Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health by David Michaels

Author:David Michaels
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-fiction, Science
ISBN: 9780195300673
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2008-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

The Data Access Act was not a complete victory for industry. After receiving thousands of comments and complaints from scientists, research institutions, and public policy experts, the Clinton-era Office of Management and Budget (OMB) interpreted the famous four lines rather narrowly, “limiting requested data to published or cited research used by the federal government in developing legally binding agency actions.”8 As a result, the Data Access Act has not had the dire results first feared.

It was just an opening salvo, however, in the “sound science” campaign. The following year the tobacco industry (still behind the scenes) and its allies brought out the heavier artillery, now labeled the Information Quality Act but more widely known by the acronym of its first moniker, the Data Quality Act.9 By any name, the DQA is a wonderful new weapon in the arsenal of all those who oppose public health and workplace regulations, as well as independent, serious science. All of two paragraphs long, its import makes the Data Access Act’s four lines seem like a child’s popgun.

The DQA authorized the Office of Management and Budget to develop guidelines for “ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” and to establish procedures that allow formal challenges to information disseminated by federal agencies. (The term “information” is not defined in the act, although two parentheticals indicate that “statistical information” is subject to the law.) “Affected persons” are granted the right to challenge and request a correction of information disseminated by a federal agency that is not in compliance with those guidelines.9

At first, all of this sounds harmless, even beneficial. Who does not want to ensure the quality and integrity of government-disseminated information? As Dr. John Graham, former administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs within OMB under the second Bush administration, has said, “[R]elease of governmental information that has important impacts on the private sector, is in itself in some ways, a form of regulation.”10 This viewpoint is sometimes called “regulation by information” or “regulation by publication,” and it is not a trivial point. Information drives individual behavior; hence, the Food and Drug Administration’s requirements for warning labels on drugs and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s rules on corporate financial disclosure. Information is incredibly powerful. Of course we want “scientific due process.” However, the devious conception of the DQA suggests that its creators’ intentions might be devious as well.

The DQA sneaked through Congress and the White House as a rider in Section 515 of the 712-page Treasury and General Government Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2000, sandwiched between one provision to transfer ownership of land for the Gerald Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and another to settle litigation on cost-of-living allowances in nonforeign areas. There were no hearings; there was no debate; and there was no legislative history to help the courts or anyone else clarify Congress’s intentions in passing the law. Representative Jo Ann Emerson, Republican from Missouri, did the deed, and she later confirmed that she acted at

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