Washington Post:
When the Bush administration last year proposed a controversial revamping of the rules by which federal agencies decide whether chemicals and other products pose risks to human health, it offered to run the plan by the prestigious National Research Council.
Yesterday the White House got its response: a 324-page report that says, in no uncertain terms, "Throw it out and start all over."
The proposal by the Office of Management and Budget is "fundamentally flawed" and should be withdrawn, the report concludes.
Among the NRC's findings was that the risk assessments would be "more susceptible to being manipulated to achieve a predetermined result" -- which, of course, was pretty much the whole point.
National Academies:
"We began our review of the draft bulletin thinking we would only be recommending changes, but the more we dug into it, the more we realized that from a scientific and technical standpoint, it should be withdrawn altogether," said John F. Ahearne, chair of the committee that wrote the report, and director, ethics program, Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, Research Triangle Park, N.C.
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