Conservative politicians love to talk about how the Environmental Protection Agency only issues "job-killing regulations", especially if they're taking campaign contributions from fossil fuel billionaires like the Koch Brothers or from agrichemical giants like Monsanto.
Republican Chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Lamar Smith, for example, has spent years trying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from conducting any real research about climate change or passing any real regulations in general.
But apparently it's true that every once in a while, even a blind mouse finds cheese.
Because for once, it seems like Lamar Smith might actually have a legitimate complaint about an EPA report.
Last week, Smith wrote
a letter to the EPA demanding to know why a risk report marked "Final Report" about glyphosate was retracted just three days after it was published.
The EPA's Cancer Assessment Review Committee issued the
"Final Report" on glyphosate on April 29 , and 13 members of the Review Committee had signed their name to the report's findings that glyphosate is "not likely to be carcinogenic to humans."
The findings should raise eyebrows to begin with, because they directly contradict a report from the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer, which found last year that glyphosate is a
"probable carcinogen."But what's really caused a stir from environmentalists and conservatives alike, and why Lamar Smith has started overseeing the matter, is that the EPA pulled the report after just three days, and claimed that the report was published "inadvertently."
Smith wrote to Gina McCarthy on May 4 that "the subsequent backtracking on [this report's] finality raises questions about the agency's motivation in providing a fair assessment of glyphosate."
But Lamar Smith was a few days late to the party condemning the EPA's research, because the Center for Biological Diversity had already issued a
press release condemning the EPA finding as "disappointing, but not terribly surprising [because] industry has been manipulating this research for years."
This shouldn't come as any surprise though, because using industry research is part of the EPA's scheme of "cooperative regulation," something that's been in place ever since Reagan appointed Anne Gorsuch to head the EPA in the early 1980s.
During her tenure as head of the EPA, Gorsuch cut the EPA's budget by 22%, she handed many of the duties of the EPA down to states and contractors, and she made a cascade of appointments at lower levels in the agency that led to a fundamental shift in how the EPA regulated industry.
You see, in the world of Reaganism, regulators shouldn't challenge industry.
