A Trust Betrayed (19 page)

The authors of the report, led by V. James Cogliano, Cheryl Siegel Scott, and Jane C. Caldwell of the
EPA
's National Center for Environmental Assessment, knew the 153-page document would not be warmly received by the industrial and military sectors most responsible for
TCE
being the number one toxic pollutant in the United States. The Pentagon had more than 1,400 hazardous waste sites around the country, and most were contaminated with
TCE
. A fivefold increase in the safety standard for the chemical would significantly raise cleanup costs: the Air Force alone estimated that remediation expenses for its contaminated sites would go from $5 billion to at least $6.5 billion. Not surprisingly, an Air Force review of the
EPA
's risk assessment said the document “misrepresented” studies of
TCE
's effects and ignored the views of many scientists who did not believe the chemical was a serious threat to public health at the levels found in the environment.
⁵

The timing of the
EPA
's report gave polluters good reason to believe that their concerns would be heard at the highest levels in Washington. Just six months before the assessment of
TCE
was released in August 2001, Republican George W. Bush had moved into the White House determined to rid the executive branch of what he and his aides considered anti-industry, antimilitary policies put in place during the prior administration of Democratic president Bill Clinton. Led by Vice President Dick Cheney, a former
defense secretary with a background in oil and gas development, the Bush administration made the
EPA
one of its top reformation projects, installing political appointees at the agency who believed in less, not more, regulation. It also empowered other agencies, particularly the Department of Defense, to challenge the
EPA
's science.

“If you go down two or three levels in
EPA
, you have an awful lot of people that came onboard during the Clinton administration, to be perfectly blunt about it, and have a different approach than I do at Defense,” a former Bush appointee at the Pentagon, Raymond F. DuBois, told the
Los Angeles Times
in 2006. “It doesn't mean I don't respect their opinions or judgments, but I have an obligation where our scientists question their scientists to bring it to the surface,” said DuBois, who had been deputy undersecretary for installations and environment at the Defense Department.
⁶

Knowing the
TCE
assessment would be fiercely attacked, the career staff at the
EPA
made sure it was sent to the agency's independent Science Advisory Board for a full review. The
SAB
issued its evaluation in December 2002 and extolled the
TCE
draft assessment as “groundbreaking” work by the
EPA
for a number of reasons. It was the first time an assessment of a chemical's toxicity focused attention on the risks to children, the board said, and it did so using “multiple kinds of evidence” and advanced research methods. “The Board advises the Agency to move ahead to revise and complete this important assessment,” the
SAB
's cochairmen, public health scientists William Glaze and Henry Anderson, wrote in a cover letter to the
EPA
with the report. “We believe the draft assessment is a good starting point for completing the risk assessment of
TCE
.”
⁷

The
SAB
, acknowledging there was still “considerable uncertainty” about
TCE
's effects, also made some suggestions for further work by the
EPA
“to strengthen the rigor of the discussion” as it moved toward a final risk assessment. The Bush administration's
new
EPA
research director, Paul Gilman, seized on the board's recommendations for revisions as a reason to put the
TCE
assessment on hold. Anderson, the
SAB
cochairman, who was also a doctor with the Wisconsin Division of Public Health, was surprised by the move. “I thought by and large we supported the
EPA
and that its risk assessment could be modified to move forward,” Anderson said at the time.
⁸

But Gilman interpreted the
SAB
's cautions as a “red flag” that “raised very troubling questions,” and decided to have the
TCE
assessment evaluated by a higher authority—the National Research Council (
NRC
) at the National Academies of Sciences (
NAS
). Actually, it wasn't really Gilman's idea. The Defense Department, the Energy Department, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (
NASA
)—all faced with cleaning up
TCE
contamination at hundreds of sites—had offered to sponsor a study by the
NRC
, feeling confident that an independent panel of scientists would conclude that the
EPA
had gone overboard in assessing the chemical's threats to public health. The three federal agencies were backed by an industry group, the Halogenated Solvents Industry Alliance, made up of producers and users of
TCE
and other solvents in manufacturing. Paul Dugard, the group's director of scientific studies, had written a number of scathing critiques of the
EPA
draft, calling it “an example of extreme conservatism applied at every stage in the risk assessment that leads to an unbalanced outcome.” Dugard had warned in public comments on the assessment that it would increase cleanup costs for the federal government and for many corporations by hundreds of billions of dollars.
⁹

With equal confidence, one of the lead authors of the
TCE
assessment, V. James Cogliano, was sure the National Academies of Sciences, via the
NRC
, would put a significant stamp of approval on the
EPA
's work. “I expect them to like the draft assessment as much as the Science Advisory Board, whose favorable review triggered
DOD
's ‘appeal' to the
NAS
,” Cogliano said in an e-mail to a reporter in 2005, not long after the
NAS
appointed a sixteen-member committee to evaluate the
EPA
assessment. The committee would be managed by the staff of the
NRC
and chaired by toxicologist Rogene Henderson of the University of New Mexico, with funding from the three federal agencies that proposed the study.
¹⁰

The military and the industry made sure the committee was flooded with studies of
TCE
that reached different conclusions from the
EPA
. Paul Dugard of the solvents alliance sent the panel a memo in November 2005 describing “new information” showing that
TCE
could not be directly linked to kidney cancer. One was a study sponsored by the European Chlorinated Solvents Association, a sister organization of the US industry alliance, that concluded there was only a “weak association” between
TCE
exposure and kidney disease. That study and two others Dugard presented made the connection “an open question,” he wrote.
¹¹

Research funded by the Department of Defense showed “no evidence” that
TCE
caused heart defects, dismissed any link between the chemical and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and raised doubts there was a connection to kidney cancer, the
DOD
's special assistant for emerging contaminants, Shannon Cunniff, told the committee in early 2006. Cunniff presented eight studies sponsored by the
DOD
, two collaborations funded by the Energy Department, and three
NASA
-funded studies—all casting doubts on
TCE
's toxicity.
¹²

Jerry Ensminger, following all this debate, left no doubt about his opinion in an eloquent appearance at a public hearing held by a separate National Research Council panel that was reviewing the
ATSDR
's water-modeling studies for Camp Lejeune. “Here we have the
EPA
that was created by the government to protect our environment and our citizens from pollution being second-guessed by the world's largest polluter, the Department of Defense,” he
told the committee. “There is something fundamentally wrong with our system of government. I say this because here we have the DoD that was created to protect our country, its citizens and our way of life that is now attempting to manipulate legislation and/or regulations. If they are successful in their manipulation, it would allow them to do irreparable damage to the people and the land they were created to protect and not be held accountable for it.”
¹³

In the end, the industry/military push fell short—at least at the National Research Council. The
NRC
's committee issued a 379-page report in June 2006 that said not only that the
EPA
was correct in its assessment of
TCE
, but also that there was ample scientific research to show that the chemical was even more toxic than the
EPA
described in its draft report. “The committee found that the evidence on carcinogenic risk and other health hazards from exposure to trichloroethylene has strengthened since 2001,” the panel said. The greatest risk posed by the chemical was kidney cancer, but a host of other diseases and deformities could also be linked to
TCE
exposure, the committee concluded.
¹⁴

The path was now cleared for the
EPA
to issue a final risk assessment and presumably, based on its conclusions, stronger regulations limiting
TCE
levels in air and water. “We can't afford any more delays,” Ensminger said after the
NRC
report was issued. Of course, when it comes to the military, where there's a will, there's a delay.
¹⁵

10

THE PENTAGON TRIES FOR EXEMPTIONS

The Defense Department is supposed to defend the nation, not to defile it.

—
REPRESENTATIVE JOHN D. DINGELL (D-MI)

A
fter the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Pentagon reigned supreme in the administration of President George W. Bush. Vice President Dick Cheney, who had been the secretary of defense under Bush's father from 1989 to 1993, focused more on energy development in the early months of the younger Bush's first term. But with the rise of al-Qaeda and escalating threats from Iraq, Iran, and others in the Middle East, national security became the preeminent concern in Washington, as it was in the nation at large. Anything that might detract from military strength became a target.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz wrote a memorandum on March 7, 2003, to the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force suggesting the need to invoke the national security
exemptions allowed in many environmental laws. “While I believe we should be commended for our past restraint in this regard, I believe it is time for us to give greater consideration to requesting such exemptions in cases where environmental requirements threaten our continued ability to properly train and equip the men and women of the Armed Forces,” Wolfowitz wrote.
¹

Wolfowitz cited sections of ten laws that allowed the president to exempt federal agencies from certain legal requirements for reasons of national security, including provisions of the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act otherwise known as the Superfund law. He asked the civilian leaders of the military to develop procedures for seeking exemptions by identifying environmental regulations that threatened military readiness. Wolfowitz insisted his memo was “not intended to signal a diminished commitment to the environmental programs that ensure that the natural resources entrusted to our care will remain healthy and available for use by future generations.” Exemptions would be “a high hurdle,” he said. “However,” he added,

we cannot lose sight of the fact that these testing, training and other military areas and resources have been entrusted to our care—first and foremost—to provide for the realistic training and testing necessary to ensure that our Armed Forces are the best-trained and best-equipped in the world. In the vast majority of cases, we have demonstrated that we are able both to comply with environmental requirements and to conduct necessary military training and testing. In those exceptional cases where we cannot and the law permits us to do so, we owe it to our young men and women to request an appropriate exemption.
²

The proposal was nothing new—after a series of lawsuits by environmental groups in the 1990s charging that military training exercises were harming endangered species or destroying valuable lands, the Pentagon had sought exemptions without success during the Clinton administration. But now, with the nation at war in both Afghanistan and Iraq—and with Republicans in control of both Congress and the White House—things were different. Wolfowitz gambled that the idea might gain traction in a political environment where national security trumped all else.

Instead, the idea of exempting military sites from environmental laws ended up calling greater attention to the toxic messes at many bases, including Camp Lejeune.