January 11, 2007 The Pump Handle 4Comment

by Robert Shull 

With the Bush administration’s war on science raging all around us, it’s nice to be able to report a win for the public.

In January 2006, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) of the White House Office of Management and Budget issued a draft bulletin proposing to impose one-size-fits-all criteria for all agency risk assessments – and a good deal of other scientific and technical evaluations that aren’t considered risk assessments. OIRA’s bulletin was expected to be the swansong of then-OIRA administrator John Graham, who had long advocated manipulations and distortions of risk assessment in order to subvert federal capacity to protect the public.

OIRA submitted the proposed bulletin for peer review by the National Research Council, which has just delivered a stunning rebuke to Graham’s dream.


In language much blunter than expected from the National Academies, the NRC panel called for OIRA not to even bother tinkering around the edges of the proposed bulletin but to withdraw it altogether.

The expert panel agreed with many of the criticisms lodged by the scientific and public interest communities (including the Center for Progressive Reform, Natural Resources Defense Council, OMB Watch, and Public Citizen).  Among them:

  • There are problems at the very core of the bulletin:  the definitions of information products covered by the bulletin’s edicts.  OIRA took it upon itself to redefine the term “risk assessment,” despite years of clarity in that regard thanks to the NRC’s “Risk Assessment in the Federal Government: Managing the Process” report (the “Red Book”) and other such documents. OIRA would have applied its new mandates not just to risk assessments, as the scientific community understands the term, but also to a wide array of risk-related evaluations that fall short of complete risk assessment, such as the National Toxicology Program’s Report on Carcinogens.
  • The bulletin would have devastating consequences for federal capacity to protect the public.  As the NRC report notes, these consequences include “the likely drain on agency resources, the extended time necessary to complete risk assessments that are undertaken, and the highly likely disruptive effect on many agencies.”  The panel wryly adds that “OMB, the champion of benefit-cost analysis for decision-making,” has failed to consider these costs.
  • The bulletin would establish across-the-board mandates to all kinds of risk assessments – including such radically different kinds of assessments as evaluating the integrity of a bridge, assessing the hazards of getting a space shuttle up and back safely, and estimating the fatality risk of exposure to a hazardous waste site.  “One size does not fit all,” the report concludes.
  • The bulletin is tone deaf to the precautionary assumptions built in to many risk assessments in order to ensure that resulting risk management decisions benefit vulnerable populations, such as children and the elderly.  The bulletin’s emphasis on central estimates of risks would mean that “decision-makers could be deprived of risk-related information on vulnerable segments of the population and the potential impacts of measurable exposures that have not been identified as adverse.”

These problems are just the tip of the iceberg.

OMB held a press conference today, announcing that it will not release this draft bulletin in a final form.  It remains to be seen, however, whether OIRA will proceed with its efforts to burden risk assessments.  That ball, apparently, will be in Susan Dudley’s court.

J. Robert Shull is Deputy Director for Auto Safety and Regulatory Policy at Public Citizen.

4 thoughts on “Good News: National Academies Tell OMB to Junk Its Junk Science Proposal

  1. Bob Shull deserves a huge round of thanks for his work leading the public interest campaign against this extremely ill-conceived and dangerous proposal. Many people worked on this effort, but Bob played an especially important role.

    In addition, Bob and Joan Claybrook submitted powerful comments (well worth reading) about the draft bulletin to the White House for OMB Watch and Public Citizen. Many of their criticisms were echoed by the NAS panel that trashed the OMB proposal. Download and read their comments from the White House’s website.

  2. Thanks so much to Bob for his rapid reading of this, and to others for their work in this very important (yet not too exciting) issue.

  3. The NAS review comes as a welcome surprise. This was exceptionally strong language for an NAS committee. The committee was not stocked with persons known to be associated with the public health side of the debate on environmental and occupational health protections, although it did include some folks with past visibility is good citizens. The committee included Sally Katzen, head of OIRA at OMB during the Clinton administration. That OIRA was charged with enforcing Executive Order 12866, which remains the core of the Bush administration’s version Executive Order 13252. That OIRA did not leap to the barricades when so-called peer review legislation was introduced in 1994. The NAS actually presented testimony generally favorable to S.691, a Senate version of peer review legislation. After all, who is committed to peer review business?

    The reference to the `Red Book” throws us back to 1983, quite a different era. I was invited to present on this, as a member of the committee.

    Distortions of the “Mis-Read” Book: Adding Procedural Botox to Paralysis by Analysis
    Author: Franklin E. Mirer1
    Source: Human and Ecological Risk Assessment, Volume 9, Number 5, September-October 2003, pp. 1129-1143(15)

    Among the recommendations of that committee was so “intellectual separation” of risk assessment from risk management. The peer review bulletin proposed by OMB would have brought risk management considerations into the risk assessment process. Frankly, back then, the paradigm was that politically motivated agency leadership would push inflated health risks in order to support regulations. Ha! When did that ever happen? However, the recommendation was correct. Agencies should not shy away from an appropriate risk assessment, because they know that protecting against the risk would cause major dislocations. The most egregious (this is a hard contest to win) example is the treatment of the carcinogenicity of gasoline.

  4. Reading over my post above, in the first paragraph they there was supposed to be a paragraph break between the reference to goodc itizens, and comments about Clinton OIRA.

    I’m not prepared at this time to comment on the past citizenship of the persons on the committee. However, they certainly stepped up to the plate on this thing.

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