Issues: Health

NRDC senior scientist Jennifer Sass has been investigating corporate influence over government environmental regulations and enforcement.

What have you found in your research into corporate influence over the regulatory process?
There have been two very significant themes. First, corporations have far too much influence on the policymaking and enforcement process affecting their own products. They're able to wield vast influence over the process by which their own pollution is or is not regulated, and over whether regulations are enforced. And they've become exceedingly thorough at how they do it -- by pressuring regulators, infiltrating the scientific advisory panels that make key recommendations to agencies, attacking studies that demonstrate the harms their products cause, and even creating their own distorted scientific studies to compete with independent ones.

The second thing that is hard to miss is that while this has been an ongoing problem for many years, the Bush administration has made it much worse, by creating more opportunities for corporate mischief, and by highlighting fabricated, pseudo-science from corporate sources when it dovetails with their policy agenda.

Let's take that one issue at a time. Tell us about corporate science.
One example has to do with, believe it or not, hermaphroditic frogs. Atrazine is one of the most widely used herbicides in the United States -- it's very commonly used, in fact overused, on farms, and a lot of what gets put on fields runs off into streams. Atrazine has been suspected of causing reproductive abnormalities and cancer for some time, so the principle manufacturer -- Syngenta, formerly Novartis -- paid a university scientist to run some tests it hoped would counter concerns about reproductive abnormalities. Instead, though, lead researcher Tyrone Hayes demonstrated that it was dangerous stuff. He found that atrazine caused eggs to form in the testes of male frogs. That's pretty distressing, not just for the frog population, but because if atrazine interferes with hormones in frogs, it is likely to do the same in other wildlife, and possibly in humans. According to Professor Hayes, Syngenta interfered with publication of his study and resisted his proposals for further studies. The timing of all of this was critical, because the studies would have been very useful to the Environmental Protection Agency as it was considering whether to continue to allow atrazine on the market. Dr. Hayes eventually ended his contract with Syngenta, reran his studies and published the results in respected, peer-reviewed scientific journals.

You said companies have been manufacturing "science" of their own. What about that?
It's a key part of their effort -- producing studies that paper over the hazards of their products. In the atrazine example, after it became clear to Syngenta that Dr. Hayes was eventually going to publish the results of his frog studies, the company hired some new scientists, who ran their own tests and reached -- not surprisingly -- a different conclusion. The company maintains those findings refute Hayes's research. But Hayes points out that Syngenta's scientists used study designs that were unlikely to find harmful effects, and that most of the studies were unpublished, and therefore not subject to peer review. EPA staff scientists found the company studies rife with design flaws and sloppy laboratory practices.

But polluting corporations have learned a lot from how the tobacco industry has fought its decades-long battle against science. One 1969 tobacco industry strategy memo put it very plainly: it said that "doubt is our product." If they can generate controversy around the science on the health hazards of their products -- no matter how clear the science actually is -- they can delay having to make their products safe and clean up their messes.

Industry-paid scientists are also taking a bigger role on government advisory committees, aren't they? How has that happened, and what has the impact been?
By law, a number of government agencies are required to create advisory committees of independent experts who are supposed to render unbiased recommendations and findings to the agencies on specific matters of science. These committees carry great weight with the agencies. But when you look closely at the committees' make-up, you see that many of them include scientists whose work is partially or even fully funded by polluting industries, sometimes the very same industry the agency is supposed to be regulating. And that's not by accident. In 2002, the Department of Health and Human Services dropped three independent national experts on lead poisoning from the Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention and replaced them with individuals nominated by the lead industry. One of those appointees had testified in court that exposure to lead was safe up until the point that it causes swelling in the brain -- an absurdly dangerous standard.

As far back as 1998, we saw a similar stacking of a panel that was making recommendations on the carcinogenicity of butadiene -- used in the manufacture of synthetic rubber, and a byproduct of burning gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. In that instance, the EPA advisory committee had so many corporate-linked members that Congress launched an investigation. That investigation revealed that the EPA had collected almost no information on the financial conflicts of interest of many panel members. Not surprisingly, the panel turned out to be very friendly to butadiene, downgrading its assessment of the danger of the pollutant over the objection of outside, independent peer reviewers.

Is this unique to the Bush administration?
It certainly didn't start with the Bush administration. Industry has been honing its tactics for decades. Still, the Bush administration has been far more aggressive than its predecessors in giving corporate interests power in and access to the regulatory process. Russell Train, the very first administrator of the EPA, under Presidents Nixon and Ford, wrote a letter to the New York Times in 2003, making exactly that case -- that there had never been such intrusion into the business of the agency in his experience.

NRDC has tracked a number of cases of industry involvement in federal agencies' decision-making on our website. At least twice in 2004 the EPA relied solely on a scientific assessment funded by polluting industries to weaken environmental safeguards. One instance was in the case of a fungicide called Captan. It's used on many fruit crops as well as on lawns and turf. The EPA reclassified Captan from "likely" to "not likely" to cause cancer at allowable use rates, based on a scientific review conducted by the manufacturer and a peer review of that study that was paid for by the manufacturer.

A second example was in the case of formaldehyde, which among other things is used in plywood for home construction. There, the EPA relied on a mathematical model of toxicity generated by a chemical-industry-funded research shop to develop a new air pollution regulation. The model predicted that formaldehyde was about 10,000 times less potent as a carcinogen than the EPA's own scientists calculated. Use of this new calculation resulted in Clean Air Act exemptions for most plywood makers, as well as for manufacturers of natural gas turbines that generate electricity, another source of formaldehyde emissions. The upshot was that these polluters were allowed to avoid installing legally required, currently available technology to reduce pollution. Formaldehyde is a carcinogen, causing cancers of the nose and throat, and there is strong scientific evidence that it may cause leukemia, too. But on the other side of the ledger, the exemptions will save industry about $66 million a year, and that apparently carries greater weight with the administration.

What needs to happen?
It's a pretty deeply entrenched problem, and it's going to take a while to dig out from under it. But you do it one shovelful at a time, with things like stronger conflict-of-interest requirements for advisory committees, better public oversight and scrutiny by Congress, and litigation where necessary to force the administration to follow its own laws. And I think we also need to find big-picture ways to persuade corporations that the public won't tolerate exposing our families to products that scientific evidence has shown to be dangerous, while companies seek to cover up the danger by cooking up studies that distort reality. Certainly government should be looking for ways to use industry funding to support independent research labs, but we shouldn't simply accept that it's OK for corporations to run these kind of disinformation campaigns, especially because the stakes are quite literally life and death. We need to find creative ways to reward companies that behave responsibly, and rein in the irresponsible ones.

last revised 8.15.05