Surprisingly, the Washington Post runs
this somewhat nuanced article on A1 today.
'Data Quality' Law Is Nemesis Of Regulation
The wording -- two sentences of 32 short lines -- directed the OMB to issue guidelines "ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information . . . disseminated by Federal agencies."
And what that means is that we can just say 99% certainty isn't good enough, so we shouldn't ban things like DDT or chemicals that turn frogs into hermaphrodites...
As with much this GOP administration and Congress has done, this was accomplished in secret, basically in the middle of the night. As the lobbyist who wrote the bill says:
"We sandwiched this in between Jerry Ford's library and something else," Tozzi said. "Was it something that did not have hearings? Yes. Is it something that keeps me awake at night? No. Is it something that I would do again, exactly? Yes, you bet your ass I would. I would not even think about it, okay? Sometimes you get the monkey, and sometimes the monkey gets you."
Why this is so bad is emphasized in the article by the failure to ban atrazine, as has been done in Europe. Atrazine is a pesticide that gets sprayed on corn - 80 million pounds of it gets sprayed in the U.S. each year, and it has problems, some more serious than just emasculating frogs.
The chemical clearly causes cancer in rats, and male workers in Syngenta's production facility in Louisiana have experienced much higher rates of prostate cancer than other men statewide. But studies supported by Syngenta recently convinced the EPA that the mechanism by which atrazine causes cancer in rats probably does not occur in people. (The company said the only reason for the high rate of prostate cancer in its workers is that it has an aggressive screening program that finds cases that would otherwise go undetected.)
This is my favorite kind of GOP logic. Admit the basic premise which hurts your cause, but then justify it with something so nonsensical that the media simply repeats your justification and it appears as if there is an honest dispute.
Of course, I won't repost the entire article, but one last piece that is another charming example of how this procedure works. The whole nutshell is that enough doubt has to be created around a legitimate report so that the legitimate report then seems questionable, and voila, whatever its conclusion, that conclusion is rendered inoperable, and no regulation occurs.
David Michaels, a professor of occupational and environmental health at George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, said even a good study will appear "not reproducible" if enough bad studies are thrown into the mix.
"I call this 'manufacturing uncertainty,' and there is a whole industry to do this," said Michaels, who was the Energy Department's assistant secretary for environment, safety and health under Clinton. "They reanalyze the data to make [previously firm] conclusions disappear -- poof. Then they say one study says yes and the other says no, so we're nowhere."
Well, I suppose creating jobs "manufacturing uncertainty" is somehow part of Bush's master plan - certainly these jobs as are much manufacturing as jobs at McDonald's.