The Trump administration’s choices of Scott Pruitt to head up the EPA along with Jeff Sessions as attorney general continue to be two of the worst decisions ever made by one human being. But the Guardian reports today that Trump’s nominee for EPA chemical safety chief, Michael Dourson, is a straight-up chemical company shill.
Michael Dourson, the nominee, founded a consultation group in 1995, the Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment, a private evaluation non-profit organization that tests chemicals and produces reports on which chemicals are hazardous in what quantities.
Through the consultancy he accepted payments for criticizing studies that raised concerns about the safety of his clients’ products, according to a review of financial records and his published work by the Associated Press.
His job now is to protect people from companies’ chemicals and pollutants. [Almost eye-rolled out of my chair]. As Inside Climate News explains, Dourson was once in the EPA but left to make some of that poison money—which is what he’s been doing for the better part of two decades now.
Dourson's organization filled a gap left by the EPA, which has evaluated the safety of only 558 of 84,000 chemicals on the market today. The EPA's sluggishness has created major business opportunities for firms like TERA because few state agencies have the resources to conduct their own risk-assessment studies, which are time-consuming and complex.
Dourson, a toxicologist who spent 15 years with the EPA, describes TERA as an independent firm that aims to protect public health by bringing together scientists from government, academia and industry. Through TERA, he has created a self-sustaining network of supporters in which clients, regulators and peer-reviewers often overlap. The firm's reach has helped make Dourson an influential figure in the field of risk assessment—a niche discipline that is used to determine how much of a particular chemical is acceptable in the environment. The results of these studies shape thousands of public health decisions around the country, including the setting of drinking water standards and air pollution guidelines.
That doesn’t sound so bad.
But an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and InsideClimate News shows the firm has close ties to chemical manufacturers, tobacco companies and other industry interests. More than 50 percent of the peer-review panels TERA has organized since 1995 were for studies funded by industry groups. TERA also runs a risk-assessment database that receives financial and in-kind support from many companies and government agencies. Some of those groups have also paid TERA to peer-review studies they hope will be included in the database.
Classic. The Environmental Defense Fund has this to say about Dourson:
“Dr. Dourson’s nomination comes at a critical time for the EPA toxics office, which is charged with implementing last year’s Lautenberg Act, which overhauled the ineffectual Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and passed with broad bipartisan support. That legislation was able to advance even in a highly partisan Congress because all stakeholders saw reform as needed to restore public and market confidence in our broken chemical safety system. The law struck a delicate balance between public and private interests.
“Already, however, that balance has been upset when EPA recently finalized “framework rules” implementing the new law that skewed heavily in the chemical industry’s favor. If his track record is any indication, Dr. Dourson’s nomination threatens to move us further away from health-protective implementation of the new TSCA.”
And as professor Sheldon Frimsky, whose focus is ethics in science and medicine, tells the Guardian that—like everything else in this administration—the only transparent thing is how bad it all stinks.
“It is not even subtle,” said Krimsky, who reviewed Dourson’s recent published work. “He has chosen to be the voice of the chemical industry. His role as a scientist is simply the role of an industry-hired lawyer – only to give the best case for their client.”
You know what makes me “economically anxious?” Being poisoned.