Suppression of Environmental Science by the Bush Administration

The House Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the Committee on Science and Technology has released the results of their investigation into the suppression of Environmental Science by the Bush administration's Office of Management and Budget. It's not good news.

"By the end of the Bush Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) process was broken. What began two decades ago as an initiative at EPA to establish a reliable database on what science said about the risks of particular chemicals devolved by the end of the Bush Administration into a tortured round of interagency bickering, mediated and even stimulated by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). As a result of the IRIS process breaking down, public health offices across the country and around the world, as well as concerned citizens, were left without the reliable, expanding, up-to-date database of chemical risks that they had come to rely upon."

Read the report here.[PDF]