":"2024-02-12T16:01:28","slug":"a-mission-corrupted-your-tax-dollars-pay-for-acc-to-coach-big-industry-on-how-to-undercut-epas-iris-program","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/2013\/03\/05\/a-mission-corrupted-your-tax-dollars-pay-for-acc-to-coach-big-industry-on-how-to-undercut-epas-iris-program\/","title":{"rendered":"A mission corrupted: Your tax dollars pay for ACC to coach big industry on how to undercut EPA\u2019s IRIS program"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Denison, Ph.D.<\/em>,<\/em> is a Senior Scientist.<\/p>\n

On February 22, <\/span>the Advocacy Office of the Small Business Administration<\/span><\/a>, an agency of the Federal Government, held a meeting without any public notice and from which the press was barred.\u00a0 And while the office\u2019s mission is supposed to be to provide \u201can independent voice for small business within the federal government,\u201d many if not most of the attendees were from large companies and the trade associations and Washington lobbyists that represent their interests.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This meeting was the latest in a long and continuing series of so-called \u201cenvironmental roundtables\u201d that serve as a basis for the SBA\u2019s Advocacy Office to weigh in against environmental or workplace regulations that big business opposes.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

There are no records from these meetings that are made publicly available.\u00a0 Agendas and attendee lists are not disclosed, though I was able to obtain <\/span>an agenda for this particular meeting<\/span><\/a> at the last minute.\u00a0 I noted with interest that the first half of the meeting focused on the US Environmental Protection Agency\u2019s (EPA) <\/span>Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) program<\/span><\/a>, which provides health assessments of chemicals used by public health and environmental officials around the world.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The key draw in this meeting:\u00a0 a senior official from the American Chemistry Council (ACC), whose dominant members are huge global chemical companies like ExxonMobil, BASF, Dow and DuPont \u2013 in short, <\/span>Big Chem<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 The ACC official spent a full hour coaching representatives of Big Chem and other global mining companies and automobile corporations like GM in how to pick apart and challenge recent documents developed by the IRIS program.\u00a0 IRIS has become a focal point of the chemical industry\u2019s multi-front attack on independent government science.\u00a0 Here is the <\/span>deck of Powerpoint slides<\/span><\/a> used by the ACC representative and the other industry speaker.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Your tax dollars at work<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Two recent reports \u2013 one by the <\/span>Center for Effective Government<\/span><\/a> \u00a0and the other by the <\/span>Center for Progressive Reform<\/span><\/a> \u2013 profile the SBA\u2019s Advocacy Office, documenting in detail how it serves as a strong anti-regulatory voice within the Federal Government \u2013 one that closely mirrors that of the chemical industry often in direct opposition to the missions and actions of other federal agencies charged with public health, worker or environmental protection <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In this latest platform that SBA provided to ACC, courtesy of your tax dollars, there was not even a pretense at balance, let alone any effort to represent the voice of small business.\u00a0 The only two speakers were from Big Chem:\u00a0 the ACC official and another vocal IRIS critic who is a consultant to the chemical and petroleum industries and formerly worked for the American Petroleum Institute (API) and before that for ACC (before it scrubbed the word \u201cchemical\u201d from its name and was called the Chemical Manufacturers Association).\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

No representative of the IRIS program was invited to the meeting, nor anyone from the health or environmental communities that could have offered an alternative view of the value of IRIS.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Hardly the first time<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Two other points are worth making here:\u00a0 First, this is far from the first time that the Advocacy Office has tangled with the IRIS program and related programs of other federal agencies.\u00a0 As documented in the reports cited above, despite having no scientific expertise, the office has filed extensive critical comments on the IRIS assessment of the known human carcinogen hexavalent chromium, as well as on the National Toxicology Program\u2019s listings of formaldehyde and styrene as known and anticipated human carcinogens, respectively, in its 12<\/span>th<\/span><\/sup> Report on Carcinogens \u2013 another focal point of attack by ACC on government science.\u00a0 <\/span>See these <\/span><\/span><\/span>earlier blog posts<\/span><\/a> for details.\u00a0 By now it should come as no surprise that these comments largely parrot the talking points of the chemical industry.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Second, the ACC speaker at this meeting is no stranger to these issues.\u00a0 Just a year ago, she moved to ACC from her previous position in another federal office \u2013 the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the White House Office of Management and Budget \u2013 where for many years she oversaw that office\u2019s efforts to question the science behind chemical assessments conducted by EPA and other federal agencies.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Talk about a revolving door!\u00a0 The move \u2013 quite a coup by ACC, I must say \u2013 raises disturbing questions, given that she wasted no time in turning to her new job of lobbying on behalf of the chemical industry on the very issues she worked on while at OIRA.\u00a0 And to bring this ironic story full circle, now in her new private-sector capacity, she\u2019s been given a prominent platform by another federal agency critical of chemical regulation to lobby on her new employer ACC\u2019s behalf \u2013 still<\/em> on your dime.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Why, given its stated mission, is SBA\u2019s Advocacy Office so intent on providing its constituency with only one extreme side of the story, even going as far as to exclude the perspective of the very government program that its invited speakers are targeting?\u00a0 Or is this really all about something entirely different \u2013 a thinly veiled effort to let itself be used as a platform for Big Business\u2019 anti-regulatory agenda in the guise of representing small business?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Senior Scientist. On February 22, the Advocacy Office of the Small Business Administration, an agency of the Federal Government, held a meeting without any public notice and from which the press was barred.\u00a0 And while the office\u2019s mission is supposed to be to provide \u201can independent voice for small business …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,44,5009,56093],"tags":[39150,39148,68,731,5021,5017],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-2577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epa","category-policy","category-health-science","category-industry-influence","tag-american-chemistry-council","tag-carcinogens","tag-epa","tag-front-group","tag-chemical-industry-tactics","tag-risk-assessment"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2577"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12677,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2577\/revisions\/12677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2577"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}