Negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) have been concluded. Citizens now have access to the 30-chapter agreement that is several thousand pages long. The TPP has been opposed by four major presidential candidates, and faces criticism in Congress. Nevertheless, it is likely that the trade deal will get a vote sometime this year.

But waiting in the wings, and still being negotiated largely in secret is another, equally important, trade deal: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The agreement, between the U.S. and the 28-nation European Union, has been formally discussed through 12 rounds of negotiations, with another round scheduled for some time this month. Both sides would like to conclude this treaty by the end of 2016.

Because Congress has approved fast-track legislation last year, TTIP also would get an expedited up-or-down vote by Congress, with no chance for amending the treaty. The fast-track law covers trade deals that extend into the next administration, over a period as long as six years.

Here’s my greatest fear about the TTIP: It will pressure regulators on both sides of the Atlantic to settle for the least restrictive public health and safety rules.

Millions of European and American activists share my concerns. Particularly on the EU side of the Atlantic, there has been spirited public opposition to the TTIP. In part, that’s because the EU has publicly disclosed the text of its proposals.

Unfortunately, the US Trade Representative still refuses to publicly disclose U.S. proposals on TTIP, a state of affairs that has drawn the criticism of members of Congress and activists. It also has greatly reduced the level of concern among the general public, who have been largely left out of the discussion.

What we have learned about some of these proposals is incomplete but disquieting. The TTIP may open the door to “mutual recognition” of a variety of products, including drugs, medical devices and chemicals, so that if they meet the standards of the US or the EU, the products won’t have to be approved by the other side’s regulators.

The EU’s proposals on regulatory cooperation could export some aspects of rule-making in the US that often delay and weaken rules. For example, business interests might get more influence over the regulatory process and regulators might have to prove that regulations did not have a harmful impact on the economy by increasing the cost of compliance for businesses.

And while both the US and the EU are alike in many ways, in some ways, they are far different.  Take the regulation of chemicals. The EU has the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals regimen, or REACH, a stringent system that uses the precautionary principle. Chemicals can’t be sold until they are proven to be safe. In the US under the existing Toxic Substances Control Act, chemicals are assumed to be harmless unless the EPA can demonstrate they should be regulated.

In an ideal world, REACH would apply to both countries under TTIP. What many chemical reformers fear is that the opposite will happen—that REACH will be jeopardized by the agreement, and that chemical companies will take advantage of our more lax regulatory assessments and opt to be initially approved in the U.S. and then be automatically accepted in the EU.

The US continues to be the gold standard when it comes to drug and device approvals. Will TTIP make it easier for US companies to bypass FDA scrutiny if their products are approved by the EU?

Another, more imminent, threat is that the EU’s recent push to make clinical trial data more transparent could be halted if the TTIP enforces strict confidential business information rules. This transparency is crucial to public health and safety.

There also is concern that TTIP’s proposals on regulatory cooperation may impede the ability of state governments to impose strict restrictions when federal regulators fail to act, whether it is food safety, labeling of toxic chemicals, or a ban on certain materials.

The EU has pushed for regulatory cooperation that goes beyond discussions between U.S. and EU regulators, and potentially involves more oversight of state regulations. States have been the drivers of science-informed aggressive regulation. If their actions have to be monitored or assessed by a federal regulator or by an extra-national regulatory cooperation council, that would delay and discourage these crucial public protections.

Investor State Dispute Settlement also is on the table. Despite the fact that the U.S. and the EU have sophisticated legal systems that could accommodate any type of litigation brought by foreign corporations, business interests continue to push for an extra-national tribunal to hear their disputes.

ISDS permits a foreign corporation that believes it has been treated unfairly by a nation through its federal, state or local policies, to sue for damages for harm to its profits before an international three-person tribunal, generally composed of trade lawyers.

There has been massive resistance to ISDS, including protests by well over 100,000 people in Germany alone. They are concerned that ISDS could jeopardize food safety and environmental standards if foreign companies challenged protective European policies. Germany, for example, was hit by a major ISDS lawsuit when it decided to phase out it reliance on nuclear energy after the disaster at Fukushima. The Swedish nuclear company Vattenfall sued Germany for $4.7 billion Euros in damages.

The EU has tried to mollify this opposition by proposing an alternative to a three-person tribunal: an international trade court to hear such cases. But the U.S. is resisting this proposal, and many critics, including the 16,000-member German Association of Judges, strongly oppose it. German judges are concerned that a permanent court, comprised of judges who must be trade experts, would not be independent enough from corporate influence. They also argue that foreign corporations do not need a separate tribunal, when they can sue in domestic courts.

Secrecy means that citizens in this country are deprived of the information they need to influence these negotiations in any meaningful way. It means that even our elected representatives cannot engage in meaningful dialogue about this crucial trade deal with their constituents.

TTIP may not be as bad as hundreds of thousands of activists fear. But the problem is that we won’t know until it is too late to do much about it. We can ask Congress to reject the trade deal, but we will not have the ability to influence it as it is being negotiated. That’s a losing proposition for everyone.

Negotiated in secret, its text considered classified information that limited access even to members of Congress, the TPP largely has been influenced by a small group of trade advisors, most of whom represent corporations or business trade groups.

While it has been agreed to by the U.S. and 11 Pacific Rim nations, TPP can’t move forward without the approval of Congress. Members of Congress who support the deal, including House Majority Leader Paul Ryan, are reluctant to bring it up for a vote until they are sure it will pass. Recent polls show public wariness about trade and its benefits.

When TPP does come up for a vote, perhaps not until after the election, it will be considered under a “fast-track” process Congress approved last year. The deal can’t be amended, and can be passed with just 51 votes in the Senate, escaping the threat of a filibuster, which would require 60 votes.

Why is TPP getting so much push-back? The mainstream media mostly has termed this a fight between labor and business over jobs, and whether this trade deal will be good for workers. But now that the public finally has access to the full text of the sprawling agreement, more than 5,000 pages in length, it’s clear that there are other reasons that TPP has raised so many concerns among those who care about the environmental, public health and safety, and addressing climate change.

Looking under the hood

The TPP has been agreed to by the U.S. and Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Together these 12 countries comprise 40 percent of the world’s GDP, and 30 percent of global trade. Its 30 chapters detail agreements on scores of separate issues, ranging from food safety to protection of endangered species and federal procurement policies.

The U.S. Trade Representative hailed the agreement because it “advances both our interests and our values abroad.” But the devil in such a wide-ranging treaty is in the details, and the details have raised a number of concerns. It is not enough to look at individual chapters of the deal, you have to look at those chapters in the context of the entire agreement.

Take the TPP’s environmental chapter. A few environmental groups, including the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy, have praised the TPP’s environmental chapter. WWF stated that its “conservation commitments … could be game changers.” But WWF went on to say that whether the commitments worked would depend on going “beyond good words and intentions in the agreement to support and implement effective environmental protections as TPP requires.”

However, the BlueGreen Alliance, Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club all have opposed the TPP, and contend that the treaty fails to protect the environment.

They argue that while the environment chapter is big on lofty goals, and asks member nations to make efforts to improve their protections of endangered flora and fauna, it largely fails to impose strong, enforceable environmental requirements.

The future of science-informed regulation

While the TPP will reduce tariffs, this trade negotiation also is valuable to multinational corporations primarily because it promises to eliminate what many members of the public consider crucial regulations to protect public health and safety and the environment, but what businesses often consider “trade barriers.” Business groups have actively promoted efforts to “harmonize” regulations, with the aim of reducing the cost of compliance.

The TPP creates a regulatory cooperation council that in theory will bring together regulators from 12 trade partners to discuss strategies to “harmonize” their public health and safety, worker and environmental regulations. In theory, this could raise the standards of all nations. But when you read the chapter on regulatory cooperation, it is clear that better standards will not be the goal of such a council. Instead, regulators will be asked to assess their rules based on whether they help or harm trade, and conform to “good regulatory practices.”

“Good regulatory practices” as defined by the TPP means a regulatory process that considers the cost of compliance along with the benefits, even though cost-benefit analysis is likely to exaggerate the costs of compliance, since those costs are provided by regulated industries, and minimize the value of benefits in terms of protecting public health and safety and the environment, which often are much harder to quantify. What is the monetary value of IQ points lost to lead poisoning, or a childhood free of asthma attacks?

“Good regulatory practices” also means considering alternatives to regulation that might be friendlier to business, and giving regulated industries the opportunity to comment on proposed rules. Another benchmark for good practices is whether a nation periodically reviews existing rules with an eye to cutting or relaxing them.

This focus on making regulations work for business raises serious questions: Will our science-informed regulations that protect us from tainted food, unsafe drugs and medical devices, defective consumer products, and polluted air and water be weakened and compromised in the future?

If regulators have to consider the impact of rules on trade, and if their approaches are monitored by an extra-national body, at the very least, this could delay needed regulations, and may discourage strong regulations that benefit the public.

Impact on fossil fuel use

The deal opens the door to unrestricted exports of natural gas from the U.S. to Japan, now the largest importer of natural gas in the world. Vietnam also is interested in natural gas.

Canada also will be able to export “billions of dollars” worth of crude oil to the U.S. without paying duties. This not only encourages more use of fossil fuels, but will make it more difficult for nations to address climate change by transitioning to renewable energy and reducing energy consumption.

Malaysia is a party to the TPP, and it is likely that will encourage the export of palm oil from that country. This increase in demand could exacerbate the problem of palm oil plantations that expand by using fire to clear forests, adding to carbon emissions, and harming public health. Deforestation also contributes to global warming.

Investor State Dispute Settlement and climate change

The TPP also will permit a foreign corporation that feels a state, local or national government has taken an action that unfairly harms its profitability to bypass domestic courts and sue for damages before an international tribunal. Since the TPP partners have 9,000 subsidiaries in the U.S., the potential for a trade suit is quite high.

ISDS lawsuits have grown substantially over the past several years, and America’s exposure to suits through the TPP now has been roughly doubled.

A lawsuit under ISDS doesn’t force a country to change its laws or regulations, but it can have a chilling effect. Faced with the pressure of multi-billion-dollar damages, countries or state and local governments may think twice before imposing strong protective environmental and public health standards. When threatened by a lawsuit, they may settle by relaxing those standards.

ISDS also may have a profound effect on state and regional agreements to address climate change. A foreign corporation that believes its profits have been harmed by policies to address climate change can bypass domestic courts and sue in an international three-person ISDS tribunal.  The judges come from the arcane world of international trade, many of them trade lawyers with ties to corporations.

Late last year, when the Obama Administration cancelled TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline project, the company used the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to sue the U.S. under ISDS, asking for $15 billion in damages.

Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer (CA) has raised concerns that her state’s landmark AB 32 law, which commits the state to sharply cutting its carbon pollution, could be sued under ISDS.

For Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, ISDS alone is reason enough to oppose the TPP. The trade deal as drafted, and unable to be revised by Congress, she writes, will make things “more dangerous for American families.”

Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz agrees. The TPP, he writes, “may turn out to be the worst trade agreement in decades.”

When it comes to improving the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), fifty years old this year, Republicans and Democrats are working together to achieve reform.  Indeed, both the House and the Senate have passed bills that would significantly strengthen FOIA.  The bills had overwhelming bipartisan acceptance. No Senator objected to the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016, S. 337. The House FOIA Oversight and Implementation Act, H.R. 653, bill passed by voice vote.

The original FOIA law was signed into law on July 4, 1966.  Its passage was based on a simple idea: that the public has a right to know how its government operates.

Its champion was Rep. John Moss, a California Democrat who joined Congress when a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, and a Republican Congress, held power, and weren’t interested in the reform ideas of a minority member.  But even when party control switched, Moss did not find much support for his ideas about transparency.  It took him 12 years go achieve his goal.

Most federal agencies resisted FOIA.  President Lyndon Baines Johnson also was leery.  But Moss found an ally in then-Republican Representative Donald Rumsfeld.  Moss held hearings that exposed secrecy scandals, and journalists pushed for the reform.

FOIA gave the public access to a wide variety of government documents, but did not surrender the keys to the governmental cabinet.  It exempted information that could compromise national security, private personnel information, proprietary information, and the exchanges on policy that agencies shared with one another.

In both the House and the Senate, there has been strongly bipartisan support for these current measures.  Both bills would put into law the approach to transparency of government information that President Obama signaled on his first day in office.

The President stated that federal agencies should, whenever possible, provide access to government information to the public. Agencies should adopt a “presumption of disclosure,” the President wrote. “In the face of doubt, openness prevails.”

Even with the President stating a very clear preference for transparency, many federal agencies continue to have spotty records when it comes to FOIA.  It still takes too long to gain access to federal documents, and often records that should be made available are kept secret or heavily redacted. Indeed, according to recent media accounts , the Obama Department of Justice had lobbied against these FOIA reform bills, efforts that it took a FOIA request to uncover.

If an Administration that began its life with the stated goal of openness has trouble delivering, think how FOIA suffers when an administration is committed to secrecy.  That’s why it is crucial that FOIA be strengthened this year.  The House and Senate bills both would place the “presumption of openness” of the Obama memo into law, where it would not be subject to the whims of future presidents.

The bills also would encourage the proactive disclosure of documents that are requested, and would require the creation of one single web portal for FOIA requests.

Under current FOIA law, documents that involve deliberations among agencies are exempted from disclosure.  Both bills bill would lift that exemption after 25 years.  This means that historians trying to understand the development of crucial policies will have access to valuable documents that would otherwise have been denied them.

The bills also make clear that the timely response to FOIA requests should be among agency priorities.  And it strengthens the authority of the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) and its valuable role in mediating disputes between a FOIA requester and an agency.  (However, some openness advocates raised serious concerns about a last-minute addition to the House bill that would protect the disclosure of any information thought to “adversely affect intelligence sources and methods,” no matter how old that information may be.)

FOIA always will be a work in progress.  The urge to keep things secret infects the culture of every government.  But with the passage of two viable FOIA reform bills this year, the hope is that Congress will not squander this opportunity and ensure that the House and Senate soon agree on one FOIA reform bill that makes it to the president’s desk.

But we also saw a glimmer of hope. It remains possible for the House and Senate to agree on a final bill that contains the best elements of both bills. If that happens, the American public will benefit from a modestly improved chemical safety law that will help the Environmental Protection Agency do a better job protecting us from toxic chemicals.

TSCA was passed in 1976. Since then only a handful of chemicals have been regulated and roughly 200 evaluated, even though tens of thousands of chemicals are sold in the U.S., and hundreds of new chemicals come on line each year. Chemicals pose a risk to many communities—but the danger is biggest for poor neighborhoods and communities of color. After 40 years of inaction, it is crucial that Congress does something to strengthen TSCA—and crucial that we get it right.

Our UCS members and supporters have been with us on this journey, letting their members of Congress know their concerns about the outdated and flawed current TSCA, and urging them to enact a strong reform bill. We have added our voices to the hundreds of thousands of activists who participate in the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families Coalition.

Our Center also enriched the debate through its examination of the considerable power of the chemical industry, and how it attempts to influence policy through its political spending and lobbying. We know some major players in chemical industry are pushing against reform, seeking a final law that produces the weakest possible result, and which will also block states from protecting their own citizens from harmful chemicals.

That influence often is measured in just a few words inserted at the last minute. The New York Times reports that a provision inserted in the House version of the bill would make it far more difficult for victims, states and local governments to sue big chemical companies, in particular, Monsanto, for the damage from chemicals that have been banned or tightly regulated by the EPA. This could interfere with pending or future lawsuits over PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, which had been banned by the EPA but were made by Monsanto. Other lawsuits concerning hexavalent chromium, asbestos, and PBDE, the flame retardant, also could be affected by this new and concerning language.

That is why citizen activism is so crucial. It is our best avenue for ensuring that ultimately, Congress listens to the people and legislates for safety.

The House and Senate must approve a final bill that gives the EPA both the authority and the resources to assess toxic chemicals and to regulate them. It must permit states to regulate these chemicals, until and unless the EPA acts. It must protect the rights of citizens and state and local governments to hold companies accountable for the damage their products caused. A final bill must also ensure that science-informed regulation is not hampered by unnecessary procedural hurdles that will slow down this important work.

For this reason, we continue our engagement on this important issue. More than 20,000 of our members and supporters have signed a petition urging members of the House and Senate who are negotiating a final bill to listen to the public, and not to the chemical industry. We will be delivering our petition to the House and Senate this week.

At a time when partisan gridlock is endemic in Congress, it is good news that Democrats and Republicans have worked together to strengthen our current chemical safety law. But bipartisan agreement only is valuable when it produces, in the end, a law that actually improves our environment and protects public health and safety.

Photo: Scott Bauer/Wikimedia Commons

The reason this House-passed bill should raise alarms is that it so clearly demonstrates how attacks on science-informed regulations aren’t always about the big bills designed to entirely upend the regulatory process and hamstring all federal agencies.

Other battles are more targeted, small guerrilla-style attacks that in fighting one regulation also include damaging provisions that could set the table for broader regulatory attacks. This  tactic also includes the misinformation that is part and parcel of these regulatory attacks.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy called the passage of the bill a victory for all the small sandwich shop owners in America. But the FDA wasn’t about to impose labeling requirements on “Mom and Pop” sandwich shops. Its mandatory labeling requirement applies to food operations that include 20 retail outlets or more, including grocery store delis, convenience stores, and movie theaters. At chain food outlets, you don’t have artisanal cooking going on. For the most part, you have consumers ordering from a set menu.

In its explanation of the rule, the FDA observes that this country now faces an epidemic of diabetes and other diseases that are linked to obesity, and that Americans now consume about one-third of their calories outside the home. The FDA rule required that consumers be informed about how many calories are in the food they consume away from home.

This is not a radical idea. It was mandated by the Affordable Care Act, and will help the nation hold down healthcare costs and reduce the incidence of chronic disease. In many parts of the country, including New York City, food outlets already have menu labeling requirements.

Public health advocates endorsed the FDA rule, noting that calorie labeling was supported by 80 percent of Americans, and that more information “would allow people to make their own, informed choices about how many calories to eat at a time when obesity rates are at a record high.”

Some studies show that consumers are likely to eat fewer calories if they have this information. There also is some evidence that, after they post their calories, companies voluntarily find ways to make their recipes healthier.

The National Restaurant Association thought this was a good idea, ensuring that all the major players were following the same rules. Also supporting the FDA rules were Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin Robbins. Many big-name chains like McDonald’s already do this, and more.

But many grocery and convenience stores disagreed.  A huge part of the opposition came from “Big Pizza.” Major campaign contributor Domino’s got its dough in a knot over this. It made the absurd contention that since pizza comes in all different combinations, an estimated 34 million of them, that it would be nearly impossible to estimate calories.

34 million? Oh please. Like all the other pizza chains, Domino’s has a menu of pizza standards. Those pizzas, routinely on the menu, would be subject to nutrition labeling, not every possible variation of pizza, although certainly it would be in the realm of the possible to list the calories contained in pizza toppings.

The idea that franchise owners of fast-food places must devote lots of manpower to figuring out caloric values is preposterous. Franchisees get their ingredients and specific instructions about how to mix those ingredients, from the franchise. That’s why a McDonald’s burger in Texas tastes the same as one in D.C. or Chicago.

House supporters of the bill were touting wildly inflated cost estimates per store. But the Center for Science in the Public Interest estimates that costs of the menu analysis would be about $45,000 per chain, not store.

There was a two-stage opposition to the menu labeling rule. The first successful step was to pressure the FDA to delay its implementation date by a full year, giving food outlets covered by the rule until the end of 2016 to comply.

But delay wasn’t enough. The next step was to sabotage the FDA’s work altogether. Enter the Common Sense Nutrition Disclosure Act.

Here’s what this bill does, or should I say, undoes. The FDA wants restaurants to tell us how many calories are contained in one standard menu item. That’s pretty straightforward. I buy a McDonald’s Big Mac; McDonald’s tells me how many calories I’m consuming.

But this bill will let food outlets play games. They can decide that a “serving” is actually one-half a sandwich or a very small slice of pizza, so that if a consumer is not reading carefully, it will be easy to assume that the sandwich I’m enjoying is only 375 calories, when in truth, I’m packing in 750 calories.

Also, food outlets covered by the House bill would not have to give equal access to information to all customers. If more than half of customers ordered their food remotely and then picked it up, a retail outlet would only have to provide the calorie information online. No information would be provided to walk-ins.

And the bill weakens any attempts to enforce the regulation.

It eliminates any requirement that a business certifies to the FDA, in writing, that it is complying with the regulation. And if this were not bad enough, there is an additional, sneaky language in the bill that not only affects federal efforts to require calorie information but also state efforts. Many states and cities already have taken the lead in menu labeling requirements. But regardless of what these elected officials may have permitted in their own regulations, the House-passed bill exempts all food outlets subject to any of these labeling requirements from being sued by citizens for non-compliance. There will be no way for citizens to hold any business accountable, no matter how flagrant the violation.

And once the FDA imposes its federal menu labeling requirements, this bill also forecloses any opportunity for states to ask the FDA to permit them to impose more expansive disclosure laws on the food establishments covered by this regulation. (It was a small window of opportunity for states, but this bill would close it entirely.)

One can see this type of language silently making its way into other regulatory bills, undercutting state and local governments before they even have a chance to protest.

This bill would muddle all the FDA’s careful rulemaking, and would delay any final regulation from taking effect by at least two more years. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the extra work will set the menu rule back by several years and cost the FDA $9 million!

But what is really unjust about these House shenanigans is the people who will be the primary victims. Not I, and likely not most of you. We may patronize places like Panera or Au Bon Pain, which cater to people with a bit of disposable income who live in the suburbs or affluent city neighborhoods. They are not in the inner city. These outlets already are providing nutrition information.

The people who end up paying the price when our elected officials shape the rules to shield certain corporations are low-income families, many of them people of color, whose health is already compromised because they live in food deserts, and have less disposable income to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. The few options they do have to select relatively healthier food should not be sabotaged by special interests.

Obesity is an epidemic in this country, but it is striking people of color even more. Diseases linked to obesity like diabetes are two times more likely to occur in black adults than white adults. Pretending this labeling requirement is some huge burden on large companies is a distraction. Not labeling burdens real people, by hiding information they need to make their own choices.

EPA poster 2009.

I will be very happy when the month of January is over. The blizzard that now is paralyzing the Washington, D.C. seems an apt metaphor for what is happening on Capitol Hill. In Washington, a blizzard of bad ideas threatens to cripple our generations-old bipartisan framework of laws enacted to keep American families and our environment safe.

These congressional efforts seem all the more troubling in light of January’s revelations that Flint, Michigan’s citizens, particularly its children, have been the victims of a massive disregard for human health, and that federal agencies and the state government failed to act fast enough and aggressively enough to fulfill their missions to serve the public.

The Flint tragedy is all the more poignant because it reflects a dramatic disconnect between the legitimate expectations of the American public and the priorities of too many of our elected officials, who are more focused on getting rid of regulations than enforcing them.

Almost from the first day of 2016, some members of Congress have continued their war on federal agencies and the way they use science to protect us from a host of dangers —from polluted air and water to tainted food and unsafe products, and hazards that would degrade our environment or destabilize or economy.

Beginning on January 7, the House of Representatives began votes on bills that would put federal agency science in jeopardy. These bills always have “clever” names. A good example is H.R. 1155, the SCRUB (Searching for & Cutting Regulations That Are Unnecessarily Burdensome) Act.

The SCRUB Act would create a commission of “experts” who would recommend regulations that should be cut or weakened. The idea is to reduce the cumulative cost of compliance to businesses by 15 percent, not to protect the public. So the commission would not be asked to strengthen existing rules, or develop new ones to respond to emerging hazards. Its sole focus would be saving corporations money.

What makes this idea even more pernicious is that it is linked to a new, unreasonable mandate on agencies. An agency could not implement a new regulation until it could find a regulation to cut, one that was on the new commission’s hit list.

Does that make sense to you? The President already has asked federal agencies to look at their older rules and see if any of them are unnecessary or duplicative. The agencies have done a good job weeding them out. Do we really want life-saving rules held hostage until agencies must scramble to find a rule that the public can live without?

Recently, rules were developed to address the growing problem of trains carrying very flammable crude oil exploding and causing millions of dollars in damage and the loss of lives. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) and other members of Congress complained that the federal government wasn’t acting fact enough. And yet, if SCRUB were enacted, these new rules could have been delayed for months, even years.

During that same week, the House also passed H.R. 712, the Sunshine for Regulatory Decrees and Settlements Act, a trifecta of bad ideas. (In this Congress, beware of any House bill that includes “sunshine” or “transparency” in its title.)

It included proposals to make it much more difficult for members of the public to sue federal agencies that are not enforcing existing regulations, and to delay crucial regulations by requiring them to be posted online for six months before they can be enacted, even though the public has already had a chance to weigh in on them. The bill also proposed that agencies develop 100-word summaries for each regulation, exposing them to the threat that if those summaries were not comprehensive or accurate enough, an agency could be challenged in court.

And just to cap things off, the following week, the House passed H.R. 1644, the STREAM (Supporting Transparent Regulatory and Environmental Actions in Mining) Act. This time, the House target was the Department of Interior, and its ability to ensure that mining waste does not pollute our streams and waterways.

It would impose “transparency” mandates that would require the science underlying regulations be disclosed 90 days before a rule or guidance is published, even when the research had not yet appeared in a scientific journal. Agencies don’t own all the scientific research that informs their decisions. But if they fail to meet the 90-day deadline, the rule will be delayed; if the delay goes on for six months, the rule is canceled. Worse, the bill would require an expensive, unnecessary study that would block science-based regulations to protect our waterways.

Our Center for Science and Democracy strongly opposed all three bills, as did the White House, which issued strong veto threats for each of them. In opposing the STREAM Act, the Administration warned that it would set back stream protection efforts by three years, jeopardizing the access of communities to clean water.

While votes on regulatory issues like these tend to be lopsided, with House Republicans largely in support, and House Democrats opposed, the STREAM Act also drew the opposition of ten House Republicans.

Just to top things off, January has been a time of waiting in the Senate. Any day now, we are expecting a regulatory working group, composed of four Republican and four Democratic Senators, to introduce a package of legislative proposals that could be very harmful to our regulatory process. That group includes Sen. Heitkamp, the same senator who pushed for faster action on oil train rules.

We don’t know quite what the package will contain, but based on media reports, we know what alarms us. It could make independent agencies more vulnerable to judicial challenge and political interference, create a commission to look at regulations that are ten years old or older and recommend which rules to cut or gut, and impose many more procedural burdens on agencies that now are scrambling to protect the public and the environment with limited resources and staff. The entire package views regulations through the lens of corporations, and their goal of reducing the cost of compliance. These proposals show little concern for the costs of not regulating that American families bear.

If the lesson of Flint tells us anything, it is that rules matter. Municipal drinking water does not stay safe if regulations are not in place, if governments and companies don’t follow them, and if federal agencies lack the authority—and in some cases, the courage—they need to compel safety measures.

If only Congress would understand what seems so obvious to the rest of us.

What’s the holdup? Delay largely results from a fight over issues that should not be part of the budget at all. We call these policy proposals “riders,” but that’s too kind a name for them. Better to call them budget cockroaches. They like the dark, they multiply, and they are very destructive. They lurk in either House or Senate spending bills. That means that they are fair game for inclusion in the budget negotiations.

What would these policy riders do? Here’s a selection, pulled from two previous blogs I’ve written, and a few new ones that have cropped up:

Hitting another brick wall on silica. This rider would once again delay a protective rule to prevent any more construction workers from experiencing serious respiratory problems or even lung cancer because of exposure to silica dust. While the dangers of exposure are well known and well documented, this rider would spend nearly $1 million on yet another study by the National Academy of Sciences to provide “epidemiological justification” for reducing exposure limits. The rule, first initiated in 2011, also couldn’t move forward until small businesses weigh in.

Halting crucial disclosures about political donations. One rider would prevent the President from requiring government contractors to disclose their political spending. Another rider would prevent the Securities and Exchange Commission from requiring publicly traded companies from making similar disclosures. Our Center for Science and Democracy supports both disclosure proposals.

Our CSD reports have tracked the toxic link between political spending and public policies advanced by wealthy fossil fuel and chemical companies. Our members have strongly supported more disclosure.

Sabotaging science-informed nutrition advice. Really? Riders would make it very difficult for the federal dietary guidelines to give any meaningful guidance to American families about the importance of exercise as well as diet, or to endorse a diet that emphasizes fruit, vegetables, low-fat dairy, lean meat and fish to prevent both obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Exempting flavored e-cigarettes from regulation by the FDA. Heaven forbid that the FDA might want to ensure that teens don’t get hooked on a potent nicotine delivery system.

Blocking expert advice to the Environmental Protection Agency: A proposal purportedly on “conflicts of interest” on the EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB) actually is a sneaky device to make it easier for industry connected folks to serve on the SAB and more difficult for scientific experts to participate. Worst of all, until the EPA actually addresses the so-called flaws in its current SAB conflict-of-interest policies, and puts together recommendations based on congressional mandates that aim to tilt the playing field away from expertise, the SAB’s crucial work is suspended. This proposal is very similar to a bad House bill we fought earlier this year.

This is just a glimpse into the riders that remain threats until the final budget deal is completed. If you haven’t called your member of Congress and asked for a clean budget, without these noxious policy proposals,  there’s still time.

Ask members to kill the cockroaches and pass a clean budget bill.

Riders are as welcome as a holiday case of the flu.

To most of us, December is a time for cookies, gifts and holiday parties. But if your job is advocating for science and democracy in Washington, D.C., the month of December is far less cheery: This is  the time for a budget showdown.

The House and Senate and the President all must agree on spending bills for the 2016 fiscal year, bills that should have been voted on by October 1.

Those decisions are being made right now. Deadline for spending bills is December 11. Figuring out spending is always difficult. What makes the process downright dangerous is the presence of hundreds of budget “riders”—provisions about public policy that hitch a ride on must-pass bills, often with little public notice or scrutiny.

Last June, I wrote about some of these riders. I wish I could say that the problem has been solved. But it hasn’t. Indeed, it seems that every day, we find a new rider that would harm public health, the environment and agency science.

These riders would be holiday “gifts” from individual members of Congress to please deep-pocketed special interests that want to place profits above public health, safety and the environment. For the rest of us, a rider-laden spending bill would be as welcome as a holiday case of the flu.

Indeed, in the environmental arena alone, our colleagues have identified well over 100 dangerous policy riders in pending budget bills, or about triple what they’ve seen in previous years. Fortunately, the urgency of the problem has galvanized organizations working for worker safety, public health, civil rights, a clean environment, consumer protections, and a host of other issues to come together to oppose all of these ideological riders and to push for a “clean” budget.

Here are a few riders that the Center for Science and Democracy is most concerned about:

Political interference in the dietary guidelines: Every five years, the US Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services convene a panel of nutrition experts to give science-based advice to Americans about how to eat healthily. This should be pretty noncontroversial, but there are riders in both House and Senate spending bills that would meddle with that expert advice. What’s upset Congress is the idea that the dietary guidelines should not only address our health but the health of the planet as well.

A House rider imposes a new standard for scientific evidence underpinning any changes to the 2010 guidelines that is so high it would be virtually impossible to give any meaningful advice. There is ample scientific evidence that eating more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, along with low-fat dairy and fish, helps reduce the incidence of type 2 diabetes and obesity. But the guidelines could not make the connection between these recommendations and their role in improving our health in specific ways.

A Senate rider would require that the guidelines address only diet and nutrition and nothing else. Reminding Americans of the importance of both diet and exercise in maintaining health would be out of bounds. And while the guidelines could still recommend reductions in sugar intake, they could not endorse giving consumers more information about added sugars through the Food and Drug Administration’s nutrition facts panel, or other food product labeling. Both these riders could delay the guidelines and/or render them much less useful.

Attacking a science-informed ozone rule: The Environmental Protection Agency, after much deliberation and informed by the conclusions of a science advisory panel, proposed a new standard to reduce the level of ozone permitted in the air we breathe. Ground-level ozone, which results from industrial pollution and auto emissions, greatly exacerbates asthma and other respiratory illnesses. An estimated one in ten American school children has asthma.

Many critics felt the ozone standard wasn’t low enough to fully protect public health. But even this modest attempt to reduce our exposure to pollution was opposed by some members of Congress. A rider would block the EPA from implementing a new ozone standard until most counties in the U.S. (85 percent) are complying with the current standard. The EPA should set the standard based on protecting our health, not on how easy it is to comply with it. This rider is a delaying tactic that defeats the science and harms the public.

Rolling back efforts to enhance fracking safety: A House rider would deny funds to the federal Bureau of Land Management to implement its new regulation imposing safety requirements on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) on federal lands. If that wasn’t bad enough, another rider tries to prevent the EPA from even studying the potential impacts of fracking on our water supply. The federal government has left fracking regulation largely to the states, but federal regulators should have the authority to determine what it will permit on public lands, our environmental legacy. And citizens living in areas considering fracking ought to be able to benefit from high-quality research about its potential impacts on their drinking water. These riders fly in the face of bedrock American values.

Undermining the Endangered Species Act: A record number of riders are proposed in both the House and Senate to attack the Endangered Species Act and the government’s ability to use science to inform its decisions to protect the gray wolf, the greater sage grouse, and other species at risk.

Indeed, 20 pro-environment Senators were so alarmed, they wrote to the President this month, asking him to stay strong in his defense of agency efforts to preserve our biodiversity.

Sabotaging democracy

What makes this rider fight so deplorable is the fact that legislative attacks are mostly happening in secret. In a democracy, members of Congress can challenge the Clean Air Act or the dietary guidelines, or advocate for no regulation of fracking. But they should do it out in the open, in a debate, where we all can hear their arguments, and they can be challenged.

Instead, riders are like chips in a high-stakes poker game. How much do you want funding for a crucial federal program? How many riders will you need to accept to convince me to go along? Who will be the first to fold? Who will be blamed if there is a budget stalemate and the government shuts down?

Public engagement is crucial

Our Center for Science and Democracy has been working with close to 200 environmental, labor, public health, faith, campaign finance, civil rights, social justice, and consumer groups to tell Congress to pass a “Clean” budget – one without these damaging ideological riders.

We’ve been meeting with members of Congress, Congressional leaders, and with White House officials to make our request crystal clear: A budget laden with harmful riders is not acceptable.

The good news is: We live in a democracy. Every voter needs to deliver the same message to Congress: Pass a “clean” budget bill. It’s a simple request, but it will make a world of difference.

At UCS, we’re very concerned that bad elements in the House-passed transportation bill might make their way into the final bill, now being negotiated between the House and Senate.

H.R. 22, the transportation bill, is primarily about maintaining and repairing roads and bridges and public transit. But it’s become huge, with lots of moving parts. Many of the provisions in the House-passed bill will not benefit the public and our environment.

I’ll just focus on a couple of provisions that are concerning to us:

Another attempt to threaten regulatory science

Despite the protests of more than 150 labor, environmental, public health, public interest, and small business groups in the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards, as well as our own Center for Science and Democracy, earlier this month the House approved an amendment sponsored by Rep. David Young (R-IA)

Like the infamous “secret science” bill, the Young amendment pretends to be about transparency, when its real impact would be to stymie science-informed regulation.

Any federal agency covered by the transportation bill would be required to make the science informing all its regulations, no matter how small or insignificant, including cost-benefit analyses and other data, accessible to the public. The Young amendment is written so vaguely that the experts can’t agree on what it actually means.

But there’s a real danger that federal agencies would interpret it to mean that they would be limited in how they regulate. Much of the best science informing what agencies do either resides in long-term health data, which includes private health information that must be kept confidential, or confidential business information.

Corporations might use this provision to question how much of the science that informed a regulation really was accessible to the public. If corporations and other special interests sued agencies, how would judges respond? Even if agencies won these cases, the litigation itself would sap their resources.

Will federal agencies decide to avoid all hassle or possible court challenges and rely only on public information to do their work? Or will agencies continue to rely on this information and then risk being taken to court?

Either way you look at it, the Young amendment is a threat to agency science. Indeed, when the bill was considered in the House, nearly all Democrats and eleven Republican members opposed it.

Other harmful riders

In addition to this attack on scientific process in the federal government, the transportation bill also contains several provisions that our colleagues down the hall in the Clean Vehicles group care about. Specifically, there are several provisions that would undermine the historic fuel economy and carbon pollution standards that were put in place for cars and trucks.

Consumers are saving money at the pump as new, more efficient models of vehicles are being sold, but an amendment added to the House transportation bill seeks to create a loophole for natural gas vehicles by giving them more credits than they deserve. Another House-passed amendment would exempt some small volume vehicle manufacturers from existing safety and tailpipe emission standards.

And then there’s the language that we are concerned will be added in the conference process. Dave Cooke wrote a blog about these provisions that would give away fuel efficiency credits for safety features that automakers are already incorporating into vehicles. Given the recent revelations about VW—the last thing we need right now is a backdoor deal that allows the automakers to game the system and significantly undermine the climate and oil-saving benefits of the fuel economy standards.

The transportation bill is must-pass legislation that helps fund our highways and traffic safety programs—it is shameful that some members of Congress are trying to use it to undermine science and public health at the behest of special interests.

Your call or email to your member of Congress, both House and Senate, can make a difference as these conference negotiations continue over the next few days. It is a busy time for all of us, but as citizens, we should, when we can, raise our voice against these damaging provisions. They don’t deserve a free ride.

President Barack Obama delivers remarks during a memorial service at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, for victims killed at a fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, April 25, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Or a defective ignition switch on more than a million cars that caused more than 100 deaths. Carmaker General Motors is paying more than $1 billion in fines because it concealed the problem for years. As auto safety advocate Clarence Ditlow observes, GM spent millions of dollars lobbying to ensure that federal laws lacked criminal penalties for auto executives whose actions cost lives.

It could be a drug, like the blood-thinner Pradaxa, approved by the FDA, that later turned out to have catastrophic consequences. An investigation by the Project on Government Oversight, released last month, faults the Food and Drug Administration for approving the drug, which can cause severe bleeding in some patients, even though there was no antidote to this life-threatening side effect.

In each case, the regulatory process was on trial. And in each case, and so many more, what was uncovered was that either the laws or regulations were too weak or non-existent, or resource-starved agencies failed to monitor regulated industries well enough.

Science-informed regulation is the best way for our government to prevent tens of thousands of deaths, injuries, and billions of dollars in property damage that result from shoddy products or poor oversight of hazardous materials.

Congress is on the wrong track

And yet instead of strengthening the role of science in regulation, and working hard to make sure our laws and regulations actually protect us, many members of Congress have done the opposite: They are doing all they can to weaken an already weak system.

On October 7, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee met to consider four very flawed bills. All of the bills addressed the process agencies use to issue regulations, which causes most people to immediately yawn and change the subject.

But these process bills are dangerous and damaging precisely because they don’t look like they’re doing anything particularly harmful. Think of them as stealth attacks on the environment and public health and safety.

True, these bills were approved by just one Senate committee. Nevertheless, this is a very dangerous time for bad ideas in Congress. The House already has approved similar anti-regulatory bills. And without going through a formal vote in both House and Senate, these bills can easily be transformed into amendments—or riders—that get attached to must-pass budget or other bills in a last-minute legislative flurry in these final months of 2015.

I will focus on the three Senate bills that are the most damaging. They all have names that make them sound as threatening as a tuna sandwich. It is their deceptive blandness that makes them particularly lethal.

Principled Rulemaking Act hurts science

The bill that most directly attacks science is the inaccurately named Principled Rulemaking Act, S. 1818. The bill’s sponsor, Oklahama Senator James Lankford, claims that the bill makes permanent what has long been the practice in agency rulemaking, but that’s just not true. It goes much farther. It would impose very inflexible mandates on agencies when they tried to justify their rules, including a requirement that agencies choose the least costly rule. But we have laws on the books such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Occupational Safety and Health Act that tell agencies that their first priority should be public health and safety and preserving the environment, not cost. The language in S. 1818 is really a back-door way to repeal these longstanding bipartisan landmark laws.

The bill attacks science in two different sections. One section requires agencies to publicly disclose the “relevant scientific and technical findings” informing the regulation in an “open, searchable, and downloadable format.” But many of the studies crucial to agency rulemaking cannot be disclosed, since they include confidential health information, or confidential business information.

A last-minute addition to the bill reinforces this demand and adds new requirements. The bill lets agencies know that they will be held accountable for ensuring that the science they use is not only “publicly accessible” but also “reproducible.” But agencies should not be restricted to use only information that fits these categories. You can’t reproduce a long-term health study assessing the damage from exposure to a toxic chemical, or climate studies that examine climate changes over hundreds of years.

Agencies that ignored this “advice” from Congress, however, could have their science challenged in court. Agencies cannot regulate if they are not able to be informed by confidential health data or confidential business information or data that cannot be reproduced.

If this language sounds familiar, it should. It echoes the “Secret Science” bill that was approved by the House earlier this year and received a veto threat from the President.

But the House-passed bill would hamper science at just one agency, the Environmental Protection Agency. The Senate bill, while not as drastic in its restrictions, covers science at all federal agencies, including independent agencies such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Independent agencies threatened

The second bill, S. 1607, the Independent Regulatory Agency Analysis Act, would greatly harm independent agencies that use science to protect the public and the environment, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Congress created independent agencies to operate with a bipartisan commission structure, and to insulate them from White House pressure.

Congress felt these agencies’ missions were so important and involved such complex technical matters that they needed extra protection from political interference. We know that scientists working at executive branch agencies, which lack that extra layer of independence, do feel the political heat. Our latest scientist survey of nearly 7,000 scientists at four agencies revealed that more than 45 percent of the scientists who responded believe that political interference at their respective agencies is too high.

But this bill would let any President break right through that layer of independence, and order independent agencies to get their proposed regulations analyzed by the White House office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). OIRA critiques of regulations would be fair game for any wealthy special interest wishing to challenge an agency rule in court. If this bill became law, it definitely would have an impact on any scientist, economist, engineer or other technical expert working at an independent agency. Their judgments, which help inform agency rules, would be second-guessed and much more vulnerable to political interference and micro-managing by activist judges.

Regulatory Improvement Act improves nothing

The third bill, S. 708, the Regulatory Improvement Act, is kind of like a Rube Goldberg contraption—sort of a jerry-built structure that really doesn’t work very well. S. 708 would create an independent nine-member commission to evaluate rules in effect for ten years or longer and put together a “hit list” of rules to cut or gut. The Commission’s recommendations would get just an up-or-down vote from Congress under expedited legislative procedures that allow for little meaningful debate or consideration. No changes permitted. You can see all the damage that this bill could create. Nine commission members couldn’t begin to have all the expertise they would need to assess regulations that run the gamut from train and truck speeds to food safety and nuclear power plant regulations. Even Delaware Senator Tom Carper, a lawmaker known for his bonhomie and courtesy who rarely criticizes his colleagues, called the bill “wrongheaded.”

The Senate Homeland Security committee did not vote on this bill, but not because it is unwise. Some members did not think the bill went far enough. They wanted to hobble agencies even more. Iowa Senator Jodi Ernst, for example, proposed that whenever an agency adds a regulation, it should be required to subtract a regulation of equal cost to the economy. The harm that could come from this concept is immeasurable. What would happen when there is an emerging danger the government needs to address—like an Ebola epidemic or the problem of unsafe rail cars carrying loads of crude oil across the country? Would agencies need to take crucial time away from dealing with emergencies to try to figure out what regulations they could do without?

The next two months are crucial

As Congress begins work in earnest on agency spending bills, all these legislative proposals could end up attached to a huge “omnibus” spending bill. Congress has until December 11 to pass spending bills. If Congress fails to act on time, the government could shut down. We must do all we can to make sure no damaging riders are included on this spending bill.

Stealth bills are no longer stealth if they are called out. In the coming weeks, we will use this blog space to keep you informed about dangers to science and our regulatory process, so that when we ask for your engagement, you will be ready to help us and help democracy.

Needless to say, the Pope’s embrace of climate change as a matter of moral urgency has also made him a figure of some consequence for all us who want to address this crisis before its effects have catastrophic impacts.

On Sept. 24, Interfaith Moral Action on Climate, a coalition of faith groups that perceive preserving and protecting our environment as a moral mandate, hosted a Rally for Moral Action on Climate Justice on the Washington Mall, in viewing distance of the Capitol where Pope Francis addressed Congress.

UCS director of strategy and policy Alden Meyer gives an interview at the rally. Photo: DeAntre Bryant

It was an event that attracted thousands of participants, a multi-cultural, multi-generational crowd. Speakers for the event included UCS director of strategy and policy Alden Meyer and the leaders of major environmental advocacy and faith groups across the country.

“No country is immune from the impacts of climate change, and no country can meet the challenge alone,” Alden told the crowd. “We can’t point fingers and say ‘your end of the lifeboat is sinking;’ rather, we must put aside our differences and come together to address this crisis.”

“The fact is, anybody who doesn’t understand that climate change is one of the most profound moral issues we face hasn’t been paying any attention at all to what Pope Francis has been saying,” he added.

“We can only hope that these advocates of inaction will open their hearts to Pope Francis’s message, will reflect deeply on the kind of world they want to leave to their children and grandchildren, and will change their position.”

Backstage at the event, as the amazing crew managed to orchestrate singers, dances, and speakers, there was a frisson of excitement. It seemed as if the Pope himself might make it to the rally. That was not to be. Not enough time.

Pope was there—in spirit

But the Pope’s physical presence did not seem to matter. In a very real way, the main speaker at the rally was the Pope. I have never seen a crowd listen more intently to a public figure speaker, his image beamed on a huge television screen. The Pope spoke in halting English, and he took his time getting to his concerns for the environment and the health of the planet.

The crowd laughed when some Congressional leaders couldn’t decide whether to applaud the Pope’s endorsement of the Golden Rule – “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” They applauded not only his remarks that addressed climate change directly, but spoke to social justice, the need for inclusion and help for the poor, the marginalized, and immigrants.

It was telling that on only a few issues—climate change being one of them—the Pope made clear what his position was. “I call for a courageous and responsible effort to redirect our steps, and to avert the most serious effects of the environmental deterioration caused by human activity,” the Pope said.  He told Congress that he was “convinced” that “we can make a difference.” He told lawmakers: “Now is the time for courageous actions and strategies.”

The Pope spoke of a “common good that includes the earth,” a “central theme” of his recent encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si. He even gave a shout-out to scientists, stating, “I am confident that America’s outstanding academic and research institutions can make a vital contribution in the years ahead” to ensure that technology serves “human progress.”

And among the four Americans that he saluted, the last—writer and mystic Thomas Merton—also reinforced the Pope’s commitment to “the earth.”  Merton was a Cistercian monk and gifted poet and author. He was passionately opposed to nuclear war and the spread of nuclear weapons. He also wrote movingly about the natural world near his monastery.

Merton wrote: “By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.”

The rally did include “fire and music.” We can only hope it propels our elected officials to preserve the natural world that means so much to all of us, believer and non-believer alike.

Homicide by House vote

Not only did the House pass the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act (REINS), Members made that ill-advised and harmful bill even worse by adding the “Secret Science” amendment. We’ve warned of the dangers of both legislative proposals.

I must be watching too many TV mysteries, and I hope you’ll excuse the gory language, but here’s what happened: In truth, REINS essentially shoots the regulatory process in the head. The “secret science” amendment stabs the science informing it.

Reining in needed protections

The REINS bill seems to reflect the confusion of many in the House between the role of Congress—to enact laws that set broad mandates—and the role of federal agencies, which develop regulations to implement those mandates.

Congress decides that access to Clean Air is a national priority and passes the Clean Air Act. It is then up to the Environmental Protection Agency, using the best available science, to determine how to protect the public from toxics in the air that would harm public health and the environment. Congress has enacted similar laws enshrining values that the entire country agrees with: clean water; a safe workplace, consumer products that don’t harm our children; safe food.

The system has not been perfect, and federal regulators often are pressured by corporate interests to weaken or delay or rules. But it does reflect a process grounded in common sense. Congress, sensitive to the priorities of constituents, enacts laws. Federal agencies use scientific and legal expertise to come up with the regulations that make the laws meaningful and workable. You can’t have clean air or clean water or safe workplaces without detailed regulations.

But the REINS Act throws the system into chaos. All of a sudden, Congress would take on the role of regulator, mandating that any major rules cannot move forward until and unless the rules get an affirmative vote from both the House and Senate. Congress would have only 70 legislative days to review each of these rules. If the House or Senate failed to act within that timeframe, the rule would not move. And it couldn’t be brought up until a new Congress was convened. Congress could never keep up with this strict timetable, let alone have the expertise to analyze these regulations. We can predict the result: crucial life-saving regulations informed by science would be in legislative limbo.

The sponsors of the bill say this system is more democratic, and will not compromise rules that the public really wants. But Rep. Evan Jenkins (WVA) was refreshingly forthright when he said that members “should vote for the REINS Act because that is exactly what we are trying to do. We must end rulemaking as we know it.”

“Secret Science” compounds the damage

To add insult to injury, the House majority voted to add Rep. David Young’s (IA) “Secret Science” amendment to the terrible REINS bill. The amendment would restrict federal agencies from using only publicly accessible science to inform their rulemaking. But much of the data that is really crucial is not publicly accessible, and for good reason. In essence, all federal agencies that used any scientific or technical data would be handicapped. We’ve written about the “Secret Science Reform Act” and its dangers many times. But that bill, approved by the House earlier this year, applied only to the Environmental Protection Agency.  This amendment would apply to all federal agencies.

Speaking on the House floor last week,  Rep. Donna Edwards (MD), contended that the “Secret Science “amendment  would “block Federal agencies from doing their jobs, their jobs of protecting our air, giving us clean water, making sure that our food supply is safe, checking on medical devices so that they don’t harm us, our prescription drugs so that they don’t make us sick, our privacy safeguards for our workplace information, our workplace safety standards, protections against Wall Street and its predatory lending practices.”

Consider how our federal agencies work. If an agency wants to impose restrictions on tobacco, impose labeling requirements on pesticides, or protect citizens from the harms of pollution, it needs access to information, much of it considered confidential and not lawful to make publicly accessible.

• Health studies would be off limits. An agency would likely be prevented from using any study that uses personal health data that should not be made publicly available as demanded. Since many agency rules are health-based standards, this rule would severely restrict the ability of the agency to base rules on science.
• Confidential business information also could not be used. An agency would be prevented from using data provided by industry to the agency to assess risk and make informed judgments about safety.
• Agencies would be blocked from using the most up-to-date scientific information. New scientific methods and data may be restricted by intellectual property protections or industry trade secret exemptions. This amendment would limit agencies’ ability to rely on the best available science including novel approaches that may not yet be publicly available.

The fact that the House approved such a terrible bill only reinforces the peril science faces today on Capitol Hill.  The only way we can ensure that science retains its rightful place informing our federal agencies is if citizens raise their voices in protest. We can’t afford any more double homicides.

That sentiment is being tested as the House and Senate vote on a series of spending bills to pay for government agencies and other expenses in the coming fiscal year.

Congress continues to try and sneak bad policy riders that would undermine the public interest into important legislation. Photo: Flickr user cometstarmoon

In too many cases, these spending bills sharply cut the budgets of federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, that have a crucial mission of protecting public health, our environment, and access to clean air and water.

Worse still, in this congress, these bills are also loaded down with special-interest riders so blatantly against the public interest that it is difficult to understand why any well-meaning member of Congress would ever support them. It is not that appropriations bills in the past have not contained ill-advised policy riders, it just seems like there are more of them this year, and they are more mean-spirited.

A long list of riders

For example, one of those riders was an amendment to the Senate bill funding the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services. The amendment would stop federal regulators from doing something they should have done decades ago – protect workers from exposure to silica dust. The government has been studying the harmful effects of silica dust on workers since the 1970s. But this amendment, offered at the very end of the Senate appropriations process and approved by voice vote, would require OSHA to spend up to $800,000 on a study by the National Academy of Sciences to provide “epidemiological justification” for the reducing exposure limits for workers. The rule, first initiated in 2011, also couldn’t move forward until small businesses weigh in.

Another rider in the House Agriculture-FDA spending bill would interfere in the Food and Drug Administration’s extremely careful and thorough process for regulating tobacco products, a mandate Congress gave it in 2009. In essence, the rider tells the FDA that its new rule can’t touch  flavored e-cigarettes or flavored cigars currently on the market, even though there is great concern that these flavored tobacco products are popular with youngsters and teens.

The House Interior spending bill not only eviscerates the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, it includes several riders that attack the heart of the agency’s policies to reduce carbon pollution and to protect our water supply from contamination. It also interferes with science-informed decisions protecting endangered species.

A sneaky attack on public interest 

There’s a common thread in all or most of these budget riders. It is the notion that spending decisions offer an opportunity to use a back door to undo policies that the public endorses without all the bother of a democratic debate.

The Supreme Court has upheld the ability of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas under the Clean Air Act. But rather than rewrite the Clean Air Act, which was a strongly bipartisan law and which Americans support, the strategy is to make it impossible for the EPA to do its work.

Likewise, a strongly bipartisan Congress approved giving the FDA the power to regulate tobacco products. But tobacco companies continue to fight on, and they have congressional champions to help them block FDA efforts through the appropriations process.

This doesn’t appear to be any policy area that the spending bills leave untouched. For example, every five years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services convenes expert panels advising the public on the most recent scientific thinking on nutrition and health. But because some members of Congress disagreed with some of the current recommendations of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, they are using a spending bill to direct the USDA and HHS to only adopt those recommendations that meet certain evidentiary standards; in effect, this rider blocks federal agencies from adopting a recommendation that Americans should eat less meat and more vegetables, hardly a radical idea.

The good news is that the President has made plain his opposition to these bad spending bills. And in the Senate, Democrats, pushing the Senate majority to lift the current caps on spending that Congress imposed in 2011, are threatening to block debate on all Senate spending bills. That means that the spending bills will have to receive 60 votes to move forward.

But the bad news is that these terrible ideas have been proposed, and in the compromises that Congress and the President must ultimately make to fund the government, it is difficult to know how many of these dozens of bad riders may survive.

It is up to all of us to make sure our member of Congress understands that we’ll be watching the appropriations process, and that we will object to any bad ideas getting a free “ride.”

So why should we care? Trade isn’t about tariffs any more. It’s about how nations agree on the right level of protections for the environment, public health and safety. It’s also about the role of science in informing those regulations, and the extent to which that science will be undermined by corporate priorities.

Congress might be undermining public health, safety, and environmental protections if they past this version of Trade Promotion Authority, or fast track.

Trade can be a very good thing for the world, but not when big businesses are driving the agenda. Multi-national corporations are tired of having to deal with standards that might be tougher in Europe than the U.S., or vice versa.  For example, when it comes to chemicals, Europe does a much better job, basing its assessment on the precautionary principle: Chemical companies have to demonstrate that their product is safe before it can be sold.  On the other hand, our Food and Drug Administration continues to be the gold standard for science-informed processes for the approval or drugs and devices. What these corporations want is a trade agreement where “trade irritants”—what most of us consider protective regulation—is kept to a minimum.

So giant corporations have intensely lobbied to get these trade deals done with as little fuss—what many of us would call democratic deliberation—as possible. That’s why they are so bullish on fast track. Business groups say that expedited review of these complicated trade deals is the only way to get them done, ignoring the fact that dozens of trade agreements have been signed and negotiated in the past without fast-track authority.

So what are the four ways fast track is bad for science?

1. Congress won’t know enough about pending deals in time to actually improve them.

The bill before Congress, sponsored by Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Paul Ryan (R-WI) would apply to all trade deals negotiated over for a period as long as six years. The legislation permits the public to comment on the deals, after they are completed, but that’s not very helpful. The public and Congress needs to know about the deals when they still have the opportunity to convince negotiators to change them if they raise concerns about their impact on public health and safety and the environment.

In essence, fast track puts the cart before the horse. Congress would be giving this Administration and a future Administration the power to get trade deals approved with an expedited process that doesn’t permit anything but an up-or-down vote. No amendments. The deals could be approved by just 51 percent of members in both House and Senate, depriving the Senate of the leverage that a filibuster, which requires 60 votes to defeat, would give Senators.

2. There are already ridiculous barriers for public access to information on how trade deals could impact health and safety. Fast track won’t help when it is most needed, right now. 

The public doesn’t know what these deals say, and members of Congress aren’t that much better off. Members can go to a room in the Capitol and look at the trade texts, but they can’t take notes. Unless their staffs have a security clearance, they can’t see the texts at all. And Members can’t discuss what they’ve read with staffers who don’t have a security clearance. As one Senator put it during the Senate debate on fast-track,  the classification of trade texts is pretty silly. This isn’t about going to war, it’s about selling stuff. And the European Union somehow has been able to make its texts accessible to the public online without national security being threatened.

3. Certain provisions that are being discussed in trade deals would allow big businesses to game the system even more by putting all the cards in their hand. Fast track will make this easier.

What we do know about the provisions being considered in these trade deals is very troubling. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has warned about the inclusion of Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS)—which would allow multinational corporations to sue countries for damages if a regulation or policy at the national, state or local level harmed their profitability.

4. All of the progress the U.S. has worked on for our health, safety, and environment would be at risk.

We know how active states have been on chemical safety, on addressing climate change, on other protective measures, whenever they believe the federal government is not acting fast enough or vigorously enough. We also know that local communities and states both have deliberated on the merits of fracking and whether it should be permitted when the environmental and health impacts are not still being studied. Those state and local fracking measures also could be vulnerable to an ISDS challenge.

Sen. Barbara Boxer has raised concerns that California could be sued over its landmark law, AB 32, which commits the state to drastically cut carbon pollution to address climate change. Corporations have been winning these lawsuits over issues as varied as the refusal by a Canadian community to permit a quarry and the efforts by the government of Australia to make cigarette labels less glamorous to discourage smoking. We also know that trade partners in Japan and Europe, as well as domestic oil interests, would like the U.S. to lift its current restrictions on its exports of natural gas and crude oil. Increased exports would make it even harder for the world to  address climate change and reduce its appetite for fossil fuels.

With so much at stake, it seems foolhardy for a Congress, so willing to challenge the Executive Branch at every juncture, suddenly to forsake its obligation to represent citizens and exercise oversight of these momentous trade agreements. Citizens should have the right to let their lawmakers know their views on these trade agreements and lawmakers should have the right to influence the content of those deals. Anything less than that fails to serve our democracy.

That’s why it’s important that you get in touch with your representative today. The House is going to vote on fast track any day now and your Member of Congress needs to hear from you now.

Fast-track had dubious benefits when our trade deals were primarily about tariffs. But the process is far more risky today, when trade deals will affect how nations protect their citizens from unsafe chemicals, tainted foods, dangerous drugs and devices, and a polluted environment.

Consider, for example, talks currently underway for the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). These negotiations are being undertaken largely in secret. Even Members of Congress have found it difficult to learn what their own government is doing. Consumer and environmental groups have learned about the substance of the talks through leaked negotiating documents, or because of a recent EU policy that permits the public release of more EU negotiating information. But what we’ve learned is very alarming.

Not about trade

The U.S. and EU have been almost exclusively focused on ways to eliminate what the business community calls “trade irritants” but what most of us consider public protections. Their goal? Regulatory “harmonization” and “coherence.” Those lofty sounding terms may presage a successful effort to adopt standards that offer the lowest protection to citizens of both the EU and US.

The White House has kept many members of Congress in the dark about what’s being discussed with the European Union in these trade talks. Photo: Flickr user David

For example, a proposed Regulatory Cooperation Council would function like an extra-national White House Office of Management and Budget—overseeing not only the development and implementation of federal legislative proposals and proposed regulations, but also state laws and regulations, and regulations proposed by independent agencies such as the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Such a Council likely would examine such proposed laws and rules based on their costs and benefits, as well as their impact on trade, and would prioritize regulatory impacts on corporate profits over their value to the general public. This scrutiny also would extend to laws and rules proposed by both the EU and its member countries.

Such a council could block efforts by California and other states to promote electric cars, control pollution or ban unsafe consumer products, and weaken or stall progressive efforts in Europe to regulate chemicals based on the precautionary principle, requiring chemical makers to demonstrate their products are safe before they can be sold. TTIP also could jeopardize regional efforts to address climate change.

Safeguards in trouble

Last May, UCS, along with NGOs from both sides of the Atlantic, wrote to the U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman and his EU counterpart, warning that it would become “a significant source of delay and preempt a state, a country or a region’s ability to maintain or establish stronger standards when consumers demand such or to respond to emerging technologies, new scientific information, preferred policies by the public, and urgent crises.”

Even worse, this and future trade agreements may very well include Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), giving a corporation the right to sue a foreign government, claiming that its regulations unfairly hurt its bottom line. Such lawsuits would be decided by corporate and trade lawyers in an extra-national tribunal operating out of public view.

ISDS in other trade deals has had real-world impacts. Using ISDS, >Philip Morris sued both Uruguay and of Australia for trying to impose restrictions on cigarette labeling. Likewise, Germany’s decision to shut down its nuclear power plants resulted in an ISDS lawsuit from a Swedish nuclear power company.

Undermining science and democracy

In short, the ability of science to inform regulation on both continents may be undermined by corporate-driven structural changes and regulatory processes developed to give wealthy special interests even greater influence. Once these structures are in place, and these agreements signed, multinational corporations may have the perfect system for blocking, weakening or eliminating altogether any rule that harms their respective bottom lines.

Democracy means something only if citizens truly are able to govern themselves and for their priorities to be addressed. In 2014, Sen. Orrin Hatch, now the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, overseeing trade, was a co-sponsor of a fast-track bill sponsored by then Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus and then House Ways and Means Chairman David Camp. Hatch has said he may introduce a new version of a fast-track bill by the end of this month. Unless the Hatch bill is drastically different from last year’s version, it will fail democracy in several ways.

Camp-Baucus-Hatch would:

• Apply to any trade agreement negotiated over at least four years, possibly as long as seven years, extending beyond the current Administration;
• Permit the President to negotiate a trade agreement that changes current federal laws and to determine which countries will be trading partners;
• Rush complicated agreements through Congress, placing time limits—60 days in the House and 90 days in the Senate—when members of Congress can consider these deals;
• Limit the power of Congress to slow deliberations down or to block votes. In the Senate, a majority of Senators can approve a trade deal. They do not need 60 votes to proceed. That means that the agreement could be ratified by one political party;
• Exempt trade deals from scrutiny by congressional committees;
• Restrict debate on these agreements to 20 hours in each chamber;
• Ban all amendments, and<
• Fail to bind USTR to any specific Congressional mandates ensuring that our regulatory system is not degraded.

Fast-track undermines the democratic process and makes us vulnerable to trade agreements that do real harm to science-informed regulation. That’s a bad deal, no matter how trade negotiators might frame it.

Why should we care? Because instead of science informing the decisions our government makes about protecting our environment, public health and safety, those decisions would be driven by the needs and wants of regulated industries, putting average Americans in jeopardy.

The proposal, expected to be voted on next Tuesday, is H.R. 185, the Regulatory Accountability Act of 2015. Rep. Robert Goodlatte (VA), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, is the bill’s main sponsor. The bill will continue the House Majority’s ill-advised war on regulation and is virtually identical to proposals he’s offered in the past.

The first in a series

You might want to call this the first in what we expect to be a long list of “zombie bills” – legislative proposals that harm science-informed policy, and in so doing jeopardize public health and safety and the environment. These are retreads of bills which failed to become law in previous years, but have been resurrected one more time. They are coming back in part because the shift in power in the Senate may mean these bills have a chance of surviving the legislative process this year.

Goodlatte and Democratic co-sponsor Collin Peterson (MN) claim that the bill would “modernize” the regulatory process and reduce burdens on the “little guys.” That is absolutely not what the bill would do nor was designed to do.

The Regulatory Accountability Act would make an already complicated process even worse by presenting agencies with extra hurdles that serve no useful purpose. Photo: Flickr user lkonstanski

This bill is deliberately complicated. You have to be a regulatory lawyer to perceive all the traps, and even then you might miss some. Essentially what the RAA would do is hamstring federal agencies with additional procedural burdens when they try to carry out their mandates using the best available science. Instead, agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission would all be subject to more special-interest interference.

On top of the already complicated regulatory process agencies have to deal with, this bill constructs a Rube Goldberg contraption—you know, one of those rickety, byzantine machines that serve no useful purpose.

Last year, James Goodwin of the Center for Progressive Reform found that one version of the bill added a whopping 65 additional procedural requirements that agencies would have to undertake to implement rules. (The 2015 bill appears to add well over 70 procedural hurdles).

Undermining science

Even assessing risk, which should be in the hands of scientists, would be second-guessed by the White House Office of Management and Budget. Goodlatte’s proposal requires that the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) develop guidelines for assessing risk, and that agencies must conform to whatever OIRA imposes, despite the fact that OIRA’s small staff, which includes only a handful of scientists, lacks the scientific and technical expertise that federal agency scientists possess. OMB bean counters should not be in the business of determining what constitutes a scientifically valid risk assessment.

In passing bipartisan laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, Congress told the EPA that preserving the environment and protecting public health was its core mission, and directed that it should not nickel and dime regulations that have ensured that future generations have access to unpolluted lakes and rivers and breathable air.

This proposal would jeopardize that mandate. The EPA would be much more vulnerable to legal challenges of its rules based on the costs of proposed rules, even if those rules were crucial to protecting our air and water and safeguarding public health—indeed, even if those rules have enormous long-term economic benefits or savings. The RAA emphasizes the costs to businesses, not the long-term benefits to the public.

A lack of debate

This bill harms science, but it also harms democracy. In rushing this complicated legislative proposal during the first weeks of Congress, House leaders subvert the democratic process. If Congress wants an open and public debate on the value of bipartisan public protections built over the past century, then it should do so directly.

But Goodlatte and others may suspect that they’d lose in a fair fight over the value of clean air and water and public health and safety. Recent polling and focus groups demonstrate that there is strong support for federal agencies that crosses party and ideological lines.  Even the EPA, often the target of Congressional critiques, received the support of more than half of those polled, well above popular support for Congress, which hovers around 10 percent.  The average voter understands and respects the work of agencies and knows the value of regulations that protect public health, safety and the environment. They want regulations to be enforced, and enforced fairly.  They don’t like the idea of big companies gaming the system. And the RAA not only ups the game, but gives priority seats to select players—regulated industries.

So instead of a direct assault, those who oppose regulation are trying a back-door approach.  The Goodlatte proposal is written in legalese that is as dense and unfathomable to a lay person as a scientific formula is to a non-scientist.

Making matters worse, Goodlatte is attempting to gain support for this radical change by trying to rush it though the House process. The House has 73 new members this Congress.  They barely know how to find their offices, don’t have full staffs, and yet they are being asked to vote on a complex bill rapidly and without any time for consideration.

If this effort is any indication, the House is off to a very poor start. But constituents have power here. Laws must be made with the consent of both the House and Senate and the approval of the President. We need citizens to fight this zombie bill, letting our elected officials know that it should be buried, once and for all.

But even a seasoned professional like Dr. Hamburg has been challenged by what she’s faced at FDA. Dependent on fees from drug and device companies to support a significant portion of its approval budget, the FDA finds itself under siege as these industries press for an expedited process, their requests often amplified by many members of Congress. Patient groups, some representing rare and/or incurable diseases, often lobby the agency as well.  The FDA also is the target of our Center and other groups who feel that the agency’s oversight of drugs and devices is not stringent enough.  We also have raised concerns about FDA advisory panels that often contain experts with industry ties.

“Faster cures”

These days, the push for “faster cures” is gaining momentum, particularly on Capitol Hill.

We can only hope to see Dr. Hamburg’s vision of the importance of safe drugs and medical devices will be heard by members of Congress pushing through the 21st Century cures initiative. (Photo: FDA)

Everyone wants faster cures. Who wouldn’t? But the FDA’s mission is to ensure that the drugs and devices it approves are both safe and effective. Earlier this month, Dr. Hamburg found the ideal venue to emphatically make this case.

Hamburg was selected to give the Edward N. Brandt Jr. Memorial Lecture in Women’s Health at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health in Washington.

The annual lecture is co-sponsored by the Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center College of Public Health and honors Brandt, who died in 2007. As a senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services during the Reagan administration, Brandt sounded the alarm on the new disease – AIDS – that was becoming a major public health threat. He found ways to push back against attempts from the White House to cut spending on AIDs and other crucial public health work. He also was a pioneer when it came to promoting more research for women’s health.

Hamburg had met Brandt, although she had never worked closely with him. Nevertheless, you could perceive her respect and empathy for a professional trying to serve the priorities of public health while dealing with many external pressures.  Brandt, she observed, knew that government had a crucial leadership role in protecting public health. The foundation for that work, she stressed, must be the “best available science.”  Brandt’s efforts to get more federal support for AIDS, women’s health and other issues “were often made in the face of significant opposition and questioning, both in and out of government.  And yet he persevered.  And he made an enduring difference.”

Hamburg’s remarks were all the more important as the House of Representatives is preparing to advance a legislative proposal that might place even more pressure on the agency to emphasize “faster” over safer.

Safety first

The initiative, 21^st Century Cures, has been the subject a scores of bipartisan meetings and hearings in 2014, in Washington and throughout the country.  Rep. Fred Upton (MI), a Republican, joined with Rep. Diana DeGette (CO), a Democrat, to explore the possibility that new technology might greatly expand the opportunities for effective new drugs.  The problem with this effort is that its message is heavily skewed. Its supporters believe that the FDA’s current approval process is “in many ways the relic of another era.” And its events and white papers have been dominated by groups, scientists and industry officials that are strong advocates for innovation and streamlining of established practices at the agency.  Those voices certainly deserve to be heard, but it’s been far more difficult for voices of caution – including that of our Center for Science and Democracy – to receive equal attention.  We want to make sure that this discussion is balanced, and reflects the views of those who want innovation, but not at the expense of safety and efficacy and science-informed regulation.

I asked Commissioner Hamburg about this initiative.  She, too, has reservations.  The effort, she said, “may bring positives” but she is concerned that too rapid a push towards innovation could also “decrease standards and authorities” that the FDA needs to achieve its mission to ensure that the medical products it approves are safe and effective.

We know what happens when drugs are approved and then prove to have serious side effects.  Vioxx’ impact on heart health caused tens of thousands of deaths and eventually led its maker, Merck, to stop selling the drug.  Safety concerns about the painkiller emerged early, but it took years, and many deaths, before the public learned of the safety problems.

Science, Hamburg stressed throughout her speech, must inform regulatory policy. And innovation must be harnessed to science-informed regulation if it is to “bridge the gap between scientific discovery, good ideas, and meaningful products and actions to address the public health issues of today and tomorrow.”

We can only hope that Hamburg’s vision prevails.  And that the drive towards “faster cures” does not jeopardize public health and safety in a race to get untried and untested therapies to the marketplace.

Members of the Public Health Service need the stronger whistleblower protections that are given to other federal workers. Photo: USPHS

On the front lines to curb Ebola, and risking their lives to help thousands of its innocent victims, these physicians and healthcare providers are part of a PHS corps that includes more than 6,500 scientists working at more than 20 federal agencies. (Those agencies include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency). They should be free to express their concerns about any aspect of the federal Ebola effort.

However, their whistleblower rights are not as strong as the rights of other federal workers.  That’s because PHS scientists are under the jurisdiction of the military whistleblower protection system. The civilian system is far stronger.  Ideally, whistleblower protections for all members of the armed services would  match the protections offered by the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, approved unanimously by Congress in 2012.

But certainly those federal employees who are not soldiers and for years enjoyed civilian protections should not have to wait until military protections equal civilian ones.

The reason for this state of affairs is complex, and there are no villains to blame.  From 1978 through 2009, the PHS corps had civilian whistleblower protections. Court decisions challenged that arrangement. A whistleblower complaint was dismissed because the judge determined that a PHS whistleblower was not eligible to pursue a complaint under the civilian process.

PHS workers found themselves in limbo. The way to fix the problem was for Congress to include language in the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act of 2012 that clarified that these scientists may be on the front lines of disease and perhaps scientific exploration but they serve no combat roles. They should not be consigned to military whistleblower protections.

But that didn’t happen. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), a strong defender of whistleblower rights, instead proposed an amendment that officially placed the PHS staffers under the jurisdiction of the military whistleblower system. At the time, there was concern that switching jurisdiction back to the civilian realm might in some way compromise some of the benefits that accrue to service in the Public Health Service. In reality, this is a non-issue. After all, PHS members had civilian whistleblower rights for 30 years without any erosion of their military status or benefits. Since 1994 employees of government corporations have had civil service whistleblower rights, without disturbing any other terms of employment.

Things improved some for PHS workers when Congress strengthened protections for military whistleblowers in 2013. Those protections, advanced by a bipartisan team that included Senators Grassley, Mark Warner (D-VA), Susan Collins (R-ME) and Tim Kaine (D-VA) gave whistleblowers more time to make their case, and ensured that those judging their reprisal complaints were independent of the whistleblower’s immediate supervisors.

But the protections are still not strong enough. Scientists, physicians and nurses in the Public Health Service still lack the ability to take their complaints about being harassed if they expose waste, fraud and abuse to court if they are not satisfied by the administrative process. Their “day in court” through administrative hearings is conducted by the military institutions that normally would be defendants, rather than an independent forum. And the legal standards to prove harassment and retaliation are stacked against them, based on rules dating back to the 1970s that have been updated in every whistleblower law enacted since 1989.

Our PHS workers are first-class scientists and healthcare providers.  They should not be consigned to second-class protections.

Senator Blumenthal introduced the “Hide No Harm Act” because it is time to hold executives accountable when public health and safety are at stake. (Photo: Office of Senator Blumenthal)

The bill was prompted by revelations that executives at General Motors had ignored red flags about the ignition switch in many GM models, a switch that could suddenly shut down power to the car, including its air bags. The product defect has been implicated in at least 13 deaths and many injuries. After GM learned about the defective part, the company took years to warn consumers or address the problem.

But the “Hide No Harm” bill addresses a more fundamental problem than one company’s mishandling of a significant product hazard. It aims to give the public and regulatory agencies timely access to public health and safety information, so that deaths and serious injuries can be avoided.

The bill requires that corporate officers and executives—the people running companies—disclose information about these dangers to the appropriate government agency, and warn employees and consumers. They must issue these warnings promptly, not years after the company detects the problem. The bill also makes clear that corporate managers may not retaliate against any conscientious employee who discloses these dangers.

The science connection

What does this legislation have to do with scientific integrity? Quite a bit. In numerous cases, scientists, engineers, and technicians working for corporations have raised concerns about product safety, only to be ignored by corporate accountants, marketers and lawyers.

If corporate executives know that they can be held directly accountable for their actions, it may persuade them to pay more attention to the potential harms a product may cause, and may tip the balance in favor of the scientific evidence that raises red flags. Whistleblowers are invaluable in helping to identify problems before they create deaths and injuries.

In GM’s case, Courtland Kelley, then the head of an inspection program for GM products throughout the country, raised concerns about safety problems he was finding in GM models in 2002. He tried to take his concerns to company managers, but was rebuffed. He sued the company to help prompt corrective action, using Michigan’s whistleblower law. But his efforts sandbagged his career at the auto company, with the company downgrading his duties.

The way that engineer was treated affected others at GM, who kept quiet when in 2004, reports were surfacing about another safety defect in ignitions. The recall of millions of cars, not to mention the loss of lives, could have been prevented if GM managers welcomed safety concerns and did not punish whistleblowers.

No spinning science

Vioxx was a huge money maker, a painkiller that reportedly was easier on the stomach than older pain pills such as aspirin. But as early as 2000, in a clinical trial of 8,000 patients comparing Vioxx to the painkiller naproxen, researchers found that five times as many Vioxx patients had heart attacks as those on naproxen.

Merck did disclose the findings of the clinical trial to the Food and Drug Administration and to the media, but it spun the message. It stressed that Vioxx caused fewer digestive problems than naproxen, and concluded that naproxen must have some property that protects the heart, thus explaining away any possible harm Vioxx might do.

In truth, Merck’s scientists were concerned about the clinical trial, wondering whether the drug was truly safe. Some corporate scientists were so worried that they proposed withdrawing the drug until their questions could be answered.

Merck failed to address its scientists’ concerns. The company did not try to determine what caused this uptick in heart attacks. Was naproxen really protective for the heart, or did Vioxx potentially cause heart problems?

Instead, the company opted to monitor clinical trials looking at other aspects of Vioxx to see if any disturbing trends turned up. It continued to insist on the safety of its drug even after the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2001 published the findings of two Cleveland Clinic cardiologists who re-analyzed data from several Vioxx clinical trials and concluded that the drug did raise the risk of heart attack and stroke.

Even worse, despite all these unresolved questions and emerging red flags, the company sold the drug to doctors for a use that the FDA had not yet approved—to treat rheumatoid arthritis.

At Merck, the marketers and bean counters prevailed over the scientists who wanted more answers. Merck took four years to voluntarily withdraw the drug from the market.  Withdrawal occurred only after a much larger clinical trial established the damage Vioxx could do. As a consequence, tens of thousands of patients who took Vioxx suffered fatal heart attacks.

Accountability is important

Merck ultimately sold Vioxx to 25 million Americans. Global sales of the drug totaled $2.5 billion the year before it was withdrawn. (The FDA also has earned justifiable criticism for its lax regulation of Vioxx and its efforts to suppress the warnings of Dr. David Graham, an FDA scientist who also sounded the alarm about the painkiller).

After misrepresenting the science, Merck was able to celebrate billions of dollars in profits off a drug that was directly linked to thousands of heart attacks. (Photo: Flickr user PGecko)

The government did punish the company, levying a $950 million fine in 2011, which also resolved civil suits in several states. In 2007, Merck paid more than $4.8 billion to settle 27,000 lawsuits by those who claimed they or their relatives suffered injury or death due to Vioxx.

But Merck executives were not held accountable by the U.S. Department of Justice. The DOJ’s charges concerned illegal marketing, and not the more fundamental wrongdoing of failing to adequately or promptly warn patients of the potential dangers of the drug, and not taking action for four years, while the evidence of serious concerns about Vioxx’s safety continued to mount. Indeed Merck’s press release announcing the negotiated deal made just that point: “As part of the plea agreement, the United States acknowledged that there was no basis for a finding of high-level management participation in the violation. The government also recognized Merck’s full cooperation with its investigation.”

It is time for corporate executives to be held personally accountable for subsuming the concerns of their scientists and others in the scientific community for the sake of profits and share price. Fines, even large ones, can be offset by the astounding money that can be made from an unsuspecting public.

As Erik Gordon, an assistant professor of business at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan told the New York Times: “It’s just a cost of doing business until a pharmaceutical executive does a perp walk.”

Earlier this year, the House unanimously approved a FOIA reform bill sponsored by Republican Rep. Darrell Issa (CA), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Democrats, Elijah Cummings (MD), the committee’s ranking member, and Mike Quigley (IL).

Improved FOIA policies will allow the public to gain better access to government information.

This June, another bipartisan team, Democrat and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (VT) and Republican Sen. John Cornyn (TX) introduced their FOIA reform bill.

The Senate legislation has a good chance of passage, assuming it is not the victim of procedural fights about other issues. Nothing can be assumed in the Senate, fraught as it is with tussles over process.

But if the Senate bill makes it through, there is a good chance that a final bill will be negotiated between the House and Senate that improves the public’s access to government information.

We all know that the public needs and deserves better access to information. In a perfect world, FOIA would almost be an after-thought, a process you went through only for obscure information.

Both House and Senate bills affirm that government information ought to be disclosed unless there’s a very good reason for confidentiality.

This was a message that President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder pushed early in the Administration’s first term. Holder specifically told agencies that disclosure ought to be the default when the public asks for information, reversing a Bush Administration policy that assumed the government information should be kept confidential unless the public could demonstrate a reason justifying disclosure.

Unfortunately, many agencies seem to cling to secrecy.  Indeed, a recent study by the National Security Archives found that 55 agencies—more than half the federal agencies surveyed—were not complying with the presumption of openness guidance.

The public continues to be frustrated by the reluctance of some federal agencies to release data that is crucially important to the public. A case in point was the effort by the Department of Navy to subvert FOIA requests for scientific data concerning toxic contamination of the drinking water at Camp Lejeune. The contamination may have harmed up to one million people who had lived or worked on the base over the past several decades. But the Navy urged that the scientific information on water modeling be redacted, claiming it was exempt from FOIA due to national security concerns.

In 2012, Sens. Leahy and Chuck Grassley (IA) challenged that national security claim, noting that such information had not been classified and had been routinely available to the public. What happened at Camp Lejeune, the Senators stated was “one of the worst environmental disasters in American history” to occur at a domestic military base.

That’s why a stronger FOIA law is so important. It gives FOIA advocates much stronger ground on which to make their case. Both bills would make the “presumption of openness” the law of the land, not just something a President tells agencies to do. That idea should be something all lovers of democracy, openness and scientific integrity, can celebrate.

To understand how important sugar was in our lives, and how difficult it is to restrict it in our diets, a number of us tried to take the Fed Up sugar challenge: Eliminate all foods with added sugar from our diets for 10 days.

Sounds pretty easy, right? Until you realize that aside from candy, cookies and cakes, you’ll be forgoing many types of bread and rolls, soups, pastas, yogurts,  juices, condiments, and myriad other food items we routinely pop into our mouths.

I never realized how addicted I was to sugar until I tried the challenge. Giving up chocolate was hard, but I’ve done that before. But eliminating all added sugars? I found myself living on blueberries and unsweetened applesauce. By the third day, I was cranky and started to get killer headaches.

I found my body was so used to added sugar, I could not stick out the 10 days. And I am someone who prides herself on eating a pretty healthy diet!

The sugar industry has played a key role in suppressing the negative health impacts of added sugar. Photo: iStock

The science says it all

My personal experience demonstrates what the science has already told us. As our report states, sugar has an impact on the parts of the brain associated with reward and craving.  Eating a lot of sugar can produce “addiction-like” behaviors. And the sugar industry has done a great job getting sugar added to thousands of food products, increasing our consumption and likely also helping to create those addictive impulses.

The science also tells us that sugar is bad for our health, with over-consumption linked to diabetes, heart problems, and obesity, the source of many more bad outcomes.

But the federal government has been slow to address these concerns, in part because of successful efforts by the sugar industry to downplay the science and to push back on any attempts by Congress or regulatory agencies to even give consumers better information about sugar, its health impacts, and how much sugar has been added to their food.

The FDA is proposing a nutritional label for foods that gives more accurate information, and UCS has been urging the agency to explicitly include the category “added sugars” on that new label. We’ve successfully urged more than 23,000 UCS members to make their views known to the agency.

But the FDA’s own economists might get in the way of even this modest attempt to better inform consumers. There is a fear that sugar regulation might get caught up in the FDA’s infatuation with an economic concept that tries to quantify how much an addictive product is worth to a consumer.

The fight over “lost pleasure”

The FDA could do to sugar regulation what it’s been doing to tobacco rules. In a regulation on cigarette labeling the FDA issued in 2011, the FDA factored in “lost pleasure” when estimating the costs and benefits of the regulation. Let’s say a pack of cigarettes costs $5. A smoker might be willing to pay $25 for cigarettes if he really needs a hit of nicotine. So economic theory might then consider the real value of those cigarettes to be $25—what a smoker is willing to pay, rather than what a pack costs in the marketplace.

Because the FDA placed such a high value on the “pleasure” of smoking, its estimates reduced the value of the health benefits—lives saved and health improved—by 50 percent.

Stanton Glantz, who has fought tobacco interests for decades, is very concerned about how this economic theory is being applied. “Lost pleasure” is not a new concept in economics, he says. But it makes sense when economists are trying to figure out what a rational consumer would do in the marketplace. But an addicted consumer is not rational. Neither is a minor, who may be tempted to experiment with a lot of addictive products.

So why should we worry about an obscure economic theory? Federal agencies justify their regulations in many cases by demonstrating that the benefits of regulation far outweigh the costs to industry. Industries are good at estimating—and often exaggerating—the monetary costs of a protective rule, while agencies discuss improving public health and saving lives, which are difficult to measure in dollars. How do you monetize the ability of children to play outdoors in unpolluted air? How much is a human life worth? And there’s basic fairness to consider—is it right that while one person or company profits from polluting, different people, workers or consumers, get sick from it?

This “lost pleasure” discount just makes it harder for science-informed regulation to prevail.

A difficult road

As it turns out, the FDA’s regulations on tobacco warning labels were thrown out in court for reasons unrelated to “lost pleasure.” But the FDA’s economists haven’t given up on the concept. Indeed, in a paper published last February in the journal Health Economics, two FDA economists and an economist from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) estimate that the “lost pleasure” discount could apply not only to tobacco but to other areas such as junk food, alcohol or gambling. While they were not claiming to represent their respective agencies in their paper, recent FDA proposed regulations, vetted by OMB, have applied the “lost pleasure” discount.

Note the inclusion of junk food. Does this make sense to you? Because I’m addicted to a sugar-laden juice, and sugar has demonstrated harmful impacts, labels letting me know how much extra sugar has been added to my juice would in some way make me unhappy as well as healthier. Just knowing about the extra sugar would deprive me of the pleasure of literally feeding my addiction.

Even John Graham, who headed OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs during the Bush Administration, and felt few qualms about undermining public protections for political reasons, thought applying the “lost pleasure” discount this way was unprecedented.

“This makes no sense in terms of science,” Glantz said last week at a meeting in Washington. Economists should not be “the only voice” when agencies are estimating the costs and benefits of regulation, particularly when it comes to products that can be addictive. Behavioral psychologists, pharmacologists, physicians, epidemiologists and biologists among others should weigh in. Protecting our families from harm, whether it comes from cigarettes or sugar-laden yogurt and juice, should not be trumped by invented theories of lost pleasure.

So where does that leave the FDA’s efforts to inform the public about sugar in a meaningful way? If FDA’s economists believe that the “lost pleasure” factor should also apply to sugar consumption, the agency’s job will be much harder. And the chances of getting crucial information about added sugar will be jeopardized.

The court refused to permit a company to be basically treated like a rape victim—to have its lawsuit against the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)—to be conducted entirely in secret. The company, called only “Company Doe” in its complaint, sued CPSC in October 2011 asking the court to block the agency from posting a complaint about one of its products on the agency’s public online consumer complaint database. The company said the report was inaccurate, but CPSC disagreed. This was the first legal challenge to the database.

This complaint was not trivial. It was a report that linked the death of an infant to a product made and sold by the company. Nevertheless, the court case went on in secret, and Company Doe won; the court ruled that the complaint could not be posted on the public database. Even the court’s decision was heavily redacted.

Consumers will finally know the identity of “Company Doe.”

Public Citizen, along with Consumer Federation of America and Consumers Union, sued to open the court proceedings and identify Company Doe.  On April 16, the public won. In a unanimous decision, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held that “the district court’s sealing order violates the public’s right of access under the First Amendment.” The court found that the district court “abused its discretion” in permitting Company Doe to “litigate pseudonymously.” The appellate court ordered the district court to “unseal the case in its entirety.” The public, finally, will get to know the identity of Company Doe.

The decision not only protects American families from being harmed by defective products, it also advances scientific integrity at the agency.

A major victory

To understand why the decision is so important, you have to know the story of how the consumer complaint database became part of Congress’s groundbreaking effort to strengthen the CPSC in 2008.

The law that created CPSC has a provision that prevents the agency from warning the public about potential harms from a consumer product until it has gone through a delicate dance with the product maker. CPSC has to negotiate even its press release announcing the harm. Needless to say, these negotiations take time, putting thousands of consumers at risk. Compounding the problem a decade or so ago was an agency that for years had been vulnerable to political and corporate interference and denied the resources to do its job. There have been tragic stories of toddlers who have died or been seriously injured because the warnings and the recalls happened months after the product caused harm.

Congress could have simply taken these restrictions out of the law, but politically there was too much pushback from corporate America. So it opted for the next best thing: CPSC would create a public consumer complaint database. The online database was part of the sweeping Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, which strengthened the agency, required higher standards for dangers to children, and gave the cash-starved agency more financial support.

The database would require specific information about the product—cribs, toys, lawnmowers, you name it. It would take complaints from consumers, first responders and health care providers. CPSC would give companies a heads up about these reports, and the opportunity to respond to them, and challenge their accuracy. And the database would state emphatically and clearly that this was a publicly accessible forum for listing consumer concerns, but not an official CPSC assessment of the product.

The concept of publicly posted consumer complaints is hardly revolutionary. Hotels, computers, hair stylists, restaurants, handymen—you name it, and likely you can find consumer reviews. Commerce has not stopped in its tracks because of these public forums.

But that didn’t stop companies from launching a massive lobbying effort to block or weaken the complaint database. They warned that trial lawyers would roam the database looking for potential litigants, that the agency would be swamped with tens of thousands of complaints, many of them bogus, and that consumers would not be smart enough to read the disclaimer that this was not CPSC’s official assessment.

Our Scientific Integrity program joined with consumer and public interest groups to support the CPSC reform law, and to protect the database. We had heard from former and current CPSC scientists who had told us that their efforts to warn the public through their studies of products, such as All-Terrain Vehicles, had often been blocked by senior officials at the agency. We knew that one way to help the science emerge was for the public to help the agency track emerging safety hazards. We knew that the delays that kept product dangers out of the public eye had caused deaths and serious harm, often to children.

Under the leadership of Inez Tenenbaum, who ran the agency from June 2009 until  November 30, 2013, CPSC responded to the complaints, carefully and thoroughly, and created its database.

This thing is working

All the warnings about chaos did not materialize. In June 2011, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) released an analysis of the database’s first three months of operation. The database received 1,624 reports of defective or harmful products, one-third of them about products that caused death or injury. Only 202—or less than 13 percent—of the reports were challenged by companies for accuracy. Of that number only 154 were deemed by the CPSC to be inaccurate. The agency either corrected information on the database or removed the posted complaint altogether. Currently, the database contains more than 18,000 reports.

And the database is providing information to the public. During its first quarter, it got 305,000 visits and visitors conducted 1.8 million product searches. It was helping the CPSC identify emerging hazards. It was offering companies the opportunity to respond to and correct complaints. In short, it was working.

But if Company Doe’s gambit had succeeded, it would have inspired many other companies to try the same thing. The time and resources CPSC would devote to fighting these lawsuits would be substantial. And if a company could keep its lawsuit secret, there was no downside to trying. Even if it lost, it could effectively delay news about product defects, for months, even years.

Company Doe may appeal the decision. But at least for now, it’s time to celebrate. Sometimes, the good guys do win.

But lately we’ve seen some signs of hope at the FDA, some indications that policies are improving.

Spotlighting the advisory panels

On the transparency front, the news is good and straightforward. For years,  UCS, along with members of the Patient, Consumer and Public Health Coalition, had urged that FDA advisory panel meetings be webcast so that more Americans could understand the crucial recommendations these panels make and how they reach the conclusions they arrive at about the efficacy and safety or new drugs and devices.

The agency has begun to do just that. However, the move to webcasting is not perfect. If an advisory panel meets at a location outside FDA headquarters, it won’t be webcast. And the agency warns that sometimes the broadcast doesn’t work properly. But after years of making the case for webcasts, the fact that the FDA is starting on this road is heartening. This means that scientists, clinicians and interested activists can listen to an advisory panel meeting, view the evidence presented and the deliberations, and keep an eye on how well the agency protects public health and safety.

To a certain extent, some of the changes will lead to greater accountability at the FDA.

FDA also is taking some positive steps when it comes to addressing the problem of conflict of interest on its advisory panels. The fact that it’s made a few promising moves is surprising, given the actions of Congress two years ago.

In 2012, Congress approved a law that sent a strong signal to the FDA that conflicts of interest weren’t that important. Congress undid a requirement it had approved in 2007 that required the agency to gradually reduce the number of conflicted experts who served on advisory panels. Although the rollback was modest—25 percent over five years—it was enough to rally the opposition of pharmaceutical interests. These interests pushed very hard for the 2012 law, which eliminated the reduction requirement.

But to its credit, the FDA appears to continue to care about conflicts of interest. Just last month, the agency quietly released a final guidance document explaining how the agency intended to disclose information about financial ties to drug and device makers its employees or members of its advisory panels may have that could cause a conflict of interest.

Federal law requires that when an expert on a federal advisory panel has a significant financial tie to a company that will be affected by the panel’s recommendation, the expert can’t participate or must receive a waiver from the agency. The waiver is given if the agency feels the benefit of the expertise outweighs the “potential for a conflict of interest.”

The FDA’s guidance makes clear that if a conflict is discovered, the agency will get pretty specific when it issues a waiver, which must be publicly disclosed. In the past, when waivers were granted, the reason for granting a waiver was pretty vague. But the FDA is telling its advisory panel members that it intends to give pretty detailed information in the waivers it issues. The waiver will name the expert receiving the waiver and explain the nature of the conflict. FDA states that it will disclose “the type, nature and magnitude of any waived financial interests.”

In addition, a panelist has to understand the FDA’s disclosure policies and agree to them before accepting a position on an advisory panel. And the template the FDA has developed for reporting conflicts is pretty specific. Conflicts would cover a panelist’s investments or employment or work as a consultant or advisor, the holder of a patent, or work as an expert witness. Does the panelist work for someone with a relevant financial interest or have a business partner with ties to that interest? Is the panelist discussing a job with an affected interest? Does the panelist’s immediate family have such financial ties?

Because panelists have to sign a form agreeing to this public disclosure before accepting a slot on an advisory committee, they will be more focused on the longstanding requirement in federal law that they report conflicts. The FDA is not breaking new ground, but it is helping to reinforce the notion that conflicts matter.

While a good first step, the FDA needs to continue to ensure that Americans are safe from approved drugs and devices. This includes tackling conflict of interest in advisory panels head on.

The bigger picture

Of course, this doesn’t address the other big problems with FDA and advisory panels. The agency often has failed to find conflicts, or has decided that the conflicts were not serious enough to merit a waiver. Inadequate vetting or treating conflicts too lightly has sometimes called into question FDA advisory panel recommendations.

When they met to consider the controversial contraceptive drug, Yaz, for example, the advisory panel voted that the drug’s benefits outweighed its risks. But at least four members of the panel had substantial financial ties to its maker, Bayer. The panel made that decision despite reports of the increased risk of blood clots in those who took the contraceptive.  (The FDA in 2012 beefed up warning label requirements for the contraceptive.)

While the guidance doesn’t address this problem head-on, it opens the door for the public to help uncover and police such conflicts.

Before a panel meets, FDA now will publicly post a roster of all panel members expected to attend a meeting, along with briefing materials.  This advance “heads up” will make it easier for activists to scan the list of panelists and to identify experts with conflicts.  Once notified, the FDA will be under pressure to either issue a waiver to the conflicted expert, or ask the expert not to participate.

Change is never easy, particularly in this political environment.  When an agency makes some changes for the better, we should take notice.

That said, we must not forget in all our justifiable disappointment that the farm bill contained a ticking bomb that UCS, with the help of thousands of our members and supporters and our coalition colleagues, was able to defuse.

Our efforts are not getting the attention of the media. But if we had not acted, it would have been easy for this time bomb to have detonated, leaving the science enterprise at our federal agencies in shambles.

The disaster we averted? Section 12307 of the House-passed farm bill, the erroneously named “sound science” provision. I’ve written about this poison pill before, when it was a legislative proposal advanced by Rep. Stephen Fincher. But then, the proposal was secretly inserted into the House-passed farm bill and became a real threat.

Proposals that have never come under reasonable consideration should not even be a part of the conversation in must-pass bills. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/ Davempowers

In a nutshell, the proposal would have made it nearly impossible for all agencies to protect public health and safety and the environment. It would have imposed new procedural hoops for agency policies, including not only rules, but also guidance documents, labeling requirements and risk assessments. And it would have made it far easier for wealthy special interests to have challenged science-based policies in court, and to win.

Why was such a bad idea a threat? Because House and Senate negotiators were trying desperately to find compromise between two drastically different approaches to farm policy. We were told repeatedly by Senate staff that this provision—whether it stayed in the final farm bill or was cut—would be decided by the Members, not their staffs. That sent the message to us that this provision remained on the table and despite the very good intentions of many farm bill leaders, we couldn’t count on it going away.

Which is why UCS sprang into action, working with many like-minded coalition partners, and also engaging our thousands of members and supporters.

Taking action, making a difference

Our outreach staff alerted our UCS activists and asked them to contact farm bill negotiators, and more than 4,500 of you responded. Members of Congress offered their help. Sen. Ed Markey (MA) circulated a “Dear Colleague” letter to farm bill conferees opposing the provision. Sen. Markey’s staff,  along with Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s (CT) staff, were both tireless and professional in their efforts to oppose the provision. It was a great boon that Sen. Tom Harkin (IA) was a farm bill conferee and could exert his considerable influence to ensure that the bill did not harm science.  Sen. Debbie Stabenow (MI), as chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, heard our concerns.

I’m happy to say that the sound science provision never made it into the final bill. We were on pins and needles until we finally saw the text of the conference agreement.

We hope that in the future, in a better political and economic climate, we’ll be able to achieve more positive proactive victories. And keeping bad things from happening may not grab the headlines. But this is a victory we all should celebrate.