In These Times: EPA on Trial

[marmar]

News > July 14, 2008
EPA on Trial
By Joel Bleifuss



For more than six years, Hugh Kaufman has been battling the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), his employer for 37 years, with a whistleblower lawsuit. He has been aided by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a D.C.-based group that represents workers who expose corruption in agencies that oversee environmental quality and public health.

“We get people calling us all the time, but in this administration, more than ever,” says Paula Dinerstein, PEER senior counsel.

In June, Kaufman made his case before a Department of Labor administrative law judge, testifying that former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman closed down the agency’s National Ombudsman Office in an effort to stop investigations that Kaufman was conducting.

As the chief investigator for the agency’s National Ombudsman Office — which investigated public complaints about the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response — Kaufman had a bird’s eye view of how the public health and safety were routinely subordinated to corporate interests.

“The Reagan, Bush I and Clinton EPAs, were all pretty much the same,” he says. “The Bush administration took a bad EPA and made it worse.”

In February 2001, Kaufman alerted the Denver Post to the fact that Whitman had not recused herself from the negotiations involving a radioactive Superfund site in Denver in which she had a conflict of interest. (Superfund sites are contaminated areas that threaten public health and the environment.) Specifically, Kaufman noted that at the same time Whitman was negotiating the settlement with Citigroup, which owned the site, she held between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of stock in the company, and her husband, John, was the president of a Citigroup-owned company.

The EPA ultimately ruled that Citigroup would pay $7 million of the estimated $35 million cleanup costs, with the public picking up the rest. Such small reimbursements have been typical under the Bush administration’s EPA. In a 2007 report, the Center for Public Integrity found that from 2000 to 2006, reimbursements from companies for site cleanups fell by half compared to the previous six years. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3794/epa_on_trial/

[Tutonic]

1. Whitman is disgusting. This is the lady that told the rescue

workers after 9-11 that it was safe to go back into the area and that they would not suffer long term health effects. Well, she's got a nice high paying consultant job while many of the workers are dead or suffering with long-term lung, heart and cardiovascular problems. Republican judge let her off of the hook. She did Cheney's bidding until whistle blowers like Kaufman busted her boney ass.