The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) attempted to use a renowned science organization to cover up evidence of “unethical and illegal” behavior, according to a legal analyst with a prominent Washington, D.C.- based free market group.
The EPA “intentionally exposed hundreds of humans in a gas chamber to exceedingly high levels of air pollutants like diesel exhaust, soot and smog” in an effort to justify “costly and stringent outdoor air quality standards,” Steve Milloy, a legal analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wrote in an editorial Sunday for The Washington Times.
The agency’s regulators are also using the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to cover up the experiments, Milloy added.
The agency’s studies, Milloy explained, included subjects suffering from asthma, and diabetes, and heart disease, or the kinds of people most susceptible to air pollutants.
Worse still, the EPA failed to tell the subjects it believed the experiments could cause death, which, according to Milloy, is “fundamentally unethical and illegal.” Federal law prohibits researchers from treating people as guinea pigs, he added.
After a series of investigations and a federal lawsuit, Congress demanded the regulator’s inspector general to investigate charges.
“The EPA inspector general eventually issued a March 2014 report in which it confirmed my allegations,” Milloy wrote, “including that the EPA had failed to inform the study subjects that EPA believed the experiments might kill them.”
The was EPA worried the inspector’s review would place a black mark on its record, so it elicited the help of the NAS to, as Milloy put it, “whitewash EPA’s illegal conduct.” The NAS is an honorary membership group for American scientists.
Milloy, who is also a senior fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, added that he has received little information about the particulars of the NAS review, despite asking several times how the review is proceeding. “But,” he adds, “I have heard from a reliable source close to the NAS committee that the “fix is in” and EPA is likely to get the clean bill of health for which it is paying.”
Milloy raised warning flags in June about the lack of public accountability associated with NAS’ review process.
NAS has held five meetings testing the program, none of which have been made public on NAS’ website. In fact, four of the five meetings were closed to the public.
“I am concerned that absent informed public input, the Committee’s work will suffer and ultimately possibly serve as an inadvertent whitewash of egregious if not illegal conduct by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,” Milloy wrote in a letter to the organization at the time.
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