Government Monitoring Body Promotes Industry Interests, US Activists Allege

A governmental agency is playing footsy with industry and stalling environmental and health initiatives, US activists allege. As of now the industry has managed to stall the release of information on some cancer-causing chemicals.

The anger of the activists is focused on the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness (CRE) which is supposed to keep track of the regulatory authorities and see whether they comply with the laws of the land.

But it is only promoting the industry interests, it has often been charged. In his book The Republican War on Science, Chris C Mooney said the CRE was only a front organisation for the industries that seek to undermine the regulatory process itself.

Now in a study of the National Institutes of Health's National Toxicology Program, OMB Watch, a Washington-based policy-research group, reports that industry is frustrating the work of government researchers with petitions that are light on science but heavy with accusations of anti-business "bias."

Public interest advocates warn that corporations are co-opting the federal Data Quality Act to paralyze scientists with frivolous allegations of inaccuracy.

In 2000, Congress passed the Data Quality Act mandating that government agencies uphold "the quality, objectivity, utility and integrity of information" they disseminate.

That's a laudable principle, critics say, but the corporate-friendly Bush administration is promoting exploitation of the law.

In fiscal years 2003 and 2004, for instance, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Health and Human Services and other federal bodies fielded 80 "substantive" Data Quality Act requests for corrections, more than half of which came from industry, according to the Government Accountability Office. The resulting bureaucratic review process could take as long as two years.