Some U.S. Agencies Ignore Laws

The next president of the United States will face an appalling task.

He or she will have to discover --- and then reverse --- Bush administration policies that have systematically degraded public health and the environment in the service of commercial interests.

One conspicuous example of this trend was reported in the New York Times recently. It involved a number of workers who became ill at a popcorn plant in the Missouri town of Jasper. State health authorities first consulted scientists from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health whose task it is to investigate the causes of health problems in the workplace.

In a short time the NIOSH scientists found that the workers had become ill after they were exposed to diacetyl, a material used to flavor food. However, their findings had little effect on the policies of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration whose job it is to administer safety rules in the workplace. Although more workers at the plant became ill, OSHA did not schedule inspections at the plant and did not require any new standards for plant operations.

Later, at a congressional hearing, OSHA officials said they would issue a safety bulletin and inspect a small number of the thousands of plants that use diacetyl. According to the New York Times report, “That response reflects OSHA’s practices under the Bush administration, which vowed to limit new rules and roll back what it considered cumbersome regulations that imposed unnecessary costs on businesses and consumers.”

Edwin G. Foulke Jr., who heads OSHA, was quoted as saying the agency favors
“a voluntary compliance strategy” under which businesses police themselves.

According to the Times report, “Three of the biggest industries regulated by OSHA --- transportation, agri-business and construction --- have given more than $630 million in political contributions since the year 2000, with nearly three-quarters of that money going to Republicans.”

The diacetyl case is not the only instance in which the Bush administration has
adopted policies that put business profits ahead of workers’ health or the environment. A number of other cases have come to light in judicial decisions.

Some examples:

1. The Bush administration issued new rules that would allow states to pursue logging and other commercial projects in the roadless areas of national forests where such work had previously been prohibited. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, critics said that the change “expedited logging and energy exploration but weakened wildlife protection and shut the public out of forest planning.” A lawsuit objecting to the policy change was filed and a federal judge in San Francisco rejected the new rules.

2. The Bush administration reduced restrictions on logging that were designed to protect the lives of salmon as part of the Northwest Forest Plan. A judge in Seattle ruled that the administration’s action was illegal.

3. One of the practices that are most destructive to the environment is mountaintop strip mining. It is practiced extensively in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia. Here is how one writer, Erik Reece, described the process in a New York Times article:

“Mountaintop removal entails the blasting of entire summits to rubble in an effort to reach, as quickly as possible, thin seams of bituminous coal. Trees, topsoil and sandstone are dumped into the valleys below. More than 1,000 miles of streams have been buried this way and an Environmental Protection Agency study found that 95 percent of headwater streams near mines have been contaminated by heavy metals leeching from the sites.”

Mountaintop removal destroys forests, pollutes streams, and causes flooding, but federal agencies have not intervened to stop it. According to Reece, “…the coal companies are too powerful, the politicians are corrupt, the regulators won’t regulate and the news media don’t care.”

This is one of the most egregious example in which environmental regulations are ignored so that companies can rake in profits and leave a mutilated landscape behind.

It is difficult enough to protect the environment and workers’ health. It is tragic when necessary laws are passed and then federal agencies adopt policies that in effect nullify the laws or allow businesses to ignore them.