Industry's Secret Weapon Against the Environment
By Sidney A. Shapiro, Center for American Progress, AlterNet.org
Despite
its furtive entrance onto the legislative stage, the Information
Quality Act has become a powerful weapon in the Bush administration's
attack on environmental, health and safety protections.
If
you've never heard of the Information Quality Act (IQA), you're not
alone. When it cleared Congress in 2000, most senators and
representatives didn't even know they were voting for it; the
two-paragraph provision had been quietly attached only hours before to
a massive appropriations bill. But vote for it they did, and it became
law without benefit of congressional hearing or debate.
…A new
report, “Truth and Science Betrayed: The Case Against the Information
Quality Act,” describes in detail the ways industry has taken the
administration up on its offer to clog the regulatory process with IQA
challenges. Researchers examined IQA petitions filed to date and found
repeated attempts to:
-delay overdue regulatory actions that have already been subject to extensive public review and comment;
-withdraw unfavorable reports rather than simply correct incorrect information in the report;
-“correct” policy decisions on the part of agencies empowered to make such decisions;
-bypass existing statutory procedures for regulatory decision-making;
-prevent agency action in the face of incomplete, rather than poor quality, information;
-obtain underlying data without complying with established Freedom of Information Act request procedures;
-sidestep
the courts by attempting to discredit information that corporate
defendants have either been unable to successfully exclude at trial, or
information that they would prefer not to encounter in future
litigation.
In
short, industry is taking advantage of the administration's expansion
of the IQA and turning it into a powerful weapon against environmental,
health, and safety regulations.
(Click here to read the complete article.)
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