I'm a Weasel

I’m trying to get other federal officials to blog. One official fretted to me about being called names. They noted that another blogger had called me a ‘weasel.’ Big deal. Every senior EPA appointee since 1970 has taken all kinds of criticism from all corners. It’s understandable. EPA’s work touches deeply held convictions regarding everything from property rights to the morality of contaminating nature.

Some people organize these criticisms into ‘narratives.’ Narratives are simple stories that people who don’t necessarily like dealing with the complexities of life may swallow. Historically, EPA narratives spin off of two different themes. We are either:

• an agency of wild-eyed zealots that regulate at the drop of a hat and persecute honest people, businesses, and localities without regard to their rights or ultimate economic ruin; or
• an ineffective stymied bureaucracy, captured by corporations, that spends a lot of time doing little to protect human health and the environment.

What people outside of Washington DC may not appreciate is there are professionals whose full-time job is to nurture and perpetuate these narratives in order to serve their own agendas. They take anything EPA does, or doesn’t do, or was rumored to have done, and try and use it to support their narrative. If it fits, or they can somehow twist it to fit, they slot it in. If it contradicts their narrative, they ignore it.

These narratives are always out there, but they blossom in big election years. The number and outlandishness of the half truths, innuendo, and personal attacks go up several notches. I see the early stirrings already. The ‘narrative’ I use when I really want to know what EPA is doing is our Quarterly Management Report. It doesn’t cover everything going on, but it’s a good start. And it’s based on facts.

Perhaps the most important thing, amidst the coming sturm and angst, senior EPA managers can’t get distracted. We must continue to: make sure dangerous chemicals are kept off the shelves; clean up contaminated yards; prevent raw sewage from going in our waters; continue our research on the affects of climate change; reduce the toxicity of solid waste; inspect animal feedlots; remove mercury switches from cars; help people conserve energy; and on and on.

As for the folks preparing to prop up their warped views of EPA this year, may I, in futility, suggest taking a cue from Jean Conder Soule:

Never tease a weasel
Not even once or twice
The weasel will not like it
And teasing isn't nice.

Comments

[Larry Gross]

I was curious if you had some thoughts on this:

Sewage-Based Fertilizer Safety Doubted

By JOHN HEILPRIN and KEVIN S. VINEYS
The Associated Press
Thursday, March 6, 2008; 5:10 PM

AUGUSTA, Ga. -- It was a farm idea with a big payoff and supposedly no downside: ridding lakes and rivers of raw sewage and industrial pollution by converting it all into a free, nutrient-rich fertilizer. Then last week, a federal judge ordered the Agriculture Department to compensate a farmer whose land was poisoned by sludge from the waste treatment plant here. His cows had died by the hundreds.

The Associated Press also has learned that some of the same contaminants showed up in milk that regulators allowed a neighboring dairy farmer to market, even after some officials said they were warned about it.

In one case, according to test results provided to the AP, the level of thallium _ an element once used as rat poison _ found in the milk was 120 times the concentration allowed in drinking water by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The contaminated milk and the recent ruling by U.S. District Judge Anthony Alaimo raise new doubts about a 30-year government policy that encourages farmers to spread millions of tons of sewage sludge over thousands of acres each year as an alternative to commercial fertilizers.

The program is still in effect.

Alaimo ordered the government to compensate dairy farmer Andy McElmurray because 1,730 acres he wanted to plant in corn and cotton to feed his herd was poisoned. The sludge contained levels of arsenic, toxic heavy metals and PCBs two to 2,500 times federal health standards.

Also, data endorsed by Agriculture and EPA officials about toxic heavy metals found in the free sludge provided by Augusta's sewage treatment plant was "unreliable, incomplete, and in some cases, fudged," Alaimo wrote.

EPA-commissioned research by the University of Georgia based on the Augusta data was included in a National Academy of Sciences report and served as a linchpin for the government's assertion that sludge didn't pose a health risk.

In his 45-page ruling, Alaimo said that along with using the questionable data, "senior EPA officials took extraordinary steps to quash scientific dissent, and any questioning of EPA's biosolids program."

Benjamin H. Grumbles, EPA's assistant administrator for water programs, said Thursday that the judge's order underscored the significance of what he called strong national standards on sludge rather than undercutting the giveaway program.

"This unfortunate instance of poor recordkeeping and biosolids sampling techniques on the part of one plant reiterates the importance of our national biosolids program," Grumbles said in a written response to AP questions about the ruling.

About 7 million tons of biosolids _ the term that waste producers came up with for sludge in 1991 _ are produced each year as a byproduct from 1,650 waste water treatment plants around the nation.

Slightly more than half is used on land as fertilizer; the rest is incinerated or burned in landfills. Giving it away to farmers is cheaper than burning or burying it, and the government's policy has been to encourage the former.

Alaimo's decision was a bittersweet victory for McElmurray, whose silos and dairy barns sit mostly empty since his herd was wiped out. He contends the cows were done in by grazing on sludge-treated hay for more than a decade, beginning in 1979.

Interviewed before the ruling, McElmurray crossed his arms, scowling at the empty pastures and idle equipment where his prize-winning herds once grazed here in eastern Georgia. "This farm never would have looked like this if we hadn't used the city's sludge," he said angrily.

The city of Augusta recently settled a lawsuit with him over the dead cows for $1.5 million. Another nearby dairy farmer, Bill Boyce, won a $550,000 court judgment against the city on his claim that sludge was responsible for the deaths of more than 300 of his cows.

The deaths of McElmurray's and Boyce's cows in the 1990s and their suits against Augusta raised a red flag with officials at EPA, which since 1978 had been promoting the use of sludge as a fertilizer.

In 1999, the agency awarded a $12,274 grant to the University of Georgia to study the problem. That research would result in a study published in 2003 in the Journal of Environmental Quality finding that the city's sludge was safe and that EPA's regulations were working.

Cities' sewage and industrial pollution had spewed untreated into lakes, rivers and oceans until 1972, when Congress passed the landmark Clean Water Act.

Back then, cleaning up waterways was the first target of the newly created EPA. The agency oversaw a multibillion-dollar grant program that Congress set up to help cities and counties build wastewater treatment plants that would filter out pollutants.

Alaimo, citing data from an environmental engineer hired by McElmurray, found that the Augusta plant was sending out hundreds of truckloads of sludge daily with dangerously high levels of cadmium, molybdenum and chlordane.

The engineer, William Hall of Atlanta, had been a project manager at seven Superfund cleanup sites and had extensive experience with toxic chemicals and heavy metals. His tests found polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs in the Augusta sludge at levels 2,500 times higher than the EPA standard, thallium levels 25 times the legal limit, and arsenic levels twice the government's health standard.

William Miller, a University of Georgia soil scientist who co-authored the 2003 study commissioned by EPA, stands by the conclusions it drew on how much sludge had been applied to McElmurray's and Boyce's land and the composition of it.

But in a draft of the paper obtained by The Associated Press, he wrote a note by hand saying the authors should "fess up" that they didn't know those things.

"Now, we didn't really know exactly how much sludge and we didn't know the quality of sludge," Miller told the AP in an interview. Despite the discrepancies, he maintained the study was valid. "It does not include fake data," he said.

Boyce told the AP that in January 1999 he informed Georgia dairy regulators and EPA that tests he had ordered on the milk from his cows had come back showing high levels of thallium, molybdenum and cadmium.

A top state official alerted the Food and Drug Administration, but Boyce said no one ever told him to stop selling his milk or mentioned a possible threat to public health.

"We were a little startled," Boyce recalled. "They concluded that our permit was good, and we could continue to sell milk. So we did."

EPA lists thallium as a toxic heavy metal that can cause gastrointestinal irritation and nerve damage, but the agency has no standard on the metal's presence in milk. Neither does the Agriculture Department, even though it regards thallium as one of the most dangerous agents of potential bioterrorism against the nation's food supply.

State and EPA officials followed up by testing Boyce's milk, but he said they wouldn't share all their results with him or McElmurray. There is no evidence that those officials took any further action. Boyce said he decided finally to reveal the milk contamination to the AP to illuminate a broader issue.

"The real problem was the state and federal regulatory agencies did not do their jobs," he said, adding that EPA and Augusta officials "tried to say we were just a disease-infested herd. Well, that's just a bunch of bullhockey."

Charles Murphy, then head of Georgia's dairy program, said he notified FDA's Administration's office in Atlanta of Boyce's contaminated samples. "I know I talked to them some, shared some of that information with them," he recalled. "I don't think they sent anybody out."

Murphy said he was persuaded by evidence provided to him by Boyce and McElmurray to seek broader state testing of dairy cows, but there wasn't enough money.

FDA officials in Atlanta and Washington said they had no record of Murphy's account.

But over the Super Bowl weekend in 1999, two senior EPA officials, Robert Bastian and Bob Brobst, huddled with the two dairy farmers and their lawyer, Ed Hallman, to talk about sludge.

"They showed us some data," Bastian recalled. "I don't ever remember seeing any milk data."

Boyce and McElmurray insist they shared all of their data with the two EPA officials, including separate tests they ran on milk pulled from store shelves in Charleston, S.C. That milk, which came from other farms in the Southeast, suggested more widespread contamination, they said. It had heavy metals similar to those found in Boyce's milk.

There are no records that anyone became ill because of milk tainted with heavy metals or other contaminants that could have come from sludge.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/06/AR2008030602508.html

the article make it sound like there was a willful ignorance of clear evidence...

We have milk being sold that is contaminated and the EPA and the Dept of Ag - BOTH know it is contaminated and don't act.

When I read something like this - I shake my head because the folks who are supposed to be protecting the public - at least according to this article - are not doing that.

[John Walke]

As a former EPA employee and current, regular critic of the agency under this administration, I agree there is truth in what you say about the existence of these two different narratives. But there is also truth in the narratives themselves, with the EPA-capture narrative especially having so much staying power in the media and public understanding for the past eight years because of EPA’s own actions.

Your facile ad hominem complaint that these narratives are perpetuated by the self-serving agendas of professionals (I suspect you would include my organization, NRDC, in this indictment) overlooks that there must be continual facts to animate and sustain the narratives; one need look no farther to perpetuate the EPA-capture narrative than the weekly headlines of industry-biased EPA rules being overturned in courts; polluter friendly agency actions prompting Congressional subpoenas and hearings and outraged editorials; and leaked documents and internal emails revealing career EPA employees suffering under politicized decisonmaking.

There is a third prevalent narrative you failed to describe – that fostered by EPA (political) management – in which EPA is:

· an agency that will be sued by all sides no matter what it does, so why not pick the winners and losers based upon the incumbent administration’s politics; an agency for which all critique is considered ad hominem, political and misdirected; an agency imbued with endless discretion for which Congressional enactments are of passing interest but not controlling over an administration’s policy and political preferences; and an agency for which the exercise of impenetrable “judgment” serves as an excuse and (non)response for all manner of harmful and unlawful action.

Here is the narrative that really matters in evaluating EPA's actions: how well is the agency implementing and enforcing the statutes passed by Congress? At bottom that is the agency's job. So of course EPA does many good things, including the items you list. That is as it should be. But EPA under this administration has also undertaken numerous deregulatory actions that violate federal law; EPA wastes resources on political initiatives that Congress has not authorized, such as this administration's predilection for all things voluntary; and the agency routinely misses numerous statutory deadlines, exacerbating the injuries causes by resources devoted to illegal deregulation and feckless voluntary measures.

So your baseline for evaluating the job that this EPA is doing is flawed. Rather than a list of some of the good things that EPA is doing, as your posting and the Quarterly Management Report highlight, the proper inquiry should proceed from the baseline of whether EPA is rightfully carrying out and enforcing federal environmental and public health laws adopted by Congress. Then one could evaluate whether EPA is meeting those responsibilities in especially laudable ways, for example by providing greater public health protections at lower costs.

But this administration has charted a different course for EPA, preferring to accommodate industry's wishes over meeting the agency's baseline legal responsibilities -- thereby delaying, ignoring or frustrating public health and environmental protections, time and time again. And those aren't weasel words -- just the facts.

[Marcus]

John, thanks for your comment. There is much in it I don't agree with but I did want to correct one particular item. The Quarterly Management Report is not a 'list of good things EPA is doing.' The vast majority of the measures in the report (e.g., reviewing pesticides, approving TMDLs, cleaning up waste sites, redesignating non-attainment areas) line right up with activities we need to do to execute the laws of the land. While I hope the quality of the measures gets better over time, I would not expect them to be altered based on changes in policies or politics. I think this is one of the report's greatest strengths.

[Larry Gross]

Well..I think I got the answer to just how serious this blog is about dealing with substantive issues of concern to the public.

I'm not sure what the make of the claim that the respondent is an ex EPA guy now working for NRDC either...

here's the NRDC:

This Just In: Sludge May Be Hazardous to Your Health

WASHINGTON (July 3, 2002) -- The government is using outdated science in assessing the health risk of sewage sludge used as fertilizer. According to a new report by the National Research Council, the standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1993 on the use of "biosolids" for treating soil are based on an unreliable survey identifying hazardous chemicals in sewage sludge from wastewater treatment plants. The NRC panel concluded that the agency needs to do more scientific study on the risks to people from exposure to chemicals and disease-causing pathogens in sludge used as fertilizer.

The panel's report underscores that current federal regulations on applying sludge do not protect public health, according to NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council). Earlier this year, EPA and NRDC reached a legal settlement that requires the agency to develop a plan to address NRC's recommendations.

note the date

http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/020703.asp

and the purpose of this blog is ... ???

[Marcus]

Larry, I personally started this blog to describe what EPA is doing to improve its operations and make what EPA does more open to the public. Commenters raise lots of specific substantive issues, such as the ongoing controversy regarding sewage sludge. I'm unlikely to comment on these issues unless I know a lot about the specifics, although I hope other people will.

[Ali]

Marcus,
You talked about convincing other federal official to begin writing blogs. Is this just within the EPA or other agencies as well? I could imagine this becoming very popular while still maintaining a professional appeal. I think you should look at the model used by Harvard http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/home/

[Marcus]

Ali, I think there should be more blogs across the federal government and at EPA. I was happy to see the US Army Corps of Engineers started a public blog last month and I think we may have a second, although temporary, blog at EPA run through part of April.