Citizen Health & Safety

Report of Newest U.S. Mad Cow Case Highlights USDA Failures

After seven months of silence, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) confirmed the second U.S. case of mad cow disease on June 24, highlighting the need for more stringent regulatory protections of the nation's beef supply. Seven months before the USDA announcement, government scientists ran a test that indicated that a U.S. cow was infected with mad cow disease. The result of this test was never publicly disclosed. According to the New York Times,

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White House Demands Power to Restructure Government

The White House finally released last week its proposal for legislation granting the Bush administration wide-ranging powers to restructure government programs and force them to plead for their lives every 10 years.

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OMB Watch Wins in Court for Access to Risk Management Data

After almost four years of silence, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released updated information on Risk Management Plans (RMPs) filed by facilities with large quantities of hazardous chemicals onsite, in order to inform communities about the risks. The agency released the information to OMB Watch after the organization sued EPA for failing to respond to its request filed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). OMB Watch has posted the executive summaries of the RMPs on its Right to Know Network website.

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Foxes in the henhouse: BLM drilling permits

Jul 11, 2005 by Guest Blogger

"Consultants paid by the oil and gas industry have been volunteering to work for the Bureau of Land Management's Vernal[, Utah] office for the past five months, expediting environmental studies to keep pace with a glut of drilling requests in the region," reports the Salt Lake Tribune. Five consultants paid by the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States have volunteered to work through "a backlog of about 400 permits." The Vernal BLM office receives the second-highest number of drilling applications in the country.

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NIH AIDS Division Director Fired Possible Retaliation for Whistleblowing

Dr. Jonathan Fishbein, a National Institutes of Health (NIH) researcher and director of the AIDS research division's Office of Policy in Clinical Research Operations, blew the whistle on poor scientific practices and inappropriate, unprofessional conduct by the department. NIH fired Fishbein on July 1 citing poor job performance, in what some believe to be retaliation. A review report for the NIH director's office confirms many of the issues that Fishbein raised about the agency's AIDS research division, adding to the speculation that his dismissal constituted a retaliatory action.

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Hearing on Hit List Addresses Larger Regulatory Policy Issues

A House subcommittee hearing on the White House's anti-regulatory hit list became a venue for stakeholders to voice their positions on the broader ongoing debate over public protections and political interference in regulatory policy, pitting corporate-conservative talking points against evidence of the need for stringent safeguards.

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Comments on 2005 Draft Regulatory Accounting Report

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Recently in the news

Jul 10, 2005 by Guest Blogger

Check out some of the latest news articles of interest to regulatory policy: Assault on Science:
  • Chris Mooney, "Some Like It Hot," Mother Jones, May-June 2005 Forty public policy groups have this in common: They seek to undermine the scientific consensus that humans are causing the earth to overheat. And they all get money from ExxonMobil.
  • Bill McKibben, "Climate of Denial," id. One morning in Kyoto, we won a round in the battle against global warming. Then special interests and pseudoscience snatched the truth away. What happened?

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Real environmental review?

Jul 10, 2005 by Guest Blogger

A new article explores the relationship between NEPA, the APA, and judicial deference to agency claims and asks whether it is acceptable for agencies conducting NEPA reviews to get away with listing their environmental considerations in the administrative record even though they have in fact given zero weight to those considerations. From the abstract:

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The Going-Out-of-Business Myth

Jul 9, 2005 by Guest Blogger

The public needs regulatory safeguards to protect our health, safety, environment, civil rights, and welfare. Corporate special interests, however, have an interest in avoiding spending a single dime to improve their destructive behavior. Again and again, when new regulatory protections have been proposed, corporate lobbyists have argued that business would be bankrupted and forced to go out of business. Again and again, they have been proven wrong. Download our fact sheet "The Going-Out-of-Business Myth" to learn just how wrong they have been time and time again.

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