The Government Does a Bad Job Assessing Toxic Exposures

The history of the captured federal agencies that reassure the public after chemical disasters should give East Palestine residents pause.

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The police went door-to-door to homes within one mile of the derailment of the Norfolk Southern train on the outskirts of East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3 of this year. The toxic chemicals that the train carried were on fire and a catastrophic explosion was possible at any time. Police told residents not to pack but to leave immediately. Others outside the evacuation zone were told to shelter in place.

Officials lifted the mandatory evacuation order five days after the derailment. When residents returned, the town had a strong chemical smell. People in and near the town had headaches, sore throats, nausea, dizziness, nosebleeds, bloody stools, rashes, coughs, and shortness of breath.

State and federal government officials reassured residents that despite the smell and the symptoms of toxic exposure, tests showed that the town’s air was safe to breathe and the town’s water was safe to drink.

Not everyone felt reassured. “I just don’t want to be diagnosed with cancer or something 10, 15 years down the line because of [Norfolk Southern’s] mistake,” Therese Vigliotti told The New York Times. “I just don’t trust anybody,” Mike Routh told the newspaper.

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The people of East Palestine are right to worry. They are right to be skeptical of what they’re told. And they are right to suspect that when East Palestine fades from the news, their interests will matter less than the interests of the powerful industries that move, manufacture, and use the chemicals that contaminated their town.

I chaired the House Science Committee’s oversight subcommittee from 2007 to 2011. I led investigations into the risk assessment of toxic chemical exposure by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), the two federal agencies upon which the people of East Palestine must rely to warn them of any threat to their health from exposure to the chemicals. Both agencies were influenced by politically powerful industries, often in ways that did not leave fingerprints, and both provided unreliable information to the public as a result.

ATSDR WAS CREATED by the Superfund Act in 1980, the year Ronald Reagan won the presidency. The Superfund program investigates and cleans up sites most contaminated by hazardous materials. ATSDR’s role under the legislation was to evaluate public-health risk from exposure to the contaminants. The EPA runs the Superfund program, but the legislation made ATSDR an independent agency. That did not last. Both the EPA and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) saw ATSDR as an encroachment on their turf. HHS sought to require that the agency’s staff be employees on loan from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an HHS agency, and otherwise to bring ATSDR within the CDC’s control. The CDC and ATSDR now describe ATSDR as a “sister agency” of the CDC.

The Reagan administration appeared to want ATSDR not to exist, but Democrats in Congress disagreed. In 1986, amendments to the Superfund legislation required ATSDR to complete initial health assessments for 951 Superfund sites by the end of 1988.

In 1991, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an arm of Congress, gave a harsh review to ATSDR’s initial health assessments. They did not always identify whether communities were exposed to given contaminants or what the health risk from exposure was, and they paid little attention to the sufficiency of the data to support the largely optimistic conclusions. The GAO found that, of the 951 initial ATSDR assessments, just 13 were assessed to pose “a significant health risk.”

ATSDR underperformed in the Clinton administration, but got worse in the Bush administration. The CDC was a front in the Bush administration’s “war on science.” More than a dozen top managers and researchers at the CDC and ATSDR left between 2004 and 2006. Employees told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that morale was low largely because of “a general lack of confidence that CDC’s leadership will ‘do the right thing’ when faced with political pressure from Washington.”

Our subcommittee investigation in 2009 found that the agency “developed a check-box mentality.” ATSDR employees were the source for many of our criticisms; they told us that the agency “lacks appropriate quality controls … conducts inadequate analyses of health risks … and often do[es] not collect and analyze the most relevant and revealing data about potential environmental health hazards.” One ATSDR scientist told our staff, “It seems like the goal is to disprove the communities’ concerns rather than actually trying to prove exposures.” Even when sparsely populated communities saw a large number of rare cancers or other diseases, a seemingly inexplicable result except if toxic exposure was involved, the agency declined to attribute the diseases to any specific source.

One subcommittee hearing witness, Salvador Mier, was a former director of prevention for the CDC and a resident of Midlothian, Texas, a community for which ATSDR performed a health assessment. Midlothian is known as “the cement capital of the world,” and its kilns had released one billion pounds of toxic chemicals into the environment since 1990. ATSDR’s initial assessment was that there was no public-health hazard. “I finally realized,” Mier testified, “that regardless of what arguments are made or regardless of what empirical evidence is presented, the bottom line on public health consultation was determined before it even began.”

ATSDR withdrew three health assessments under public pressure, much of that the result of our investigation.

ATSDR FIRST CAME to our subcommittee’s attention after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. FEMA provided trailers as temporary housing to tens of thousands of people displaced by the hurricanes. The trailers reeked of formaldehyde, which is used as an adhesive in plywood, particle board, furniture, carpet, and upholstery. People who lived in the trailers complained of headaches, respiratory problems, nausea, rashes, and other apparent symptoms of toxic exposure.

The industry has hotly disputed the toxicity of formaldehyde for decades, but at the time, long-term exposure was thought to be likely linked to sinus cancer, brain cancer, and leukemia. FEMA asked ATSDR for a health assessment of formaldehyde exposure in the trailers. ATSDR’s February 2007 assessment concluded that formaldehyde exposure in the trailers was not a health hazard. ATSDR’s assessment assumed short-term exposure, which was not stated in the assessment. People by then had lived in the trailers for more than a year, well beyond what would constitute “short-term.” ATSDR told residents to open the windows if their trailer smelled of formaldehyde.

Sources at ATSDR told our staff that the agency’s leadership knew of potential litigation against FEMA by residents and environmental groups. The agency’s leadership denied that the assessment was intended for use in litigation, but FEMA used ATSDR’s health assessments to try to shoo away lawyers and distributed the health assessment to residents to assure them that the trailers were safe.

After congressional hearings and extensive press coverage, the CDC announced in February 2008 that new tests showed that formaldehyde levels in some trailers were a possible health hazard after all, and that residents should “be relocated to safer, permanent housing as quickly as possible.”

ATSDR also issued a health assessment in 2003 that unexploded ordnance at a Navy bombing range off the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico posed no health hazards, and that it was “safe to eat seafood from the coastal waters and near-shore islands.” Independent studies found that the unexploded ordnance leaked cancer-causing substances. Residents of Vieques had a 23 percent higher cancer rate than residents of the main island of Puerto Rico. Sea urchin and marine worms closest to the unexploded ordnance exhibited some toxic chemical levels that were 100,000 times more than established safe limits. In November 2009, ATSDR withdrew the Vieques assessment to collect additional data.

In 1997, ATSDR issued an assessment for a past health hazard at the Marine base at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Wells from which the base drew drinking water had been contaminated by unregulated solvents that leached into the groundwater. The Marines continued to use the wells for four years after learning of the contamination, but closed them between November 1984 and February 1985. The assessment concluded that exposure at the levels ATSDR believed were present did not pose a health threat to adults, but recommended further research on the effects of exposure on pregnant women and their children.

The assessment assumed that 20,000 to 30,000 gallons of fuel leaked from storage tanks into the groundwater. A Marine veteran found documents on the internet that showed the Marine Corps knew that between 1988 and 1991, an estimated 1.1 million gallons of gasoline were floating on top of the water table at Camp Lejeune, the result of 50 years of leaks and spills. Benzene, a component of gasoline, is a known carcinogen. The Marine Corps apparently posted the documents on the internet by accident.

ATSDR withdrew the 1997 assessment. They claimed that they never saw the documents and didn’t know the extent of the benzene contamination. ATSDR’s final 1997 assessment never mentioned benzene, though earlier drafts did. ATSDR also claimed that all the files on the 1997 assessment were accidently discarded. I did not find their story entirely credible.

Toxic contaminations are usually identified by a “cluster” of cancers or other illnesses near the contamination site. The Marines exposed to the contaminated water were scattered across the country. Under great pressure, the Marines tracked those veterans down to learn their health status. There was a stunningly high incidence of rare diseases, such as male breast cancer.

Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) and I introduced legislation to compensate Marine veterans who were exposed to the contaminated water for the cost of medical care for the diseases associated with the exposure. The legislation was enacted in 2012.

“The [Marine Corps] has known for 30 years that the drinking water at Camp Lejeune was contaminated,” I said during House debate. “They’ve known for 20 years exactly what chemicals were in the water. The science may have been slow to develop on the effects of exposure to those chemicals, but they knew better than to say that there was nothing to worry about, which is what they did. [The Marine Corps] concealed information from Marines and their families who drank the water, cooked with it, and bathed in it. They withheld information from the Centers for Disease Control [ATSDR] and from Congress. And they have shamefully failed to take responsibility for the contaminated water.”

My press secretary got an angry call from the Pentagon after that speech.

REAGAN’S FIRST EPA ADMINISTRATOR was a state legislator from Colorado, Anne Gorsuch Burford (Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s mother), who was investigated by two House committees in 1982 for political interference in the Superfund program. The EPA withheld $6 million for cleanup of a contaminated site in California to hinder the Senate campaign of the Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, and Burford incautiously said as much within the earshot of others.

Reagan asserted executive privilege over the documents that the committees subpoenaed, but career EPA employees leaked damning evidence to Congress of misconduct by Burford’s leadership team. Reagan publicly fired the head of the Superfund program, Rita Lavelle, and two other Superfund officials in February 1983. Burford resigned under pressure a month later. Burford’s deputy, John Hernandez, briefly served as acting administrator, but resigned because he let Dow Chemical edit the EPA’s draft report on dioxin contamination at a Dow plant. Lavelle was convicted in 1984 of perjury and obstruction of the House investigation.

The EPA improved after Burford’s resignation, but like ATSDR, got worse again in the George W. Bush administration.

A thick cloud of gray ash covered lower Manhattan when the World Trade Center towers collapsed. Four hundred tons of asbestos were used for fireproofing in construction, and more for insulation of pipes and the like. Fires smoldered for more than three months and burned other toxic chemicals, such as dioxin, as workers removed the debris.

According to Paul O’Neill, the Treasury secretary at the time, President Bush told senior staff that he wanted to reopen the New York Stock Exchange on September 13, two days after the attack, out of concern that disruption of Wall Street could be disastrous for the world’s financial system. That opening was delayed, but only until the following Monday, September 17, 2001.

Wall Street was still covered in ash from the collapse of the towers. “The good news continues to be that air samples we have taken have all been at levels that cause us no concern,” Christine Todd Whitman, the EPA administrator, told reporters three days after the attack. The EPA urged anyone who worked in the rubble to wear respirators because of asbestos and other toxins, although most did not. According to the EPA, however, the air in surrounding neighborhoods “did not pose a public health threat.” In a statement released by the EPA on September 18, the day after the New York Stock Exchange reopened, Whitman said, “I am glad to reassure the people of New York … that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink.”

Tens of thousands of financial-sector employees returned to work.

Whitman acknowledged in congressional testimony in 2007 that she talked by telephone with the White House on September 12 about the importance of reopening the stock market, but she insisted that the building be properly cleaned first. “Was it wrong to try to get the city back on its feet as quickly as possible, in the safest way possible? Absolutely not,” she said. “Safety was first and foremost but we weren’t going to let the terrorists win.”

Safety was not first and foremost. The White House wrote Whitman’s statement on September 18, not the EPA. Bush’s top environmental policy adviser was James Connaughton, not a scientist, but a partner at a large corporate law firm before he joined the Bush administration. He had lobbied for gasoline retailers and the Chemical Manufacturers Association. After Connaughton left the Bush administration, he managed government relations—in other words, lobbying—for a large energy company.

A report by the EPA’s inspector general in 2003 found that the EPA “did not have sufficient data and analyses to make … a blanket statement” about air quality. The EPA had no monitoring data for many pollutants, such as PCBs and dioxin. There were no established benchmarks for safe levels of other pollutants. The sampling methodologies for asbestos were imprecise, and conditions at the site made sample collection difficult. Even still, a significant percentage of the samples showed a disturbingly large presence of asbestos.

The IG also found that the White House’s influence over the EPA’s statements to the public was improper. The White House “convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones,” the IG’s report said.

Tens of thousands of people who lived or worked in downtown Manhattan on and after 9/11 have suffered from a constellation of illnesses associated with toxic exposure. Many have chronic respiratory illnesses or cancer. As of December 31, 2022, at least 5,578 people have died from toxic exposure that resulted from the World Trade Center attack, almost twice as many as the 2,974 who died on 9/11.

OUR SUBCOMMITTEE DID NOT JOIN the scrum of congressional investigations on the EPA’s response to 9/11. Instead, we investigated the EPA’s program to assess the health risks of specific chemicals. ATSDR’s leadership argued that their health assessments of contamination sites were often inconclusive because the science of the toxicity of the contaminants was inconclusive, and that our criticism was unjust. We wanted to know why the science was so uncertain, in their view.

The EPA created the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) in 1985 to provide a single source of current information and consensus opinion from scientific literature about the risks associated with exposure to various chemicals. The industries that manufacture and use toxic chemicals realized that scientific disputes about risk were their first line of defense against regulation or liability. The industries often had allies at the White House and among political appointees at the EPA. For those industries, the more tortured the analysis required to create or revise IRIS profiles for particular chemicals, the better.

By the early 1990s, there were IRIS profiles for roughly 500 chemicals. By 2009, there were profiles for 548. There were only two profiles completed in 2006 and two more in 2007. About 700 new chemicals enter commerce a year, with no requirement that companies that market new chemicals first provide information about possible toxicity. Meanwhile, more than half of the profiles in the IRIS database in 2009 are likely outdated because of later research.

In 2008, the GAO found that the “IRIS database is at serious risk of becoming obsolete because EPA has not been able to routinely complete timely, credible assessments.” There were 70 new or revised entries in the works, most for several years. Among the profiles that were delayed were formaldehyde; Royal Demolition Explosives, an explosive used by the military in munitions; tetrachloroethylene; and dioxin.

The Obama administration completed 31 profiles in eight years, a slight improvement on the Bush administration but a bitter disappointment to environmentalists. The White House reportedly stalled the profiles that industry most opposed. The most important and controversial profiles that were in the works at the beginning of the administration were still in the works eight years later.

The Trump administration completed one profile in four years. According to whistleblowers, Trump administration officials halted the EPA’s review of the public-health risk of toxic chemicals and suppressed the EPA’s draft findings that certain chemicals pose a significant cancer risk. Biden’s administration has published some long-delayed IRIS profiles for public comment, which is at least some progress.

Our subcommittee began to investigate IRIS in public hearings in 2008. The GAO publishes a list of federal government programs that are at “high risk” of failure. IRIS has been on that list for the past 15 years.

THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that President Biden’s EPA has downplayed toxic exposure in East Palestine to please industry, or that the initial ATSDR assessments are inaccurate. The agencies have leaked like sieves to Congress and the press for decades because the scientists have been faithful to their mission when the political leadership sometimes was not. But the history of both agencies still does not inspire confidence, whether due to corporate capture, corrupt political influence, or a tendency to provide unduly optimistic scientific conclusions on the effect of toxic chemicals rather than candidly acknowledge scientific uncertainty and proceed with the information available.

“I’m asking they trust the government,” Michael Regan, the EPA administrator, told reporters on a visit to East Palestine. “I know that’s hard. We know there’s a lack of trust.” It is unfair to blame Regan and others in the Biden administration for the sins of past administrations, but they have decades of earned distrust to overcome.

Rep. Brad Miller chaired the House Science Committee’s oversight subcommittee from 2007 to 2011. He was principal House sponsor of the Janey Ensminger Act, which was enacted in 2012 and provided medical care for Marines exposed to contaminated drinking water at Camp Lejeune. He now is North Carolina counsel to two Marine veterans who were exposed to the contaminated water at Camp Lejeune and now suffer from cancers associated with the exposure for claims under the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, which Congress enacted last year.

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