Editorial: EPA Lies

Agency numbers don't add up

Bee Editorial Staff (Sacramento Bee)
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Friday, July 11, 2003

There's no nice way to put this. Under President Bush, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has cut back on criminal investigations of polluters, then cynically manipulated the data to suggest the opposite. What constitutes a criminal investigation in today's EPA has been exaggerated and distorted to the point of deliberate deception.

Any call by any EPA agent, however casual, can be classified as an investigation. Thus, as one disgusted investigator told The Bee, "I called the FBI and said 'If you need us, give us a call.' That warranted a [criminal] case number. There was no investigation."

Pollution agency officials have seized upon the war on terrorism to boost EPA's enforcement numbers, at least as they appear on paper. Of the 674 enforcement cases officials claim they initiated in 2002, Sacramento Bee reporter Chris Bowman found that 190 were for "counter-terrorism" -- efforts, many of them like the call above in which EPA was not the major investigator or even a minor player. To record such a contact as an agency-initiated investigation is, as one agent said, "false." To be blunt, it is a lie.

EPA inflated the penalties meted out to "polluters" in a similarly dishonest fashion. This past April, the agency took credit for 471 years of prison sentences handed out to polluters in 2001 and 2002. The agency press release failed to note that a very large number of these cases involved drug traffickers. The EPA was brought in only to help dispose of toxic methamphetamine labs after the narcotics agencies had already completed the investigations that led to the arrests, prosecutions and incarcerations for which the EPA took credit.

While political spinners at EPA tout phantom enforcement, investigators responsible for fulfilling the agency's mission -- "to protect human health and to safeguard the natural environment"- complain anonymously to The Bee and other media that their work is being undercut. The number of EPA referrals to federal prosecutors has fallen 29 percent since the last full year of the Clinton administration. Enforcement budgets have been cut and personnel redirected to other duties. The agency's top enforcement official quit last year after documenting the Bush administration's systematic sabotage of enforcement efforts.

Under Bush, the EPA has been in full-scale retreat on environmental protection. No matter how the statistics are manipulated to hide the facts, that sad truth emerges for all to see.