EPA Dismisses Scientist for Double Standards, But Who Has the Double Standards?

At the request of the chemical industry, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dismissed a toxicologist who had chaired a panel investigating the harmful effects of a flame retardant widely used in consumer electronics, the LA Times reports.

According to documents obtained by industry watchdog Environmental Working Group (EWG), the EPA took Dr. Deborah Rice off the panel last August after the American Chemistry Council, a lobby for chemical manufacturers, complained she was “biased.” The industry took issue with testimony Rice gave to the Maine Legislature last February, around the time the EPA panel convened, in which she called for a state ban on the chemical known as “deca” because “scientific evidence shows it is toxic and accumulating in the environment and people.”

EPA officials cited “the perception of a potential conflict of interest,” agreeing with a May letter in which the American Chemistry Council wrote that Rice is “a fervent advocate of banning” deca and said she “has no place in an independent, objective peer review.” The EWG calls Rice’s removal a “dangerous double standard where scientists and experts working for state or federal health agencies can be removed from EPA advisory panels simply because they express the views of their agency in public as a part of their job responsibilities.”

This material was created for the Progress Report, the daily e-mail publication of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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