but the hearing will come to order good morning and welcome to our second hearing integrated risk assessment system iris now the glacial pace at which e p a is completing assessments of chemicals has real consequences for public health and tragic consequences for human beings and their families the completion of an r f assessment of an hour assessment i did that the last hearing as well completion of an arse assessment is just the first step in the process of protecting people from dangerous exposure to toxic chemicals when an iris assessment with it our success and in place it is easier to deal with the cleanup of chemical contamination of the air or water to adopt safer practices in the workplace and to consider steps to to regulate toxic substances that can harm our children and our communities the government accountability office recent report on our us conclude that e p a process for initiating completing our assessments resulted in proposals that are now in preparation for more than five years with some assessors taking more than a decade the new process that no and they instituted just in april will add additional years to our assessments according to the g a o conclusions the years of study and discussion regarding our assessments comes on top of a regulatory process that is bored with time consuming steps for complete risk assessment cost benefit analysis and internal links and external reviews all is laid out in executive orders and in statute even after a regulation is finalized it can be challenged in court and sent back to the agency for revision when finally establish new regulation usually includes some some time off to many years for the effect affected parties to transition away from the practices that are being regulated during this entire process exposures continued toxic substances remain unregulated or under regulated in commerce and contamination is not cleaned up we're not cleaned up to a level that we think is actually safe today we will hear from people who have lived and are living with those consequences people will describe what their families and communities have endured for years situations that no one would wish to endure for a day when while the failures of the i r s database are not responsible for these these experiences the gaps in our in the improper intrusion of politics into database entries have likely contributed to the situations that these people in their communities have had to deal with when state and local authorities get poor information or no information from our is regarding the health hazards of a particular pollutant their response to pollution in a community is likely to be confused and confusing when citizens can't turn to hours for information and the database gets twenty thousand  web hits a year then it is hard for them to know what they are fighting in terms of clean ups cleanup and health risks the worst thing about these families experiences is that they are likely to be repeated because exposures to the chemical that led to the experiments showed that it might cause cancer it is one of the most frequently occurring contaminants in superfund sites and it is present in air drinking water and soils e p a has been working on a revised t t c e assessment since y expeditious is not a word that describes a situation g a o estimates that e p a will not complete their t c assessment until twenty ten that's twenty one years from the start date if they ten we will still be years away from real regulatory action people have been exposed to a known toxic substance for decades for a generation while their government has engaged in one study after another have we become so obsessed with getting it with getting the the science exactly right that we have a lot of our real goal protecting public health or is getting the science exactly right a pretext for obstruction of any real protection of the public this system defies the files commonsense it is broken it is condemning people to future health problems and al record and that he be instructed to respond to certain written questions by members of the committee and their staff and that the responses to those questions also be placed on the record without objection  i miss chairman the integrated risk information system iris process was originally developed for a specific task different offices throughout the e p a were relying on different assessments of the health effects of chronic exposure to toxic chemicals iris was intended to establish uniform data base within the however over time iris has become an authoritative resource on chemical toxicity other agencies states the international community  interagency review process limit the usefulness and credibility of e p a s integrated risk information system unquote that's a mouthful but i think it says where we're apt and in my opinion it accurately sums up the jail's findings irises actual production numbers are even worse a b a currently has a backlog of seventy out of going assessments and has managed to complete only two assessments in each of the last two years talk about a snail's pace at the current pace it will take thirty five years for the e p a to finish its current backlog and that's assuming it takes no further tasks the e p a has attempted to develop a uniform process for iris assessments the agency argues that it can expedite the iris process by involving other agencies earlier in the process preventing last minute delays is an important reform the ability of other agencies to extend the timeframe of assessments should be sharply limited data gaps in risk assessments will always exist as better science is always developing e p a needs to limit the time frame of assessments to prevent other agencies from indefinitely delaying the process the e p a must also balance its need to complete assessments with the rights of the interested parties to comment best way to achieve this balance would be to give more notice of its assessments to comment on what they deem to be insufficiencies in the scientific grech or during this comment period each can focus on its backlog because it offered a comment period he can then fairly limit the ability of outside parties to delay assessments once they are underway the result would be a more efficient process that preserves experience money and promotes public health in my opinion that's a win win i urge the p to consider these proposals because iris must be fixed and april this subcommittee held a hearing on formaldehyde levels and trailers provided to the victims of hurricane katrina and that hearing we investigated how the agency for toxic substances in the disease registry struggled to identify the proper level of concern for long term exposure from aldehyde e p a determined its formaldehyde assessment was outdated in one nine hundred ninety seven unanimous consent that any additional statements a bit about members be included in the record without objection so ordered and now it is my pleasure to introduce our witnesses today the first is a north carolinian at least one adopted north carolinian included in the record for the hearing when you have completed your testimony we will begin with questions each member will have five minutes to question the panel it is a practice of the committee of the subcommittee to take testimony under oath to any of you have any objection to being sworn committee also provides that you may be represented by counsel or you represented by counsel today's hearing if you now would please stand and raise your right hand my name is jerry as mayor and i served my country faithfully for more than twenty four years in the united states marine corps i would like to thank the chairman of the committee members and their staff for all the hard work that went into making these hearings possible i must say that since three january two thousand and seven i have been heartened and inspired by the oversight activities of this congress you have been taking on the important issues that matter to the majority of our citizens not just the issues that affect benefit special interest groups and big business i am appearing here today as a tragic example of the consequences of a system that ignores our environment inevitable health effect that results from a marine corps base camp was you north carolina is quite possibly one of if not the worst water contamination incidents in modern world history water while stationed at camp with whom my daughter janie was conceived while her mother and i lived in one of the base family housing areas where the drinking water was affected by the contamination at the base just the protocol and proposal for this study outlined that the expected occurrences of the target illnesses in a cohort of ten to twelve thousand births for that time period would be seven point two cases chairman let me lay out some of the facts and figures relating to the campus to water contamination situation the documented levels of contaminants in the finished drinking water at the tap were some two hundred eighty times higher than what is considered currently safe for these very same chemicals the navy bureau of medicine and surgery issue strict regulations in their view met instruction sixty two forty point three b hundred sixty three governing possible water distribution systems one naval shore facilities including included in these regulations were preemptive measures to ensure that existing and future water supplies were not contaminated by extraneous sources family housing area water supply wells were located on the virtual property line down gradient and directly across the street from potential civilian contamination sources gasoline stations auto repair facilities dry cleaning of stablish vents and known septic systems in one nine hundred seventy one the naval facility facilities engineering command from norfolk virginia came to camp woon and selected multiple sites for the construction of new drinking water supply wells one of these new wells was h p six fifty one which began producing raw water for the ca luna had not point water distribution plant in january of one nine hundred seventy two the site which had been selected by the navy engineers for the place placement of h p six fifty one was at the back corner of the base disposal yard the junk yard the disposal yard had been in operation for decades by the time they selected this site for a water supply well in the irony of all this is the fact that many of the human exposures that took place at camp when june would have been avoided had navy and marine corps officials follow their own regulations the most audacious and blasphemous took any action to rectify the problem navy and marine corps officials were knowingly poisoning their own people that is correct all of this was known in taking place behind the scenes at the very same time that my daughter j t was suffering through her fight with leukemia and they said absolutely nothing not only did they say nothing they went as far as to return to one of the three contaminated wells for the taro a terrace housing area back on line for two more years they had the option of tapping into the local community water line which were located just a few feet from the property line instead navy and marine corps officials up against this idea because they didn't want to zero the local government any reciprocating favors since the a t s p r under the gates of camp was human to execute their congressionally mandated mission representatives of the department of the navy have done all they could to obstruct their efforts i can make this statement with confidence because i possess the documentation to back it up as recently as the week before i asked d o d and department of the navy officials were threatening to thwart a p s t our initiative to kant was shown by withholding the i spoke earlier about my daughter janie my daughter janie i don't know if anybody else in this room ever had a child that was diagnosed with a catastrophic illness but i can do assure you w diagnosed and they told me that she had leukemia it took me to my very nice in the hallway at the naval hospital at camp and my forehead went down on the deck and i broke out in a sweat and i could not move he went through hell and all of us that loved her went through hell with her a six year old child naturally they've had their normal inoculations but a child with leukemia gets poked and prodded you just can't believe what they go through i had my daughter in the treatment rooms when they took needles and broke through her hip to extract bone marrow to test and she screamed in my ear daddy daddy don't let when she got hit with chemotherapy i'd make it a few miles down the road and she'd get so sick i'd have to stop and pull over and her learn and rubber back while she threw her guts up wishing that i could take that on for my child to put it on myself but god wouldn't do it straight when she was allowed to go back to school her treatments made her look like a freak she lost her hair she gained more than thirty pounds at a time when she was on steroids her schoolmates would pick on our color cabbage patch kids she'd come home from school griet i don't know how many times i had to take things to just go out to the beach and walk to try to make sense out of what was happening to her at duke university medical center where janie died getting a lot of receiving a lot of her treatments in the pediatric ward the majority of the rooms up there have soft walls they fold there's two rooms at the corners right a directly across from the nurse's station that has two solid walls they're referred to by the parents as the dining rooms and the closer your child comes to die and the closer you are to those two rooms when you get moved in the one of them you know you're next it's like watching milling around walking toward your bunker nights in the hospital i spent countless nights in a cot it forward down out of the wall and you lay in that hospital all hours of the night listening to the kids that they got in the treatment room screaming and the day of her death i never cried in front of the whole time she was being treated which was nearly two and a half years that morning that day i started crying and she looked up at me and she had pneumonia and she could hardly talk and she looked at me and she said stop it and i said stop what if you said stop crying daddy she said i love you and i said janey i know that i said i love you do and she said i know those were the last words my daughter spoke to me she went into a coma thirty five minutes later she was dead  jane is dead now nothing's going to bring her back but there are people that were exposed to camp adults the siblings of these in utero children that failures those people need help we don't need any more delays from d o d and the department of the navy and united states marine corps it is a known fact that the united states department of defense is our nation's largest polluter it is beyond my comprehension why an entity with that type of reputation and who has a past vested interest in not seeing or looks seeing little to no environmental oversight would be included in the scientific process not only are they obstructing science they are also jeopardizing the public health for millions of people all around the world it is quite obvious by their activities thwart science that they have something to fear what they fear is the past negligence and the liability that comes along with that there is no wonder why d o d has been seeking immunities from environmental regulations for the last seven years running and yet this administration and past congress is that allowed their tentacles to infiltrate the realm of science me just back off a little bit of allow science to speak for itself and let the chips fall where they may thank you much german good morning i'm from the town of mountain view california we have about seven or eight superfund sites and numerous other contamination sites and i work with communities all over the country visit communities have visited and i hear lots of stories like like jerry's the environmental protection agency's integrated risk information system is the foundation of most of the federal state and tribal risk management decisions that determine the safety of the air that we breathe the water we drink and the soil under our feet the quantitative judgments imbedded in iris may read like a foreign language or quantum physics to most americans people don't understand it but those judgments affect our health our environment and our property announcement in april of the new process for iris simply institutionalizes an approach that has been used at least for perchlorate and tricor atheling this is an approach that unnecessarily puts americans at risk and lay terms the fox is now managing the hen house in my prepared testimony i tell the story of tricor atheling i could tell perchlorate because i've been i've worked on that as well  he's had delayed and perhaps prevented in the long run the establishment of more protective health standards for t c e and that's the process they use for that as this is a apparently the precedent for the new iris what was called the interagency working group and that working group sent it to the national academy of sciences for a review in early two thousand and three january two thousand and three e p a scientists came to my community mountain view to discuss the migration of t c v t c e vapors into homes and businesses at least fo contamination sites one of them was not superfund the other were superfund there are over four hundred people attended that meeting pictures up there e p a told us that based on the two thousand one risk assessment the t c was five to sixty five times as toxic as previously believed i learned about a year later from a friend in the navy that that provisional risk assessment would never be implemented  that but the pay was going to withdraw it and indeed go through the process i just mentioned but they weaken the standards and those staff those we can standards have led to less protection from the people in my community and communities throughout the country even though as chairman miller read the academy of sciences review committee found that the evidence that t c causes cancer was even stronger than e p a believed in two thousand and one still e p a has really done almost nothing to move forward to establish standards for new standards for  the key point of my testimony is that these numbers and iris actually make a difference in people's lives and their health what happens to their property this is a picture of my friend james house about a half mile from my house she lives across the street from the birthplace of the semiconductor industry and they originally thought that the plume boundary for t c e was in the middle of the street in front of her house it turns out the plan goes under our house because when they tested her son's bedroom they found point eight micrograms per cubic meter of t c e in the in the air according to the initial standard the scientists brought in you know based on a two thousand one health risk assessment back before the two thousand and one health risk assessment he was considered safe so it made a difference fortunately and i use it's really not fortunate at all but the measurements in the basement in the house were higher and so they installed a fan  to ventilate the house and lower that the contamination so after age eleven her son's exposures went down because we did something about it we don't know whether he'll get sick as a result minnesota she had contamination in her private drinking water supply between the five parts per billion which is the long as the longstanding standard for t c e in drinking water and one which is where everybody expected them the number to minnesota is that people who had contamination above five would have treatment systems on their their private wells she didn't get it and she died of cancer a couple years ago and her son asked me you know why is it that that she didn't get the protection now i can't say i'm not a scientist and i'm not sure scientists can tell you whether she got sick because of that exposure or to what degree it added to the risk that she faced because we're you know we drink this stuff breathe this stuff all over the place but i do know that that number made a difference as to whether her water was treated for the that she was drinking and was showering in and being exposed to the numbers also make a difference to these polluting agencies we found on the web an air force presentation a few years back around the time that this was all happening they figured out that would cost the department of defense five billion dollars extra to clean up t c if they standard went from five parts per billion to one part per billion for drinking water i don't know whether that's really true there are reasons why it might not be as high but it might have been hi the point is that the defense department's interest in this is primarily one of the fact that they're responsible party rather than they are there their mission is to protect human health and the environment so the people that i work with people who are impacted her breathing and drinking the contamination at these sites a calling on e p a to withdraw the rib agents that are made in the iris process in april because they're basically institutionalizing something that has been putting people at risks already and we've come up with three principles that we think that the iris process should involve and then i was process isn't the entire process but it's the foundation of it first all stakeholders including the affected public private polluters federal polluting agencies including the defense department should have the same access to the decision making process for the federally funded risk relevant research should be managed by agencies to do not have conflicts of interest that is agencies that will not that is the agencies that will incur the agencies that will incur significant costs and conferences like limits on their mission and associated with more protective health and environmental standards should not control those research activities what happened with perchlorate is the defense department sponsored some research didn't like the results so they sponsored more research to disprove it i'm much more comfortable in the centers for disease control studies because they are not encumbered by the conflict of interest and i guess that was i should have put that forward so that was a second principle and the third one the entire process of assessing hazardous substances should be carried out in the sunshine with oversight by the public the press and by congress i'm not a toxicologist or nappanee meola just i assume the members of this committee are not the same as well we are in a position to determine whether it should be one five or fifty for t c e but we're calling upon you this is a people who are living and breathing this stuff we are calling upon you to ensure that we have a fair open and timely process to evaluate not only the chemicals that we're discussing today but the many more that impact our lives thank you thank you m defense council where i've been for fifteen years and i've watched the e p a s evaluation of toxic chemicals for many years both in my capacity as the director of the health program at an r t c as a member of the executive committee of the science advisory board where i served for six years in on many committees of the national academy of sciences including mostly recently the committee on emerging issues and toxic chemicals i commend you mr miller for your interest in the iris review process and more specifically in your concern and the committee's concern about the recent changes that have been made to this program iris is as you have said a cornerstone program at e p a which provides the scientific information necessary to develop our nation's air and drinking water standards as well as hazardous waste cleanup levels the changes that are the subject of today's hearing are yet another escalation of the administration's war on science and public health that has gone on for nearly eight years its record of political interference with the work of government scientists across a range of environmental issues including global warming or even endangered species has been well established things are no better in the case of analyzing and regulating toxic chemicals that pose a risk to health in this area the administration has attempted and in some cases succeeded in blocking weakening and delaying health standards for a very long list of pollutants including arsenic mercury lead benzene perchlorate formaldehyde particula lane in addition the administration has weakened the public's right to know about the release of toxic chemicals into their community thus the recent changes to the iris program that are so the subject of today's hearing are properly viewed as one of them as  one part of a much broader agenda to sacrifice public health protections and limit public understanding of the risk of tax of chemicals in a manner that benefits a host of polluting industries and federal agencies for many years i was assessments were developed by e p a scientists drafts were released simultaneously for public comment and external independent peer review oh and b n government agencies such as d o t are dealy who sometimes had a stake in the outcome of the evaluation because of their obligations to address contamination at their facility he has had an opportunity to review and comment on the draft when it was released for public comment these procedures allow the scientific experts to create and own the assessments and kept under the influence by government agencies with a polluter profile to a minimum the new process established by the white house turns this process on its head it invites interference by o m b and other agencies both at the outset of the process in the middle and at the better end a license to kill so to speak if the process did not end as they wished importantly these newly introduced intervention points are considered deliberative and hence shielded from public view forcing e p a to respond to concerns behind closed doors and alarming the new opportunities are not limited to data critiques one particularly misguided new feature offers agencies outside e p a up to two years to undertake their own additional studies of quote mission critical chemicals suspending e p a s evaluation of these contaminants for a very substantial period of time while they take advantage of this opportunity today to delay a potential day of reckoning although current e t a labor leadership argues that new process was developed in order to provide  and i quote greater transparency activity balance rigor and predictability to the ira's assessments we would characterize these crane changes quite differently in our view the new process is designed precisely to give the polluting agencies more access more opportunity for delay and more influence to what has historically been an objective scientific evaluation process and to allow these opportunities to occur behind closed doors hiding the exercise of that influence from public view in fact if one's intention was to design a new system that would deliver great influence to government agencies with pollution problems over e p a rules it would be hard to think of a system that would be better than this one the claim that the new process will result in a mall balance and objective result simply doesn't pass the laugh test before closing i'd like to turn briefly to issue of timeliness which as we've seen from our other witnesses is a real problem in the iris program the iris program has always struggled to keep pace with the e p a s regulatory needs and many environmental contaminants lacking our assessments are quite important to public health for one for chlorox for another there's no iris risk assessments for nearly one third of the hundred and eighty nine hazardous air pollutants for example furthermore even where important chemicals are in the iris database the risk assessments available for many of these chemicals are outdated the average assessment on iris is over thirteen years old with the oldest having not been significantly revised since the  and as has been mentioned these problems greatly exacerbate the already long period of time required for e p a standards setting procedures up to a decade in some cases and had been the focus of criticism for some time clearly constructive reform of the  program is needed and constructive reform would focus on increasing resources available to undertake iris reviews as well as policy changes that would streamline the difficult decision making inherent in the process the new procedures run completely counter to these goals and will only exacerbate the backlog properly implemented the e p a iris program provides a crucial scientific service to the public and i emphasize speed is important but scientific integrity is paramount these changes hit iris on both fronts in a terrible way slowing the process further and compromising its content we request that the science committee and the subcommittee work with other house colleagues to ensure that the new iris process is overturned or withdrawn and that you require iris health assessments reviewed to be reviewed in an open process without an appropriate political interference thank you very much for this opportunity to testify thank you dr greer at this point we witnesses have testified the current hours process allows repeated interagency in prague governmental discussions about the health risk assessments those but your testimony made it pretty clear that you do not believe that your former employer the department of defense talks about public health or expresses concern for public health they are more concerned about potential clean up costs mr siegel said perhaps as much as five billion dollars not doing is talking about the public good i have always thought that democracy dies behind closed doors to use justice brandeis is phrase sunlight is the best disinfectant and the electric light the most efficient policeman but last week in our hearings susan dudley the head of the closed door meetings she said that it encouraged candor that people could say exactly what was on their mind and not worry about the consequences of it because they knew that what they had to say would go no further and therefore they could say exactly what they thought and process was better as a result do you have any thoughts on her view of the the virtues of closed door meetings and a deliberative process to decide mr chairman it is my opinion that if somebody has to go behind closed doors to say something they have something to hide and why else would they want to say it out in the open if you can't say it slightly different perspective i've served on a number of national academy of sciences committee dealing with various contaminations at department defense facilities and those meetings they exclude d o d and we have a number of scientists talking frankly and that works because i'm in the room because they have a representative of the public interest in the room to make sure that it's not just a few people trying to pull the wool and everybody else over everybody else's eyes there are stages in various processes where private private discussions may make sense but not if a major interest group is excluded group and i i strongly believe that my presence affects what other people in the room say because dana you know not that not that i'm going to run to the press and leak something but they have to treat things differently when they know that  somebody who's asking real questions the you think perhaps the candor that susan dudley thought was a virtue of being being able to say whatever you thought was actually not such a virtue say things they aren't sure of and then i'll know i see you're right and they are quoted in the press and the thing isn't taken too far but that only works if it's open to other people with other interests so that's and that's a scientific discussion but not a political discussion dr greer well i think the important principle here is transparency and accountability of the decision making and what we've seen through various experiences that is that behind closed doors arguments are made data is hidden and the decision that comes out in the end is not transparent and it's not accountable so although there may be a minor role for informal conversations to try to get your act together the general principle for all e p a rulemaking is one of transparency and accountability to the public and to all affected parties and that is what we lose with these they have guidance documents on principles of how to make these decisions and they have decades of experience in making these decisions i would contrast that against any of the scientific experts in any of these agencies are you know ira who are really does e p a have the capacity but i think that the the other agencies that the there are a lot of good people department of defense are trying to do good science too and they're capable of communicating with e p a and a p s capable of communicating back and the involvement to me smacks of a political involvement that you have people who are involved not primarily because of their scientific expertise but because of their political obligations that is the chart that she said streamlined the r s process dr mr siegel does that is that your impression like g a o is that that actually will further complicate not streamline it does not look just to the two mile in line as to be a simplification of the earlier chart you know as i said you know there are a lot of good people at e p a and career people i talk to are you know very concerned about this sort of thing and i tease them i say take c p a thirty days to put in a light bulb and and basically you know you have not just with iris but with a large number of process sees things  just drag on and on as well people are already exposed it's one thing if there's a delay and nobody's being exposed and you basically have people like surely like jane sun like janie and finger people who are being exposed while this is being this process goes on so again things that take a long time that are complicated are ok if people are safe but if you don't know that they're safe you need to act quickly when we've tried to accelerate some of these some of these studies like on perchlorate they just say we can't possibly do it by such and such a date well i guess that's because they don't really care staff who overruled the thousands that worked at e p a boy and that's well again what you just said is consistent with what i had heard but when and when i asked susan dudley that the head of a lar she did not seem to get a clear answer and she said that they had access to other expertise that they that they employed well and then the ms mr siegel made a comment a while ago about the o d had good researchers on their staff this is ludicrous is it the department of defense or is it the department of legal defense sections periods where there was an opportunity for anyone in the private sector to be part of deliberative discussions and obviously public comment is not a deliberative discussion or secretive as i'm sure you would  and i would too and she said no that actually all of the calm participation by the private sector would be through public comment there was no opportunity for them to have any say any opportunity to influence an hour's decision on our assessment not t c e manufacturers not in the private sector companies that might face clean up calls no opportunity except during public comment mr siegel is that consistent with your own observations of the process it's my understanding that through the perchlorate study group and you may have the documents that the contractors for these federal polluting agencies have have a direct line to to the different defense department nasa participants because these agencies end up in many cases paying for the clean up of the contractor obligations i mean it's a little known when congress looked at this all over ten years ago that companies like lockheed and aerojet charge the cost of their clean up off as overhead on their government contracts and the people in the defense department who are in charge of dealing with with it know it so they are very open to input from these companies when they go to e p a i don't know that the companies are actually in the deadly less talking about it there is plenty of precedent for that not being true you know in this case that was a group set up by the military they were present in the so called interagency deliberations and was actually the chair of the deliberations in many of the meeting notes that an r t c has so they were running the deliberation let alone not present if there were not  about that well you know their federal agencies have always had an opportunity to comment and weigh in on these assessments that's been the case all the time they've weighed in with during the public comment period but not in secret and you know not with a license to kill that's the big difference between what we're looking at today and the normal procedures we certainly would not object to having these agencies weigh in with the public you know on the record so to speak you know one of the things that i wonder is whether what these agencies agencies including agencies saying in private is what they're actually saying in public is that we have no way of knowing that and keeping track of all the people who've been exposed is no small task how is the government doing to deny finding people who had been exposed and trying to see what he outcomes they have had whether they've had health consequences that are consistent with the t c exposure risk their answer your question mr chairman to date to date there have been no studies done on any population groups at camp alone other than the in utero population and other words of the siblings of those in utero children their parents the men and women who were stationed at camp as the marines and sailors and the civilian employees that work aboard the base to date no studies have been done on them trying to get the department of defense department the navy and the united states marine corps to execute a notification process  actually had to go to the extreme of getting an amendment to the defense authorization bill through the senate last year to force them to live up to their own motto which is separate but that was always science and science policy pushed him some on exactly what he meant by science policy and i think most people with science policy was just part of sasaki a razor for instance appears beside policy  rather than strictly science dr greer can you give us some idea of what elements of policy might be in an r s list so you know there is a mixture of science and some decisions that i would call policy decisions in an iris assessment for example deciding whether the data is has enough certainty to negate the need for a safety factor or two and whether or not a certain study shows that there really is disproportionate vulnerability in a certain type of population i think the key thing here though to focus on is that those policy decisions are best made by relying on existing e p a guidance documents because the key here is consistency the key here is consistency in how you make those decisions so that you get objective clear and health protective decisions and those guidance documents are publicly vetted publicly commented on an open and so what i get worried about in this distinction between science and policy is that we lose the we lose the plot here that the plot here is how to make consistent decisions that err on the side of protecting public health and that is not about individual analysts or even the boss george gray inserting his own personal opinion on how he think something out of go that is about following the rules of the road that e p a has in those longstanding documents and something like one of the innovative things and the t c e human health risk assessment the draft from two thousand and one is incorporated exposures because if you're exposed to other similar chemicals or t c e or even alcohol can and enhanced the impact of the exposure and then the scientist who led that study explained it to me as an analogy of taxes if you make five zero dollars a year and then all of a sudden you make five thousand dollars more your taxes don't really go up you barely pay any taxes anyhow but if you start out at a hundred thousand and you go one hundred five thousand and your taxes might go up a couple thousand dollars and the same is true with the body if you're already have a load of exposure to chemicals that affect the kidney or affect the fact the liver various parts of the body and it goes up it has an impact the two thousand one human health risk assessment incorporated that that's a policy decision some people argue the other side saying now we should address that at the risk management stage when we decide whether or not to treat the well to treat the air or something like that that is a viable arguments a policy debate unfortunately i don't know of any place where that came of exposure is addressed at the risk management stage so i think i would go with a two thousand one health risk assessments are to say yes we should do it in the risk assessment phase and that should be part of virus but that is a policy decision that affects how the science comes out strange when you seem to want to answer th they go back to that thing about the studies though there are there are some feasibility studies that have been proposed by eighty s t r for some of these other population groups the protocols have just been written for them they are there in the peer review process now and approval process but like i said in my testimony just the week before last the department of defense department of the navy were bulking at one point six million and eighty s t r is estimating that next years these feasibility studies and their water modeling a camp of jonah it's going to come where somewhere close to twelve million i can just hear him now but you know they're doing everything they can to kill the camp of june efforts and they're going to use every excuse in but mr siegel and i think dr greer mr is mayor has obviously done a good deal of research and it's obvious what his motivation is from having heard his testimony that the typical expectation for a population the size of the folks who are the children who are exposed in utero would have been seven point two cases  expected but mr siegel your discussion of the cumulative effect is that is it's likely that that baseline does include a fair number  of folks whose leukemia is a result of it of environmental exposures is that the question makes sense yeah i mean basically it's very difficult to show to a single chemical and so it's very difficult to show that that the particular even in ingenious cases it's difficult to show that that particular exposure cause the disease but we know that if we know something about the exposures that it was probably a very major major percentage of the cause not just but but if there were other exposures that would have also increased it and the problem we have a problem of burden of burden of proof in this country and i'll give an example of i'm a man i met in kentucky earlier this year where he was he was one of the key subjects in a study by the university of kentucky which showed that there is a relationship between t ism and he was obviously very sick and what woman who was with them wasn't exposed as much as she wasn't quite as sick and they used just for this very well you know regarded published scientific study and that's great that they can show that there's probably a t c e is a factor in parkinsonism but he told me that this doctor who did the study on him they included him would not certify for his purpose of workers compensation that he was sick because of that exposure and so we've always studying that's going on and a lot of scientists are you know getting awards and degrees and all kinds of stuff for doing it but the the problem that i have is the studies go on and they don't end up helping people and that's that's baseline be the result of an in some part to some extent of environmental exposures you know i mean to some extent you know what they try to do is compare against a control population that looks the same about everything except the exposure of concern but i'll tell  that environmental at the study that shows twice as high as expected is very alarming i mean two times as high is a high as a high rate for an environmental at the study and the reason for that is because unlike laboratory animals that you control every single thing that they're exposed to people are exposed to a lot of things and people smoke and people have other diseases etc etc so when you're comparing a disease caused by an environmental exposure with a baseline of disease it's sort of muddy and you have a hard time seeing trends two times is high for environmental at the study and would certainly be a red flag for most environmental epidemiologists as something that looks like a registry as part of the c d c the centers for disease control they were involved in the scene the trailers i guess hundreds of thousands of people who were staying who were living in  result of being victims of katrina being displaced by katrina and rita mr sensenbrenner mentioned that in his opening remarks that we had had a hearing on fema trailers and the formaldehyde exposure  e ask a t s t or for a helpful assessment obviously would not have done them a lot of good to go to the to our us to to find out what what the effect of our of formaldehyde was  dealings with them well specifically eighty s t r is many many different departments many different departments several different departments their largest department is the department of health assessments and cons and there are so many errors in that public health assessment and every one of those errors have been pointed out to those people and they absolutely refused to pull that help us down and correct it  last year there was a hearing held up specifically about campus joan and we almost had to beat them into submission just to get them to put a disclaimer up at the beginning of that public health assessment so people were looking at that thing and relying on the erroneous information that they have on their website now public health assessments and consultations with  eighty eight when we discussed this yesterday with some of your staff a t s t our was given an exception when they were created back in the early eighty's to bypass the peer review process because of the backlog in superfund sites that they needed to do assessments on so congress gave them a pass on the peer review process for public health assessments that done there is no backlog for superfund sites anymore eighty s t r needs to be held to the same standard as everybody else and those public health assessments need to go through a peer review process and i'll guarantee you if this is instituted you will see a much better product coming out of eighty s t r than you see now not a matter little standard quotes that they can just slip in there and nobody ever questions about you if you make them go through the peer review process you'll see a lot of people that work at eighty s t r that won't be working there later is very low they almost never find with their methodology with the burden of proof that people are sick as a result of environmental exposures i membered i would ask them you know how many times out of all the health assessments that you've done have you found that there 's a direct link between exposure and and disease and the problem is to me with their methodology and their methodology may be good for some purposes not but not for the purposes they've been assigned you know to help help guide risk management decisions at these sites unless you believe that people really don't get sick as a result of exposure to these chemicals and there are people who believe that and which case eighty s t r is batting any well as i said in my oral statement you know the changes to the iris program that we were talking about are just part of what we regard as the administration's war on science and public health protection and i think that eighty s t r is another strongly to do is if they're going into a community where they know that it's a small community and statistics will not allow them to ever find something significant because there just aren't enough people to study that they should say that it's scientifically not possible to do a study rather than going in and doing a study and saying we didn't find anything statistically significant which sounds like there's nothing wrong here so they really need to develop a bright line threshold that they make an evaluation at the outset to say this is there are enough people or as nafta's type of disease here that we could actually study this scientifically or this doesn't lend itself to assign civic study and we need to make a decision to move forward erring on the side of protecting human how to do it without the study and that's what we've urged upon then many times without success when they go to a d o d site specifically all the information gathering for their health assessment d o d superfund sites are placed on an honor system own honor system these people are the keepers of all the records on that for that base and these researchers are literally thrown into these worlds when they go to these bases and have to rely on these people these people r their required mission and when they did provide them with with with data there was no supporting documentation to back up what they were giving them i mean how can you place a polluter on a system they've already shown they don't have any honor and they've proven it time and time again in the camp of situation dragging their feet putting up roadblocks starlee giving incorrect data and i have documented situations that can please you where that they knowingly provided incorrect data to a t s d r which skewed one of their studies to them by the polluter sometimes by the regulator which really doesn't do its own studies and they do want to sas meant that but they do not generate any new data they don't do sampling they don't go out and interview people like a university study would do they just take the existing data and make a judgement based on at least in my experience that's what i've seen if somebody may know more about it but that that's generally the way they operate when they're asked to conduct a public  would probably need to be this need to be a final question that this morning when i pull out of bed walk down the corridor to get the washington post thinking of the today's hearing there was an article in the front page  own decision by the european union that has been adamantly opposed by the bush administration and by the chemical industry that would make a fundamentally different approach to regulating chemicals that may be toxic but what we've been talking about today is just the very initial stages of a regulatory process before cost benefit analysis for instance is supposed to be taken into effect just assessing which chemicals have what toxic effect and in this case we can see that too assessments are coming out when six hundred years formaldehyde eleven years and counting this is this hearing has been about how to fix that iris assessment process but mr siegel dr greer do you think maybe our fundamental approach should be different by the way as five hundred million people in a developed developed economies we are three hundred million people in a developed economy it is hard to imagine that that industry will simply stop producing goods for the european market which is significantly two thirds again the size of of our of our economy mr siegel the short answer is yes i mean i i've actually been to a defense department sponsored meeting with their contractors where the european approach the reach program has been presented and very clearly with the defense contractors they're already finding that there are changing their practices phasing out certain of chemicals like chromium six because of their need to market globally american companies are at a competitive disadvantage if they do not recognize this this new approach  but unless you know american defense department justice specifications which is a big part would actually require the use of toxic substances it will be limited but this is definitely you know it's being it's being heard it's being felt and it would be so easy for the u s to i mean implementing would be hard over it would take a while but it was be so easy so helpful to put burden of proof on the people who are using these toxic substances rather than on the people who are the victims but there's a problem here well you know we americans really like to think of ourselves as number one and at the head of the pack globally on so many things but i have to tell you that europe is far ahead of us on these issues of public health protection environmental contaminants and the reach program really has a tremendous amount of proud promise i mean it sort of takes you know here chemicals innocent until proven guilty and you see how long it takes to get proven one way or the other under their new system account is going to be guilty until proven innocent that is data is going to be required before a chemical can get on the market so that we don't get this big bad backlog and of course the incentives will be to get that information forward because they want to put it on the market so it's a really smart idea i think because we're in such a global economy we may be the accidental beneficiaries of a lot of that work because when  global companies need to make certain products the european standards i think the higher than the american standards in the probably will benefit from that but you know we've had our feet in cement shoes for almost a decade now on these t chemical issues and we've got a we've got our work cut out for us to get back to where some of the colleagues in the other developed countries have really been on this scientifically things a lot of they will produce two versions of their products the safe european version and the toxic american version mr inswinger do you have any thoughts on that you don't have to have any thoughts on this you have also a lot of things do basically the european union  is concerned about there people make you wonder what are governments concerned about as a people are money for additional two weeks for any members to submit additional statements and any additional questions that could go to you for a written response and the hearing is now adjourned thank you