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The buffer zone program around military installations to protect endangered species was never part of the Pentagon’s environmental law exemption efforts, which were essentially dead once Ray DuBois, the former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Installations and Environment, left office. (Even one-time House Armed Services Military Readiness Subcommittee Chairman Joel Hefley, a Colorado Republican, voiced opposition to any further legal revisions before leaving Congress in 2006.) As recently as March 2008, Congress’ investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), found, “DOD has not provided any specific examples showing that training and readiness have been hampered by” RCRA, CERCLA and the Clean Air Act, which the Pentagon consistently failed to amend. Nevertheless, when it comes to the laws he did amend, DuBois said the record vindicates his efforts. “I would submit that any analysis of where we have exercised our authority under those amendments [will show we] have yielded an improvement in the critical habitat and breeding pairs, et cetera. I believe that the results speak for themselves. The military should be proud of what we were able to do and in the process provide realistic training opportunities, which, if you ask Mr. and Mrs. America, they’ll say is priority number one.”

Surveying his time at the Pentagon, DuBois laughingly remembered taking over the reins as the premier target of environmentalists from retiring Rep. James Hansen (R-Utah), who once chaired the House Resources Committee and was long considered a foe of the conservation movement. “At his retirement dinner he was thanking a number of people, recognizing people,” DuBois recalled. “He was very much involved with the military bases in Utah.” DuBois got down on his hands and knees for thirty seconds after saying this to look at a map in his office of military sites around the country, trying to locate Hansen’s district. “Anyway, he was saying, ‘I’ve been the poster boy for environmental fundraising for twenty years in Congress, and I’m now turning that over to Ray DuBois.’ It’s true that I was figuratively burned in effigy by several environmental groups because of the fear that if the Defense Department was able to [amend laws], that was just going to be the beginning and the world was going to come to an end as we know it. There was a certain hyperbole attached to what I was trying to do, in a negative sense, but I like to think the evidence between then and now demonstrates that it was never leveraged off of, it was always carefully constrained to military training. I would only ask if anyone wants to seriously consider rolling back, that they look at the evidence. Has anything negative happened? A lot of positive things have happened.”

GAO investigators politely disagree. The office found in an April 2008 report that the interagency review process DuBois pressed so hard to create “limits the credibility of [EPA chemical] assessments and hinders EPA’s ability to manage them.” It also pointed out that such assessments are already behind schedule and said the lengthy interagency process would make the problem worse, adding that the process created by the rule is not publicly transparent. Finally, it said, EPA should “provide assurance that [chemical] assessments are appropriately based on the best available science and that they are not inappropriately biased by policy considerations.”

The GAO report pointed to six ongoing chemical reviews — of formaldehyde, the combustion byproduct dioxin, the jet fuel component naphthalene, the explosive RDX, and of TCE and perchloroethylene, another degreasing solvent — as particularly troublesome examples of delays wrought by lengthy interagency review and debate, and noted that, for instance, “The dioxin assessment is an example of an assessment that has been, and will likely continue to be, a political as well as a scientific issue.” In general, the report cautioned, the EPA chemical information database “is at serious risk of becoming obsolete because EPA has not been able to routinely complete timely, credible assessments or decrease its backlog of 70 ongoing assessments.” It said in fiscal years 2006 and 2007, only four reviews were completed.

That report is even more resonant than it first appears. Naphthalene, RDX and TCE are among the substances on the military's current emerging contaminants “action list” of “materials that have been assessed and judged to have a significant potential impact on people or the DOD mission,” according to the Pentagon's environment Web site. It is unclear when EPA will complete health assessments for any of them, let alone establish enforceable standards. [See the dcbureau.org story “Poisoning Patriots” on TCE contamination at Camp Lejeune.]

Some of DuBois’ other signature accomplishments are also now coming under closer scrutiny. EPA has come to question NAS’ ruling on perchlorate, and in January the agency revised its health recommendation from the previous 24.5 ppb standard to a stricter 15 ppb. A December 2008 draft report from the EPA Office of the Inspector General found that EPA’s internal procedures support the use of a cumulative risk assessment — which looks at the risks of multiple similar contaminants from multiple sources, not just one contaminant from one source — in assessing perchlorate’s risks. The draft points out that both EPA’s 2002 draft proposal and the NAS panel used single chemical risk assessment to reach their conclusions even though, the new draft report says, “a single chemical risk assessment of perchlorate is not sufficient to assess and characterize the combined human health risk” from perchlorate, thiocyanate, nitrate and lack of dietary iodide, all of which impact thyroid health. However, the Obama administration also announced in January that the EPA is once again “seeking advice from the NAS before making a final regulatory determination on whether to issue a national regulation.”

Larger changes are currently underway. On May 21, EPA announced a complete overhaul of its Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) chemical assessment process that was praised by GAO environmental expert John Stephenson at a June 11 House Science and Technology Committee hearing. If implemented effectively, he said, the changes — including requests for additional IRIS staff and funding, eliminating the Bush-era ability of other agencies to suspend EPA reviews to gather more data, publicizing all comments on draft proposals, and transferring management of the interagency process from the White House back to EPA — “may appropriately restore to EPA its control of the IRIS process” and increase its transparency.

Stephenson cautioned, however, that the recent move is not the end of the story. “Unlike a number of other EPA programs with statutory deadlines for completing various activities, no enforceable deadlines apply to the IRIS program,” he pointed out. “We believe the absence of statutory deadlines may contribute to EPA’s failure to complete timely IRIS assessments. For example, assessment schedules can easily be extended — and consistently are. These chronic delays in completing IRIS assessments have detrimental consequences for EPA’s ability to develop timely and scientifically sound decisions, policies, and regulations.”

Some environmental activists also point out that the interagency review process remains intact, maintaining a place at the table for outside figures at early stages of EPA decision-making. A June 2009 white paper from the Center for Progressive Reform notes that the new procedure “still offers too much opportunity for other government agencies to wield excessive influence over decisions that should be left to EPA scientists and IRIS program staff. . . . As a result, DOD, which, as the nation’s largest source of toxic waste has a decidedly parochial interest in the outcome of IRIS decisions, will continue to have privileged access to the development of the profile.”

DOD is still pursuing an active role in EPA scientific analysis, just as the paper foresaw. A June 22 story in the New York Times, written by Sara Goodman of the environmental news service Greenwire, reported that Pentagon was “invited, along with other federal agencies, to attend a meeting attended by mostly defense and aerospace industry groups, as well as other affected industries, to express their views on . . . a possible U.S. EPA tightening of a health advisory for perchlorate” — apparently a reference to the agency’s decision on whether to set an official regulatory limit, although that decision will not be made until NAS completes its latest scientific review.

These doubts and roadblocks aside, non-governmental observers have long hoped for many of the recently announced IRIS reforms. Lenny Siegel, an activist in California who has worked with EPA and military officials for more than a decade to increase public participation in cleanup decisions, said of DuBois’ tenure, “The way I remember it, working through the White House, DOD told EPA what to do and how to testify to Congress,” especially on perchlorate and TCE. Although Siegel agreed that encroachment was and remains a serious problem at training ranges — he hailed DuBois’ success at expanding buffer zones — “his solution was to [try to] relax RCRA and CERCLA, which had nothing to do with training. . . . There were encroachment issues, but people had axes to grind [on environmental policy] and just didn’t want to spend money on cleanups.” As far as chemical policy, Siegel said, the Pentagon’s “interference with the standard-setting process” started by DuBois “set back standards for toxic chemicals in general.” In the final analysis, he said, “I don’t know what legitimate role polluting agencies have in setting standards. They shouldn’t be inside the process. But they are. EPA released [assessment] drafts on perchlorate and TCE in 2001, and the best we can do now is start over.”

EPA’s major revision of one of the Pentagon’s signature environmental endeavors no doubt disappoints DuBois, who said during his interview with DCBureau.org that he was motivated largely by concern for the health of military families. “When you care about national security, when you care about the military — and in my case, I was the son of an admiral,” he said. “I was an Army sergeant in combat in Vietnam. I served twice now as a civilian at the highest levels of the Department of Defense, both at [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] and the Army. You don’t go through life and not have that affect you, in a direct and indirect way. When I was presented with these environmental challenges, my immediate thought, quite frankly, was not the birds and bees but families. I’ve lived in military installations. We have to keep them safe for the people who live, work, train and visit there. That was probably why I took the job, not knowing the extent of the problems. . . . [I]t was a real learning experience for me. Will the new administration change some of the policies we were able to effect? I hope not.”