Reading Time: 4 minutes President Donald Trump wants to cut the number of federal advisory panels by one-third. Critics say this will make it much harder for agencies to rely on objective facts to do their job protecting the environment as well as public health and safety.
Reading Time: 6 minutes Federal agencies had already been reeling from the Trump administration’s disdain for regulation. The shutdown adds insult to injury — and puts Americans at risk.
Reading Time: 4 minutes The battle of humankind vs. nature might have been a draw this year — with several huge blows to the environment as the planet metaphorically struck back with devastating natural disasters. It is a fight with no winners.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Hurricane Harvey was supposed to be a 500-year event. Instead, it became the third and most destructive in three years. Whether Americans can outlast more catastrophic disasters will depend on the GOP’s willingness to acknowledge and combat the threat of climate change.
Reading Time: 7 minutes For 40 years, the federal government has failed to protect the public from toxic chemicals. Last year, a bipartisan Congress passed a law to change that state of affairs. Public health advocates worry that the Trump administration is now undermining it.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Government agencies continue to delay Obama-era regulations, leading to an influx of legal challenges from states.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Over half of the EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors have been dismissed to make way for fossil fuel advocates, leading many to worry about the vanishing role of independent scientific review within the agency.
Reading Time: 3 minutes A former EPA official involved in a controversial study of the health effects of Monsanto’s glyphosate is being taken to court by public interest advocates who want to know more about his ties to the company and the chemical industry.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Last spring, a report published on the EPA’s website said glyphosate does not cause cancer. It disappeared within a week and an advocacy group’s efforts to obtain the information has been met with silence. Now it is suing for access.
Reading Time: 6 minutes Pro-business lawyers, scholars dominate Hill conference pushing deregulatory agenda.
Reading Time: 6 minutes A large batch of emails from Scott Pruitt’s time as Oklahoma Attorney General reveal an alarmingly cozy relationship with oil and gas industries. Will he put their interests first as head of the EPA or those of the American people?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Part 1 of this series revealed the technical difficulties in assessing the potential harm from chemical additives like BPA. Part 2 focuses on the contamination of scientific review by money and politics, and why chemical regulatory systems are not only broken — they are unfixable.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Barack Obama began his presidency with a promise of unprecedented openness in government. But heading into his final year in office, journalists see an administration that is more interested in message-control than transparency.
Reading Time: 1 minute Paul DeRienzo appeared on the Thom Hartmann Program to talk about the risk of contamination and explosions from America’s nuclear stockpile waste.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Why did the president back away from a commitment that federal agencies use green electronics? Buried in a recent Executive Order on sustainability is recycled rhetoric that undermines long-standing federal policy.
Reading Time: 3 minutes Chevron is selling treated wastewater to California that has been shown to include oil and potentially harmful chemicals. What exactly is in the water used in agriculture is still the oil giant’s dirty secret.
Reading Time: 7 minutes Washington won’t act to slow the chaos of climate change, even as the Navy prepares to patrol an open Arctic Ocean and the oil industry pushes to be able to start drilling in newly ice-free Arctic waters.
Part two of a three-part WhoWhatWhy investigation.
Reading Time: 4 minutes [Updates below – Ed.] As the Obama administration attempts to overhaul the nation’s health care, energy, and financial sectors, it faces the growing leverage of the Blue Dog Coalition—the conservative, fifty-two-member faction of the House’s Democratic caucus—to moderate, or obstruct, its goals. The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) recently published an investigation into the Blue Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes In the days after the November election, Obama’s advisers announced “the strictest, and most far reaching ethics rules of any transition team in history.” These rules included a ban on lobbyists joining the new administration. Why would political ethics demand such a prohibition? According to Obama’s transition team, the new policy sought to curb the Read More