Go to the Environmental Protection Agency's website and you'll find this; "The mission of the Environmental Protection Agency is to protect human health and the environment. Since 1970, EPA has been working for a cleaner, healthier environment for the American people."Turns out, under the Bush administration, this is no longer true. Let me go ahead and fix that statement to make it more honest; "The mission of the Environmental Protection Agency is to protect industry from regulation. Since 2004, EPA has been working for a less restrictive business environment for the American and international corporate world."
Under the Bush administration, the EPA has been a non-enforcement entity, existing solely to pretend that some environmental protections are in force. The EPA doesn't waste a lot of time enforcing the law or regulating industry -- despite the fact that that's the agency's entire purpose.
The latest scandal (or what would be a scandal if the media focused on things that actually matter) is that the EPA is covering for industries that not only harm the environment, but harm people who happen to live in that environment. For the record, that's everybody.
The Bush administration is undermining the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to determine health dangers of toxic chemicals by letting nonscientists have a bigger -- often secret -- role, congressional investigators say in a report obtained by The Associated Press.
The administration's decision to give the Defense Department and other agencies an early role in the process adds to years of delay in acting on harmful chemicals and jeopardizes the program's credibility, the Government Accountability Office concluded.
At issue is the EPA's screening of chemicals used in everything from household products to rocket fuel to determine if they pose serious risk of cancer or other illnesses.
A new review process begun by the White House in 2004 is adding more speed bumps for EPA scientists, the GAO said in its report, which will be the subject of a Senate Environment Committee hearing Tuesday. A formal policy effectively doubling the number of steps was adopted two weeks ago...
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