DC Bureau

National Academy of Sciences Building in Washington D.C. Photo from the National Academy of Sciences

Perhaps because of his near-unconditional job security, Ray DuBois, the Bush era’s first Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Installations and Environment, felt free to question the good faith of EPA scientists when he disagreed with their work. The Pentagon chemicals office was formed in large measure because of the furor that arose when EPA issued a January 2002 draft assessment of perchlorate, the rocket fuel stabilizer, suggesting a drinking water limit of 1 part per billion (ppb) — an infinitesimal amount that can be expensive to achieve — might be needed to protect the health of fetuses of pregnant women who drank water contaminated with the substance, based on thyroid impairment in lab animals. The Public Education Center, DCBureau.org’s parent organization, worked closely with
the Wall Street Journal on a 2003 series examining the issue.

“There were folks in EPA who believed that the initial results . . . were sufficiently troubling that I should have immediately embraced this [standard],” DuBois explained. “I said no, I’m not going to do that.”

Instead of accepting EPA’s decision, DuBois said, in early 2004 he asked Shannon Cunniff, his recently hired chemical policy expert, to “pick up the phone and call some other folks in the scientific community, chemical or environmental.” According to him, the two of them asked these outside observers whether the Pentagon should accept the draft results. “And they said, ‘No, you shouldn’t,’” he recalled. “I said as a non-scientist, ‘Shannon, what’s the deal here?’ She said, ‘You have competing science. The best way to do this is to go to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and have them do the analysis.’ So that’s what we did. But that whole process made me think about how DOD should be positioned. You had to take some risks here. I was criticized by some people in Congress that I was kicking the can down the road, ignoring clear scientific results. I said, ‘On the contrary. I am embracing whatever the scientific community is going to tell me. I don’t want to rely on what I’ve been told are inadequate scientific results.’”

Based on this warning, DuBois said, he rejected the draft’s conclusions outright. “Then I decided to call up Jimmy Connaughton [then chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)] and I said, ‘Jimmy, I need your help. I’m not just going to sit here in my DOD world. I want a bigger audience, a bigger group of people to be dealing with this problem.’ I wanted to be proactive.”

But DuBois’ version of events could not be confirmed. Cunniff began working in DuBois’ office in late March 2004, just as NAS was having its last public meeting on the perchlorate risk assessment. Any decision to contest the 1 ppb figure would have been made a year or more before she got to DOD. Asked to explain this discrepancy, DuBois wrote in an e-mail: “I guess the comment about ‘competing science’ may have emanated from one or more of the Military Departments’ scientific types or even from EPA itself or both” — he wasn’t sure. The “important issue,” he wrote, is that after multiple discussions he had with his staff and EPA, “I asked for help in assessing the scientific basis of the preliminary . . . determination by EPA and turned to the CEQ which then lead to the interagency discussion and ultimately the decision to ask the NAS to study it.”

The inconsistency of DuBois’ account only throws into sharper relief the importance he attached to his hiring of Cunniff, who previously had worked for 10 years at the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation. Working with her was a necessity, he said, because even though he wanted to take an active role in chemical regulation, he had no one available to advise him. “She had been recommended to me on the basis of her scientific expertise, so I interviewed her and realized that not only was she the right person for the job, but I had no one on staff with this kind of expertise,” he said. “I told her it wouldn’t be easy. She was coming into a department that historically has been reactive and very nervous about potential costs at the hands of individuals who might not be as sympathetic to national security or who might be much more sympathetic to the issues of cleanup and remediation. I said, ‘You and I are going to come up against obstacles internally and externally in terms, arguably, of the environmental movement.’ That was the beginning of it. I wanted someone on the staff who could advise me from a scientific, analytical standpoint whose credentials were impeccable and who, yes, I could lean on.”

How could they be proactive? In addition to the Pentagon, DuBois says, the Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and other federal agencies and departments “had equity” in chemical regulation issues, and so he pressed to create a nearly government-wide roundtable that could make decisions better than EPA could acting alone. “I didn’t want to be put in a position where it’s me versus EPA,” he said. “I wanted a federal government integrated group looking at these issues thoughtfully and scientifically.”

A perchlorate remediation system filtering out the toxin at a Southern Nevada perchlorate clean up project site. Photo provided by the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection

This effort, essentially overturning EPA’s traditional prerogative as the nation’s sole environmental agency,began with the NAS — rather than waiting for EPA to finish its customary assessment process — accepting a proposal to conduct a lengthy review of all available scientific data on perchlorate’s health risks. The panel formed to conduct the review quickly became the subject of its own controversies: according to a joint letter from California Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein to then-NAS President Bruce Alberts dated May 14, 2004, “records indicate that a financially interested party has funded two of the committee scientists, Dr. Richard Bull and Dr. Charles Capen. Dr. Bull’s conflicts of interest were partially acknowledged only due to external pressure. Dr. Capen’s reported relationship with Lockheed Martin” — a major defense contractor with potential perchlorate cleanup responsibilities — “remains unnoted. This raises serious issues about NAS review of conflict of interest, bias, and balance for this panel.” Capen, it emerged, was once a paid consultant for Lockheed on perchlorate, and Bull had consulted for the company during a toxic contamination lawsuit in Redlands, California.

Bull resigned from the panel; Capen, a professor at Ohio State University, remained to contribute to the final version. Ultimately, the NAS review led to EPA adopting a significantly weakened, unenforceable health guideline of 24.5 ppb. To date, the agency still has no formal regulatory limit for the substance, a common occurrence with chemicals important to the military.