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EPA retaliated against employees who raised concerns about deadly chemicals being commercially approved
Employees within the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who raised concerns about certain questionable chemicals being approved for commercial use were punished by their superiors, newly released reports show.
In a series of partially redacted reports, the EPA’s inspector general office found that managers within the EPA’s New Chemicals Division retaliated against employees who spoke out by passing them up for promotions, reassigning them to other divisions within the agency, and punished them with lower performance evaluations.
Many of the employees at the EPA who faced retaliation worked as chemists and toxicologists. Their job duties included evaluating chemical safety and determining whether or not the EPA should recommend a chemical for commercial approval.
“They would do these risk assessments on new chemicals and they’d say, ‘Okay, we found that this one causes cancer,’ for example,” explained Kyla Bennett, director of science policy for the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
“And the managers would say, ‘No, no, we don’t want to say that,’ and they’d delete the cancer designation. And it was happening over and over and over, and then they started getting retaliated against when they were pushing back.”
(Related: Remember when the Government Accountability Project [GAP] called on the EPA to release records of Facebook censorship during the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment saga?)
EPA retaliation violates agency’s scientific integrity policy
Five EPA scientists contacted the PEER hotline to complain about the mistreatment and substantiate the claims of three other employees, including one who was retaliated against for being a whistleblower. PEER filed the hotline complaints with the EPA IG’s office on behalf of these employees.
“Three personnel actions occurred within a period of time such that a reasonable person could conclude that differing scientific opinions or protected activities were contributing factors,” that report states.
Challenging the report’s findings, officials at the EPA tried to argue that they never penalized anyone over scientific disagreements, “but instead assessed overall performance against various metrics, including ability to meet programmatic deadlines for new-chemical assessments.”
“Performance ratings are not static and that employees are not entitled to the same rating they received in a previous year,” they added.
The Toxic Substances Control Act, which was last amended in 2016, requires EPA employees to conduct a full assessment for every new chemical within 90 days of its introduction. However, a human health assessor at the EPA told the IG’s office that it is “somewhat impossible” for the EPA to fully assess any chemical within that limited timeframe.
“The EPA has 90 days to say, ‘This presents an unreasonable risk, and it can’t go to market,’ or, ‘You’re OK if you put these protection measures in,’ or ‘No problem,'” Bennett further explained.
Any chemical assessments that are not completed within the statutory 90-day deadline get added to a backlog that has been steadily growing over time. Political pressure is mounting to eliminate that backlog by any means, but some EPA employees have a problem with how “intense” that pressure is.
Whenever someone at the EPA disagrees with or delays the resolution of backlogged assessments, he or she is labeled as “problematic” by management, according to an unnamed individual who spoke with the IG’s office. Others confirmed that the pressure to clear the backlog by any means is “pushing us like animals in a farm.”
EPA assessors are allowed to “pause the clock” on chemical assessments if they determine that they need more information from companies, though Bennett says this is “frowned upon.”
“The culture of this division is such that they are rewarded for getting those reviews out in 90 days to help industry,” she further added.
More related news at Pollution.news.
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