This article originally ran at Forbes and has been republished here with permission of the author.
If you needed to hire a person to head the financial integrity division of the Securities and Exchange Commission, how about someone who had held that position in Bernie Madoff’s investment firm? In effect, that’s what EPA has done by choosing Francesca Grifo as its “scientific integrity official.”
Grifo previously oversaw the scientific integrity program at the Union of Concerned Scientists – an oxymoron if there ever was one. UCS is well known for exploiting every opportunity to distort science to further its radical, anti-technology agendas. In particular, the organization’s “experts” have been consistent, irresponsible and mendacious critics of genetic engineering and nuclear power, among other technologies; and they have been advocates for the kinds of shifts to “renewable energy” that would send energy costs to consumers and companies into the stratosphere.
UCS’ view of genetic engineering applied to agriculture is especially indefensible and hypocritical: “Genetic engineering in agriculture has failed to deliver on many of its promised benefits, and has produced some serious unintended consequences.” The facts argue otherwise. Because of its advantages – higher yields, less spraying of chemical pesticides, and greater food security and an improved bottom line for farmers — genetic engineering has been hugely successful and the most rapidly adopted agricultural technology in history. The major factor preventing the realization of even more of the “promised benefits” is the overregulation and nuisance lawsuits promoted by UCS and similar groups! UCS’s carping about lackluster progress is reminiscent of the story about the man who kills his parents and then begs the court for mercy because he’s an orphan.
Serious unintended consequences of genetic engineering? Please. Even after the cultivation of more than 3 billion acres of genetically engineered crops (by more than 17 million farmers in 28 countries) worldwide and the consumption of more than 3 trillion servings of food that contains genetically engineered ingredients by inhabitants of North America alone, there has not been a single ecosystem disrupted or a single confirmed tummy ache or zit.
Grifo’s appointment is especially inopportune at an agency in desperate need of an overhaul of its integrity, scientific and otherwise. Its waste, fraud, and abuse in scientific and regulatory programs are legendary.
With a research budget in excess of $800 million, EPA has long appeared to be more concerned with public relations than public or environmental health. A scheme was exposed several years that would have diverted EPA “research” funds to pay outside public relations consultants up to $5 million over five years to improve the website of the Office of Research and Development, conduct focus groups on how to polish the office’s image, and produce ghostwritten articles praising the agency “for publication in scholarly journals and magazines.”
This payola scheme is similar to the agency’s longstanding practice of buying influence by doling out hundreds of millions of dollars each year to certain favored nonprofit organizations — money that, according to the inspector general and Government Accountability Office, is dispersed with no public notice, competition, or accountability. The GAO investigators documented systematic malfeasance by regulators, including: (1) making grants to grantees who were unable to fulfill the terms of the grants; (2) favoring an exclusive clique of grantees without opening the grants to competition; (3) funding “environmental” grants for activities that lack any apparent environmental benefit; and (4) failing to ensure that grantees performed the objectives identified in the grants.
I saw evidence of this while I was an official at the FDA. For some reason I was favored with periodic reports of the research funded by the EPA. The overwhelming majority of it was shoddy, irrelevant, and unpublishable.
It is understandable that EPA needs to resort to such chicanery to whitewash its shortcomings. Science is routinely regarded there as a tool to further its anti-technology and anti-industry agendas, even if it means torturing the intent of statutes and affronting common sense.
The EPA is the prototype of agencies that spend more and more to address smaller and smaller risks. In one analysis by the Office of Management and Budget, of the 30 least cost-effective regulations throughout the government, the EPA had imposed no fewer than 17. For example, the agency’s restrictions on the disposal of land that contains certain wastes prevent 0.59 cancer cases per year – about three cases every five years – and avoid $20 million in property damage, at an annual cost of $194 to $219 million.
In his excellent book Breaking the Vicious Circle, written shortly before he became a U.S. Supreme Court justice, Stephen Breyer cited another, similar example of expensive, non-cost-effective regulation by the EPA: a ban on asbestos pipe, shingles, coating, and paper, which the most optimistic estimates suggested would prevent seven or eight premature deaths over 13 years – at a cost of approximately a quarter of a billion dollars. Breyer observed that such a vast expenditure would cause more deaths than it would prevent from the asbestos exposure, simply by reducing the resources available for other public amenities. And perversely, the very act of removing asbestos from existing structures poses greater risk from asbestos than simply leaving it where it is: During removal, long-dormant asbestos fibers are spread into the ambient air, where they expose workers and bystanders to heightened risk. When the EPA banned asbestos in 1989, it was already an old product whose risks and benefits were well understood. Nevertheless, political pressures from environmental activists pushed the EPA into making a decision that turned out to increase the risk to individuals and society.
Another example of flawed decision-making at the EPA is the imposition of overly stringent ambient air standards under the Clean Air Act. Clean air is desirable, of course, but an EPA rule finalized in February 2012 that created new emissions standards for coal- and oil-fired electric utilities was ill-conceived. According to an analysis by Diane Katz and James Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation, “The benefits are highly questionable, with the vast majority being unrelated to the emissions targeted by the regulation. The costs, however, are certain: an estimated $9.6 billion annually. The regulations will produce a significant loss of electricity generating capacity, which [will] undermine energy reliability and raise energy costs across the entire economy.”
Stung repeatedly by such benefit-cost calculations, EPA has begun more frequently to manipulate the benefit side by invoking so-called “non-use benefits” of regulations, such as “the value one places on knowing that an aquatic ecosystem is healthy” or secondary and tertiary ecosystem impacts.” The problem with such supposed benefits is that estimating them is highly prone to wishful thinking. (Read: plucking numbers from the air.) For example, regulators might “calculate” that a significant improvement in water quality in the Mississippi could be a source of benefit to people throughout the nation, not just those who use the river or who live near it, because the river is nationally symbolic.
Perhaps not coincidentally related to Grifo’s appointment, the regulation of products made with modern genetic engineering techniques has been a bête noir of both the Union of Concerned Scientists and EPA.
The EPA has long regulated field tests and the commercial use of pesticides under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). In 2001, the EPA issued final rules for the regulation of genetically engineered plants and concocted a new concept — “plant-incorporated protectants,” or PIPs, defined as “pesticidal substances produced and used by living plants.”
But the EPA regulatory net captures pest-resistant plants only if the “protectant” has been introduced or enhanced by the most precise and predictable techniques of genetic engineering. The registration process is excessively complex and burdensome. The submission required for regulatory review includes copious data on the parental plant, the genetic construction, the behavior of the test plant and so on — requirements that could not be met for any plant modified with older, cruder techniques, which are exempt from the FIFRA rules. EPA then conducts a series of redundant case-by-case reviews — before the initial trial; when trials are scaled up or tested on additional sites; and again if even minor changes have been made in the genetic construct. Those reviews are then repeated when the sponsor is ready to cultivate the plants at commercial scale.
This approach, which has been condemned repeatedly by the scientific community over many years, has discouraged innovation and provided incentives for the developers of new plant varieties to use inferior but unregulated techniques.
Grifo said recently that government scientists are currently working on “safe food” and a “safe environment” using the “best available science,” and that “the most important thing as we move forward is to increase the transparency of the federal government.” She is wrong on both counts.
EPA’s science is shoddy, and its scientists and administrators routinely manipulate it to fit their radical policy agendas. Moreover, transparency is less important in government regulation than the content of decisions. Putting it another way, transparency is desirable, but arriving at the right decisions about public health and environmental protection is what is paramount.
The EPA has long been intellectually, scientifically and ethically bankrupt. Francesca Grifo will fit right in.
Henry I. Miller, a physician, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy & Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. Follow him on Twitter @henryimiller.
