Ever since the House Science Committee was taken over by the likes of Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, it has been using its powers to harass scientists, protect the oil and gas industry from climate change culpability, and generally attack the reasons we are supposed to have a House Science Committee in the first place. Now Smith and Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs—best known for being booed offstage by his constituents for denying climate change science—have decided to go after a government scientist for … practicing science. Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, wrote an editorial called “Regulating toxic chemicals for public and environmental health” last month. In it she and co-author Liza Gross give a history of regulations in the United States since President Gerald Ford signed the United States Toxic Substances Control Act in the fall of 1976.
In the decades since Ford promised a robust policy to regulate potentially hazardous chemicals, evidence has emerged that chemicals in widespread use can cause cancer and other chronic diseases, damage reproductive systems, and harm developing brains at low levels of exposure once believed to be harmless. Such exposures pose unique risks to children at critical windows of development—risks that existing regulations fail to consider. To address these issues, PLOS Biology is publishing a special collection of seven articles, Challenges in Environmental Health: Closing the Gap between Evidence and Regulations, that focus on US chemical policy [1].
In commissioning the collection, we aimed to reveal barriers to developing health-protective policies not only when the scientific evidence of harm is clear but also when it is uncertain. We sought to explore the technical challenges involved in determining how the hundreds of chemicals we carry in our bodies affect health. These challenges include ascertaining exposures and impacts of short-lived compounds; identifying chemicals that pose unique risks to the developing fetus; and assessing the risk of chemicals that cause proportionately more harm at the lowest levels of exposure in violation of longstanding toxicology principles. We asked authors to consider these issues within their field of expertise and to suggest ways to bridge the gap between evidence and policy.
Birnbaum’s conclusions are that the U.S. is not keeping pace with scientific advancement, leaving potentially hazardous chemicals unregulated. Well, Reps. Lamar Smith and Andy Biggs want to investigate! Not the science. No, that would be doing their jobs. Instead, they want to investigate director Birnbaum for being an unpaid lobbyist for Big Environmentalism.
A toxicologist who has headed NIEHS and the National Toxicology Program since 2009, Birnbaum received no funding for writing the editorial, as she notes in the piece, nor does she recommend any specific policy, piece of legislation, or action in it beyond being engaged citizens.
Nevertheless, Biggs and Smith, who have both received money from Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil, and other companies that have a financial interest in limiting research on the environmental effects of chemicals, noted that their “committee suspects this activity may be a violation of the anti-lobbying act.” The two Republican members of Congress also called on the DHHS Inspector General to analyze their concerns so that he might “launch a full-scale review of the situation.”
As The Intercept points out, Reps. Smith and Biggs aren’t the first set of Republicans to go after Birnbaum for being all into science and evidence and facts and protecting people.
This isn’t the first time the House Science Committee has gone after Birnbaum for bringing attention to environmental science that raises the need for increased regulation. In 2013, then-committee Chairs Larry Bucshon and Paul Broun, expressed outrage about a 2012 article, in which she described the harms of endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
The good news is that Rep. Smith has announced his retirement. The bad news is that Smith hasn’t yet stopped working to destroy science.