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One recurrent theme of the Bush Administration’s regulatory approach has been the weakening of protective regulations – not just by weakening standards, but by erecting bureaucratic barriers to progress. In mid-August, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) provided another example of the later approach, proposing changes to rules implementing the Endangered Species Act (ESA)—changes […]

I share Wendy’s concerns but also believe that there is room for optimism, although on different grounds than Rena and John.  Much of the debate over the use of science to support regulation of public health and the environment has focused on the most challenging contexts.  Toxics regulation, as we all know, rests on relatively […]

Wendy asks a fair question: if I may rephrase, “If not science, then what?” Of course, this rephrasing is a little hyperbolic. No one suggests that there is no place for science. Indeed, as I mentioned before, it is the foundation of our concerns and provides essential (if limited and often uncertain) information about the […]

As the moderator of this blog, I am the designated devil’s advocate. Read together, Rena’s and John’s entries make my assignment easy. Both write upbeat and insightful entries about their preferred approaches for the future, but they reach diametrically opposite conclusions. John suggests that the best solution for the manipulation of regulatory science is to […]

Reading Wendy’s rather gloomy assessment of the abuse of science in regulatory decisionmaking – which is to say, in political decisions – and Rena’s more upbeat reply, I find myself asking why we are so tied to science in the first place. If the science is so subject to bias and abuse, why are we relying […]

  I think Wendy paints far too black a picture of the current state of affairs, and that rays of sunshine are beginning to poke through this particularly cloudy sky. I rest my case for more optimism on the increasingly aggressive role that scientific advisory boards are playing when political appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency […]

One can quickly become depressed by the problems afflicting the science used for regulation of public health and the environment, and CPR bears a substantial share of responsibility for painting a grim picture of a world where politics prevails over science. In a Cambridge-published book, Rescuing Science from Politics, and an accompanying white paper that summarizes […]