Many U.S. scientists working for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) say they don’t trust the agency’s senior leaders to be honest and they fear retaliation if they were to report a violation of the law, according to a survey of employees conducted in 2020.
According to the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey for 2020, which was conducted by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, 75 percent of EPA workers in the National Program Chemicals Division who responded to the survey indicated that they did not think the agency’s senior leadership maintained “high standards of honesty and integrity.” Sixty-five percent of the workers responding from the Risk Assessment Division answered the same way.
Also alarming, 53 percent of respondents in the EPA’s Risk Assessment Division said they could not disclose a suspected violation of the law or regulation without fear of reprisal. Forty-three percent of responding EPA workers in the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics (OPPT) answered the same way.
The negative sentiments reflected in the survey results coincide with mounting reports of malfeasance inside EPA’s chemical assessment programs, according to the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
“It should be of grave concern that more than half the EPA chemists and other specialists working on crucial public health concerns do not feel free to report problems or flag violations,” PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse, a former EPA enforcement attorney, said in a statement.
Earlier this month, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said the EPA ’s hazard assessment practices within the framework of the Toxic Substances Control Act were of “critically low quality.”
“EPA’s new leadership will have its hands full righting this sinking ship,” Whitehouse said.
After taking office in January, President Joe Biden issued an executive order noting that the EPA under Biden may diverge in its position on several chemicals from decisions made by the agency under previous president Donald Trump.
In correspondence dated Jan. 21, the EPA Office of General Counsel said the following:
“In conformance with President Biden’s Executive Order on Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis issued January 20, 2021, (Health and Environment EO), this will confirm my request on behalf of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) seek and obtain abeyances or stays of proceedings in pending litigation seeking judicial review of any EPA regulation promulgated between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021, or seeking to establish a deadline for EPA to promulgate a regulation in connection with the subject of any such
