Matters of Political Inconvenience: Scientists in the Public Service
Simona Perry | Interview with Jeff Ruch, PEER
t r u t h o u t
Wednesday 07 May 2008
An interview with Jeff Ruch, executive
director of PEER, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
As I sat down last week to speak with Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER
since 1997, the news had not yet hit the presses that the administrator of the
Environmental Protection Agency's Region 5, Mary Gade, had resigned over disagreements
with other Bush political appointees in her efforts to enforce clean-up of a
dioxin contaminated Dow Chemical Company site in Midland, Michigan.
The full story behind Gade's resignation has not yet been uncovered, but from
documents obtained by The Chicago Tribune all indications are that in the course
of doing her job - upholding environmental clean-up laws and protecting human
health - she had become a problem for Dow and therefore a problem for politicians
in Washington, DC. In the past seven years, reports and news stories reveal
political manipulation of scientific evidence in cases when the science suggests
more stringent environmental laws and regulations may be necessary to protect
human health or natural resources. Here's a sampling of titles and headlines
from just the past month: "EPA Opens Chemical Risk Assessment to Corporate
Lobbying", "Systematic
Interference with Science at Interior Department Exposed",
"US Plan to Protect Right Whale From Shipping Blocked by Cheney",
"Ozone Rules Weakened at Bush's Behest".
For 15 years, the non-profit PEER has been working on behalf of employees from
federal, state, and local governments in cases of whistleblower retaliation,
scientific fraud, and political malfeasance. Jeff Ruch explained to me that
the politically charged workplace that government scientists are currently in
is not new with the George W. Bush administration. However, Jeff pointed out
during our conversation, what PEER has seen in the past seven years under Bush
is an increase in the career level of federal employees who are calling for
help. In the past, the typical request for assistance would come from a National
Park biologist, today they field calls from National Park superintendents.
During the course of our interview, Jeff chronicled the founding of PEER, from
its critical (and highly personal) mission of "talking down jumpers,"
to the pivotal cases of scientific fraud and government retaliation against
employees who were just trying to do the job they were hired to do. He also
talked about the progress he's seen, particularly in raising attention within
the political culture of agencies and in more positive public attitudes towards
whistleblowers. If you are concerned about the "political inconvenience"
of public health and environmental issues facing the United States today and
in the future, this interview should interest you. It offers a glimpse into
the political battles being waged on a daily basis by the men and women who
serve the United States in laboratories and cubicles across the country, armed
only with science, professional integrity and a sense of duty to serve their
fellow citizens.
Wednesday 30 April 2008, Washington, DC
Simona Perry: Prior to PEER, you worked with the Government
Accountability Project, or GAP. Touted as giving
"voice to truth-tellers," GAP is the nation's leading whistleblower
organization, "working to promote government and corporate accountability
by advancing occupational free speech, defending whistleblowers, and empowering
citizen activists." So, how did your experiences at GAP pave the way for
the work that PEER does today?
Jeff Ruch: When I worked with GAP, I felt like I was in
a legal M.A.S.H. unit because you get these disconnected calls from all over
- public, private sector, you name it. And I felt like I was practicing emergency
room law. One of the groups we started working with was a Forest Service employee
organization, which still exists as the Forest Service Employees for Environmental
Ethics, and I was struck that working through the organization you had the opportunity
to practice preventive law and address underlying problems without having people
be in the career emergency room. They ended up being one of the groups that
I took over as a lawyer at GAP and that all led to a discussion of how to take
employee activism beyond the Forest Service, and there was a conference held
and the decision was made to start an umbrella organization, which became PEER.
With PEER, the idea was to be a service organization so that employees could
work on environmental issues when they felt they couldn't do that same work
in their day jobs. Sometimes, it's dealing with obstructions; sometimes, it's
a limited mission or organizational myopia that's not addressing problems. So,
that's how we sort of grew up.
The model that we've had for the last decade or so is as a service organization
in the sense that our work is entirely driven by intakes. In a way, it's sort
of anti-strategic, but we think that's our strategic niche. Nobody else represents
the employees, and so they determine what it is that we do and how we do it.
For that reason, a lot of times people come to us from environmental organizations.
In some cases, employees get burned for working with environmental groups. In
addition, a lot of groups - Sierra Club, Environmental Defense - working with
agency insiders often reach a point in a relationship with an inside source
where there's a "smoking gun" document, and the insider says, "well,
if I give this to you, what happens to me?" That's not the Sierra Club's
mission, and so they bring them to us.
For example, we're working with a network of current and former scientists
in the Minerals Management Service on the Arctic outer continental shelf. They
were brought to us by the environmental groups because they correctly perceived
that it was not a good idea for groups that were in litigation against the government
to be in direct contact with the scientists. They needed a middle man and somebody
to represent the scientists. That's our job and we're brought in to play that
role.
Helping these scientists and other specialists constructively ventilate their
frustrations hopefully reduces alcoholism and spousal abuse. Otherwise, they
end up in a spin cycle - they're so frustrated about issues that not only they
care about, but in some instances that they dedicated their whole career to.
When they see their work undone, or perverted, it really eats at them.
From our point of view, if you sort of step back and look at it, there are
about a quarter of a million environmental specialists who work at all levels
of government, but the vast majority of them feel that they are not able to
fully render public service. So, if we can be a vehicle by which they can more
effectively participate in the environmental movement then we are occupying
an important role. For the most part our expertise is redeploying their expertise,
I mean, in the same way that we're not strategic, we're also without content,
in that we don't typically take positions on issues. Nobody cares what we think;
we're an obscure acronym. They only care about it because these are the public's
own experts that are coming forward and they're using our stationery to put
that information in the public domain.
SP: What do you think makes PEER different from other whistleblower
or government watchdog organizations like GAP?
JR: First of all, I think one of the very best things we
do - and we often do it on a daily basis - is that we talk people out of blowing
the whistle. A lot of times we're contacted by people because they are upset
and want to tell the world about a permit that's been improperly granted or
an enforcement action that's been obstructed. If they went public with it they
would certainly blow the whistle, but in many cases their career would be effectively
over. Also, it's not entirely clear that by them going public that they would
fix the thing that they were upset about, let alone the underlying dynamic that
was causing the permit or the enforcement action.
So, a lot of times we're, I call it, "talking down jumpers." We're
talking them off the ledge, to consider other ways to deliver the message without
the messenger. And, while we do whistleblower work - sometimes it's absolutely
necessary because the person has already been hit by the car - to us it's the
least efficient way to address the problems because the whistleblower case is
basically about labor law and it turns on whether or not you were wrongfully
fired or transferred or what not. So, if you win, you win restoration to an
even more hostile bureaucracy, but the underlying dysfunction that caused you
to take the career risk to begin with is beyond the jurisdiction of the court
hearing the whistleblowing matter. So, if you're trying to address the underlying
problem, that's generally not the way to do it.
In the book "The Art of Anonymous Activism,"
which we published in cooperation with GAP and the Project on Government Oversight, we got GAP to agree to it, which was surprising. GAP views
whistleblowing as noble. And while it often is noble, it's not universally noble.
In essence, it is a guide on how not to be a whistleblower. With little chapters
like "Reporters Are Not Your Friends." Not that they are enemies,
but that they just have a different interest.
The second point is that the overwhelming majority of people that contact us
are not whistleblowers in the normal sense in that they're usually in trouble
because they're doing their job. And so, the distinction between a whistleblower
and somebody doing work that's become institutionally inconvenient is increasingly
blurred. A lot of times they're doing the same job they've been doing for 20
years. So, a classic example I use is a Forest Service biologist who did work
on the goshawk, which is an indicator species like the spotted owl. His work
was considered and submitted to peer reviewed journals, he was featured at conferences
and things like that, but when his public work was used by an environmental
group to sue the Forest Service to argue that for reasons of protecting the
goshawk you needed to cut less timber, he suddenly - through no action of his
own - went from golden boy to public enemy number one. The agency had to impeach
the science and, also, by extension the scientist. His career just turned into
a nightmare, and he hadn't done anything.
In some variation, that's a lot of what's going on. We see political intervention
in science only when it is politically important to do so, so that if the science
was irrelevant, and it was not bothering political contributors, then the White
House wouldn't intervene. They only intervene when somebody calls them up and
says, "this bothers me and I'm one of your supporters." And they'll
say, "we'll get right on it," and they get right on it.
SP: PEER characterizes its constituency as "one of
the most crucial and viable untapped resources in the conservation movement."
Could you explain why you think that's the case? What makes these employees
so crucial and why do they remain untapped?
JR: They are the public's experts and they are the eyewitnesses.
So, in many instances they are the ones who are most knowledgeable about the
issues and the implications of actions. They are underutilized because they
are subjected to political screens. They are not allowed to openly discuss findings.
One of the big issues right now is whether or not scientists are able to speak.
And, for the most part, the prevailing law is no, they can't. They cannot discuss
facts without approval.
Public agencies, not just the Bush administration, but Democratic and Republican
administrations - we see it an awful lot at the state agency level - they insist
that the government speak with one voice. Well, if the question is one of science,
there isn't necessarily one voice. The whole point of science is there should
be debate. And so, people are literally scared to death and don't know what
to do.
One of the things I find most interesting about the surveys that we've done
in science-based agencies isn't the amount of intervention (though that's the
part we feature in the press releases); the part that I find most interesting
is the high level of uncertainty as to what they think they're allowed to say,
either inside the government or outside the government. We have tons of stories
of scientists that get in trouble in ways that they never would have imagined
for the smallest bits of candor.
And when you're marked, it's you against the agency and that's a bad place
to be in. When people are in that situation for the right reasons, it's our
job to basically empty our treasury and be there for them. But we would far
prefer to work with them so that they are never in that situation, because that's
not a pleasant thing to happen.
The vast majority of people that reach out to us, and, for the most part, they
skew to be older, mid- or late-career people as opposed to early-career, more
often than not say, "I never imagined I would call you." Because they
never thought that that kind of thing would happen to them. And in many cases
the reason that it happens to them is because they're not paying attention to
the politics. And, I'm not suggesting that they should. They are the goshawk
specialist or whatever the specialist is, and they didn't go into this work
because they were interested in office politics - if they had, they would be
the regional administrator or somebody else. And so, it's for that reason that
they often don't realize when the winds shift behind them.
In many cases, because they are the experts, they believe they're right (and
they usually are right), and so they want to elevate it up the chain of command.
In doing that, they often in fact descend into their own career inferno. Then
they wake up one day and they realize that their chain of command is the problem,
that the decision has been made, that the work they're doing is institutionally
inconvenient. And that's usually the point when they reach out to us and say,
"I'm crossing over to the other side."
What we're about is activism - we want good people to stay in the agency. That's
why we sell PEER underwear, so that you can wear them to work and still have
a career. It's not like we're looking for perpetual activism. The model we've
arrived at is that you work with people and the immediate problem, and, in a
lot of cases, it gets resolved. We hope they remain members of PEER and continue
to donate, but we would suggest that they go out and have a beer and a career.
There are groups that specialize in birds and fish and other things, but our
target ecosystem is the agency culture. So, we want to make sure that there
are good people that remain in. They are an important resource the way that
wetlands are. Part of what we're trying to do is make sure that agencies have
healthy ecosystems where information can flow in and out and sunlight can penetrate
and diversity of opinion is tolerated.
So, we view what we're doing as sort of a process in the sense that there are
little victories, but very few of them are permanent victories. It's a continual
process because we're trying to change the dynamics inside the agencies.
SP: A Forest Service botanist, in one of the testimonials
on your web site, writes that she fantasizes about a world in which PEER will
no longer be needed.
JR: Well, and one person that told us that was Jim Baca,
who was the director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) under President
Clinton.
We had done one of our first white papers on grazing reform. The concern at
the time was that Secretary Babbitt was going to sign off on a phony grazing
reform; and so, we had this group of people inside BLM that were so paranoid
because they were not only concerned about occupational retaliation, they were
also concerned because they lived in small ranching towns and feared going to
church, going to the store, and for their families. The white paper draft was
passed from hand to hand and nobody knew who anyone was in the whole network.
So, we produced this paper on what grazing reform had to be. Baca was new, and
so we gave him an advance copy and then we released it. He then made this statement:
"I agree with what's in this paper, and the only thing I disagree with
is the need for the authors to remain anonymous."
We were kind of impressed with that. So, when we had a case that involved a
BLM hydrologist on the San Pedro River - a very controversial area - who had
been retaliated against for raising concerns about the water levels and was
being transferred to a desert district, we brought that to Jim Baca's attention.
A week later, Baca happened to be in Arizona, and during his tour he looked
up this hydrologist, and asked him, "You have a truck, let's go some place."
And he got into the hydrologist's truck and the director of the BLM drove away
in the middle of the tour. Just completely flabbergasted the other people. And
when he came back he reversed the transfer. He did that in two other cases that
we brought him, and so we met with him and said, "We're converted, what
can we do?"
He asked us to put together kind of a kitchen cabinet of internal reformers,
and we did. In our last meeting with him as director of BLM, he told us he was
making us superfluous, there was no need for PEER while he was the Director
of the BLM. And then ten days later, he was fired by Bruce Babbitt. That was
in '94 I think it was, and from '94 through '96, at the time I was the general
counsel here, we primarily were doing whistleblower cases on behalf of the kitchen
cabinet, who were all being subject to retaliation.
For the balance of the Clinton administration, the BLM had no permanent administrator.
It's sort of a cautionary tale.
One thing that has been different during these Bush years is that both the
number, but also more dramatically, the GS grade, the seniority of the people
that are intakes, has dramatically gone up. So, during the Clinton years our
typical intake would have been a park biologist, now our typical intake is a
park superintendent.
SP: Some members of Congress have been attempting to strengthen
whistleblower protections with revised legislation
since the current system of arbitration set up for federal whistleblowers under
the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act appears severely broken, with accusations
of conflict of interest, political cronyism and even homophobia within the Office
of Special Counsel that is supposed to be the body that decides on whistleblower
cases. What does all this mean to passage of a revised Whistleblower Protection
Act in the current or next Congress?
JR: There is legislation that is pending and about to go
to conference. But the two versions, House and Senate, have substantial differences
that have to be resolved and the administration opposes both bills. So, I don't
know what the ultimate outcome will be.
From our point of view, some of the more significant provisions in the new
version include things like for the first time extending the mantle of whistleblower
protections to scientists. For the most part, scientists fall outside of the
gamut of the Whistleblower Protect Act because they're not disclosing, except
in very extreme cases, violations of law or gross mismanagement or imminent
threats to public health and safety. If a methodology is skewed or a key recommendation
is removed, the current whistleblower law treats that as just a difference of
opinion.
For the most part, the Office of Special Counsel is really in trouble. For
example, the Special Counsel [Scott Bloch] having his computer erased and trying
to do an investigation of the White House is just bizarre. I'm not quite sure
what to make of it. So, Bloch's term is up in January; his five-year term. He
can only be removed by the president for cause. This insularity was built in,
because it was a sensitive position - and in this case where you have a nutball
in as special counsel, the insulation means it looks like Bloch is going to
stay until the end of this term no matter how nutty he is. And then I don't
know what happens.
But even the White House, according to Bloch, has asked him to resign at least
twice. He claims that's because it's part of a gay rights conspiracy.
SP: Last week, the Union of Concerned Scientists came out
with a report that said, based on an on-line questionnaire sent to 5,419 EPA scientists
in the summer of 2007, that 889 of the 1,586 who replied reported experiencing
at least one type of interference within the last five years. This received
a lot of media attention as factual, as opposed to anecdotal, evidence that
political interference or manipulation at the EPA is undermining decision-making
in the public interest. However, the response rate was only 29 percent. Why
do you think more employees did not respond?
JR: There are a variety of reasons - you can't prove them.
But, there's fear, and in some cases there's indifference, there's a sense that
nothing can change, and in some other instances, there's distrust.
When we first started doing surveys I was struck at how many came back with
critiques of the questions. And there's sort of a bureaucratic quality to it,
and also to get scientists to agree to an absolute statement is one of the toughest
things you can do.
We've been doing surveys for a long time. I think there are about 30 on our
site. It's a means of collective
disclosure that's completely safe. For example, when George Allen was governor
of Virginia, we did one of our early surveys in Virginia DEQ (Department of
Environmental Quality). More than half of the people surveyed who identified
as managers, and I think all together there were 30 of them, indicated that
they had experiences where they had been directed to overlook environmental
laws. If any one of them had stood up and said, "On February 12th I got
this order ..." he or she would have been ripped apart by a pack of dogs.
The fact that there was this sort of collective expression that came out was
enough to trigger attention; there was a front page Washington Post story, and
it resulted in a legislative auditor investigation. And so, when Allen was leaving,
both the Republican and Democrat campaigned on DEQ reform.
The rates of return for mail-in surveys, I think the industry standard is about
10 percent, and so 29 percent is O.K. The thing about it is, it's not like you're
trying to take a sample and then project forward. We view them as sort of "mass
speech." So that even if it's only a minority of the agency, the fact that
30 percent of responding scientists, meaning 700 scientists, say technical information
was removed from a document for non-technical reasons, even if that is a minority,
that's 700 scientists saying that something happened - that's important in and
of itself, even if it's not predictive.
I think it's difficult at EPA because of the way that the agency is organized.
By contrast, when we were dealing with field offices and ecological services
within US Fish and Wildlife, there's sort of a series of jobs where it's almost
like a regulatory car wash. There's a unified theme. There was a higher rate
of return and the result was clearer. EPA's a much harder agency in the sense
that the pure scientists, for the most part, are detached from regulatory decisions.
They're working in ORD (Office of Research and Development), and you got air
and water and other divisions. You've got scientists that are in there, but
they're generally working with attorneys and engineers and others, and so they're
not all doing the same thing. I'm not sure we would have done that EPA survey
exactly the same way. We would have maybe broken the agency down in order to
get more of a pure view. From our point of view, it's more productive surveying
people who are in a comparable situation.
We've often used surveys as a referendum on something like a proposed reorganization
or a leadership change. Those kinds of things tend to up the rate of return
and they're sort of galvanizing. They're a tool. And we've done, for that same
reason, a number of surveys of Wildlife Refuge managers and those tend to have
very high rates of return. One had as high as 90 percent - but then they were
all mad. There was an attempt to get rid of the programmatic identity. So, our
survey was a referendum on that.
SP: That idea of the surveys being a kind of "mass
speech" seems particularly important.
JR: Yes, in the case of the US Fish and Wildlife Service
survey we did with Union of Concerned Scientists in 2005, we were receiving
so many individual complaints about Julie MacDonald and her boss Craig Manson
that we were wondering how to universalize this, so the survey was a way.
Sort of in defense of MacDonald and Manson, they were doing what they thought
they should have been doing. And if you talk to them now they would stoutly
defend what they were doing. When I first saw Craig Manson, the assistant secretary,
it was at a get to know you breakfast at Interior. And we had received all of
these complaints where documents, like proposed critical habitat, had gone from
x to half of x and things had been changed from "are" too "not".
These were real direct interventions.
So, I was going to ask him, "Do you do these things?" And when I
got there, his speech said, "What I do is I intervene and I inject policy
and I change these documents." He was saying, "I perceive this is
my job. The scientist comes to me and then I inject policy." So, I asked
him, "You inject policy, does that include opposition from local politicians?"
"Yes, I would consider that perfectly legitimate." And so, then my
follow-up question was, "Is there anything you consider illegitimate?"
And he stopped for a second and said, "Something that's illegal."
So, unless you greased his palm, everything was sort of fair game. But that's
what they view their job as being.
Bruce Babbitt did the same thing. We did a report called "War of Attrition"
that was based upon actual
court records that highlighted nine high profile cases where the information
had come out through litigation (it wasn't based on whistleblowers, but it was
suggested by a whistleblower) that Babbitt had intervened, and one was at the
behest of then Governor George Bush on behalf of some salamander outside Austin.
But that's what Babbitt did in these high-profile cases, which is not anything
more defensible than what Craig Manson was doing, it was just that you multiply
that by ten or 20 and now it has become routine.
So, the difference is that in the Bush administration everything has to be
screened, everything requires approval, and that, to some extent, is a function
of the way the Bush administration works. Everything is tightly controlled.
In agencies like the Park Service, the director of the Park Service isn't making
any of the substantive decisions, from Yellowstone to who will be the next superintendent
at Grand Canyon, they're all being made above.
SP: During the late eighties and early 1990s there were
accusations levied against EPA of misusing studies into "environmental
tobacco smoke," or second-hand smoke, to further a political anti-smoking
agenda. It seems there is nothing new to the political manipulation of science,
or "scientific fraud," and the important balancing act that federal
environmental scientists have to negotiate between science, politics and professional
integrity. Will this ever change?
JR: I see progress. I see distinct progress in a number
of ways. For example, the excesses of the Bush administration have framed political
manipulation of science as an issue in a way that it was never framed before,
and I think that, whether it's a new whistleblower bill this year or not, certainly
in the next administration there will be substantial legal reform to address
the issue. To me that's significant.
I also think there's been a huge and continuing social evolution in terms of
the perception of whistleblowers. Twenty years ago, I think there was more of
an expectation of how could you be a whistleblower, or whether or not you were
violating some omerta, a pledge of silence, or somehow being disloyal. Now,
I think there's a growing expectation that there ought to be whistleblowers
and when there are scandals, I was struck that sometimes you see reporting asking,
"Why weren't there whistleblowers?" You now expect to see them. They've
become a much more accepted part of what's going on and I think there's a greater
anticipation in the sense that this is sort of normal.
So, in 2004, in the Time magazine "People of the Year" were three
prominent whistleblowers. I'm not sure that that by itself did anything, but
it sort of signaled that when you look back over time, there's really been a
sea change in the sense that these people are now socially regarded as heroes
more often than pariahs.
Sometimes, there is regression. We represented an Army Corps economist named
Don Sweeney, who was the lead economist for the Upper Mississippi Locks and
Dam Reconstruction - it's a public works project that's second only to the Everglades
Restoration in terms of the size - and it's a matter of replacing and expanding
I think it's twenty locks and dams from St. Louis north, up the Mississippi
River. He exposed a plan by the Corps to "cook the books" to justify
the project. His disclosure triggered an official investigation that not only
vindicated him, but found an inherent conflict of interest throughout Corps
planning. The outcome was an official report recommending that two generals
and a colonel be disciplined and their careers ended. But, as a result of this
case, the Army Corps basically stopped using email and bent over backwards to
eliminate paper trails. Now, when they have important decision meetings, they
have them by video conference and nobody is allowed to leave with notes. So,
one aspect of all this is to teach them to cheat better.
But, it also shows an awareness of scrutiny that heretofore didn't exist. And
so, I suppose you could argue that it's progress that they're being more cautious
and circumspect rather than acting with impunity.
SP: But what about scientific fraud remaining a problem
within the agencies?
JR: Transparency is the real key. Because if there's transparency,
that means there's outside review and, to the extent that there's controversy,
then you can pull in professional societies, or the National Academies of Science,
or others. Not that they're always right, but that tends to move it completely
from the bounds of a political decision maker of saying, "day is night."
Or, my favorite Julie MacDonald example was an email about the Gunnison prairie
dog. She said, "change pd [prairie dog] rec [recommendation] from pos to
neg." So, in this 200-page report recommending the listing of the Gunnison
prairie dog, just change the conclusion, but you can leave the rest of it alone.
On the point of scientists as advocates, I urge them to be advocates for science.
Professional societies should act as peer reviewers and monitors of what's going
on. Also, one of the things that we've expressed concern about it is the inability
of government scientists to fully participate in those societies. To the extent
that the societies were more involved in, not so much in the formulation, but
the reporting and review of agency science, the more outside people there are,
particularly if their affiliations are disclosed, the better it is and the harder
it is to manipulate because there are too many people watching.
This sort of stuff can only take place if it's done shielded from any kind
of public knowledge. When the report came out about Julie MacDonald, she resigned
rather than face a Congressional hearing and fled the jurisdiction. I got the
pleasure of sitting next to and testifying with Lynn Scarlet, who is the deputy
secretary. Got to basically beat her about the head and shoulders and then watched
while Committee members beat her about the head and shoulders. One of the most
painful things I'd ever seen.
The Fish and Wildlife Service has finally adopted a code of scientific conduct.
And, on paper at least, it says some very important things, like you're supposed
to place accuracy above loyalty; you're supposed to disclose any concerns you
have about the quality of the information; you're supposed to openly share factual
information inside and outside the agency. It doesn't have a heck of a lot of
teeth in it, but the fact that they felt compelled to even hurry up and promulgate
something like that (it's in their manual) is a step forward because it provides
scientists in that agency a hook for, if nothing else, whistleblower protection.
Because now they can allege violation of a rule or policy because it's codified
in the Fish and Wildlife Service manual. It's all the outgrowth of the Julie
MacDonald scandal and after that hearing, which was a year ago in May, that
left Interior sort of defenseless.
The thing that we keep pointing to is that Secretary Dick Kempthorne, who has
declared ethical reform as one of the hallmarks of his tenure, has been utterly
absent from this whole debate. It could be that we're just too deeply engaged
in it, but I view this all as progress.
SP: So, what about the future?
JR: I think in a lot of these issues, even John McCain will
try to be the anti-Bush, in the sense that I don't think you're going to see
the same sort of manipulation. Also, you'll see a sensitivity to accusations
that they have engaged in it. I think that there'll also be Congressional reform
either through the context of whistleblower protection or other venues.
One of the things going on right now - the EPA "in the name of transparency"
secretly revising their chemical risk assessment process - I think you'll see
involvement in fixing that, because one of the things that's significant about
the way EPA revised the risk assessments was that all the inter-agency review,
particularly with the Defense Department, is shielded from public view. A lot
of the chemicals that were subject to those internal reviews were defense-related.
We also do a lot of Defense Department work, and we expect to be doing even
more of that - not only because we don't see a heck of a lot of other people
doing it and we represent a lot of theologists that work inside these agencies,
but also everyone has pledged to grow the military. So, with the military footprint
in the domestic US - just the Army alone needing training ground expansion and
talking about needing new areas about the size of New Jersey - you're going
to see more land, more sensitive land come under fire.
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