Under increasing scrutiny for allegedly cooking the books on global climate change and other crucial issues over the last seven years, the political appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency are trying to circle the wagons.
Somebody better take custody of a lot of the agency’s records before there’s a suspicious air quality permit issued for a giant bonfire.
Members of the EPA’s professional staff were instructed by e-mail this summer not to answer any questions from the press, from the investigative arm of Congress or even from the EPA’s own inspector general’s division. Any questions they did get were supposed to be referred to official EPA spokesmen.
The gag order for people who know what the EPA is really doing to protect, or not protect, the environment was lamely explained away as just an attempt to be more efficient. But, with various members of Congress increasingly on the lookout for evidence that the agency’s top dogs have blacked out their own employees’ work on the effects of global climate change, the memo looks more like a rock in a bureaucratic stonewall.
Members of at least two Senate committees, Judiciary and Environment, want to know who has been tampering with such things as EPA scientific reports on how climate change could impact public health (which the staff said it will, big time) and whether to approve California’s own carbon dioxide regulations (which the staff said it should).
It is in that atmosphere that the memo requiring that professional staff members not only decline to answer questions, but make sure their political masters know who is asking them, was sent. It smells for all the world like an attempt at a giant cover-up, with Bush administration loyalists all the while gathering information that will aid in their spin campaigns.
The belief that the Bush EPA has been politicized to the degree that its professional and scientific staff has been neutralized and its official pronouncements censored of any meaningful science is abroad in the land and growing. The only cleanser for such a stain is for everyone at EPA to fully cooperate with the investigations that Congress and the EPA’s own inspector general are launching, along with keeping communications with the public open through the press.
EPA officials who remember that their loyalty is to the American people, not to whomever happens to be president at the time, will answer those questions anyway. And anyone who gets in the way will have some answering to do, as well.
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