Nature takes on the Bush administration

The world's leading science journal, Nature, has been hitting editorial home runs lately. This week it's a real prize, "Safety catch." The subject is the Bush administration's proposals for how the government should go about conducting risk assessments.

Risk assessments are a sensitive topic with many consumer and community groups who have experienced them as elaborate exercises in government decision justification. There is so much latitude to how the knobs of the risk assessment machine can be tweaked to make the output come out right, that many people see the process as one where the risk assessor paints the target around the arrow. Yet it can be done honestly and may be a useful way to get order of magnitude estimates when you had nothing to go on. But good risk assessments can be time consuming and are often the subject of protracted wrangling leading to even more protracted delays. In 1991 the EPA issued a nine volume risk assessment of dioxin. It is still being reviewed. The latest saga came when the National Research Council issued a report assessing the risk assessment, essentially ratifying the main elements in the 1991 document after 15 years. So Nature is justified in taking a jaundiced view of the new proposals to extend the scope of things subject to mandatory risk assessments.

This effort echoes the legislation on risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis that the Republican-led Congress attempted to pass in the late 1990s. That legislation failed, opposed by moderate Republicans such as Sherwood Boehlert, now chair of the House science committee, who rightly saw it as an attempt to stifle the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration and other regulators.

That legislation was, at least, a relatively transparent attempt to roll back regulation, which at the time was an important element in the Republicans' political agenda. The call for government to get off the backs of companies and individuals had considerable resonance then, and indeed it still has. But it is an argument that has lost some of its political appeal, and it is certainly not being made in public to support the White House's proposed risk-assessment bulletin. (Nature 442, 223-224(20 July 2006) | doi:10.1038/442223b)

The Bush administration's scientist in the Office of Management and Budget which is promoting the new requirements was John Graham who came there from the industry supported Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. Graham was a notorious opponent of health and safety regulation and made numerous attempts to curb them but ran into serious opposition from the scientific community. Graham has departed OMB for Rand, but OMB is still on the offensive. As Nature observes, the ends are the same:

The motivation of Graham, his mooted successor Susan Dudley of George Mason University in Virginia, and indeed of President Bush himself, is not really in doubt. What they want is not better regulation, but less regulation. They should admit as much, instead of hiding their agenda behind the mantra of 'sound science'.

Different choir, same sheet of music.