Last summer, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that in 2018, the Environmental Protection Agency downplayed or ignored multiple known hazards of Monsanto’s crop-wrecking dicamba herbicide. Now the federal Office of the Inspector General backs up that judicial finding, saying high-ranking members of the previous Administration’s EPA put their political thumbs on the scale to hide scientific evidence of dicamba’s dangers:
In the watchdog report released today, investigators said the EPA’s actions on the dicamba registrations left the decision “legally vulnerable,” spurring the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to vacate the 2018 registrations for understating some risks and failing to acknowledge others entirely.
The report stated that while division-level management review of pesticide safety documents is part of the typical EPA procedure, senior leaders were “more involved in the 2018 dicamba decision than in other pesticide registration decisions.” As a result, senior-level managers made “changes to or omissions from scientific documents.”
For instance, the documents excluded some conclusions by staff scientists about dicamba’s drift risks, according to the report. The investigators also found that some staff felt “constrained or muted” about sharing their concerns [Center for Food Safety, “EPA Watchdog Report: Senior Staffers in… EPA Changed, Omitted Science During 2018 Review of Dicamba; Skipped Internal Peer-Review Process,” 2021.05.24].
Last June’s Ninth Circuit ruling had effectively banned dicamba, but the environmentally predatory EPA rushed to reapprove dicamba just a week before the 2020 Presidential election in an attempt to shore up farmer support for the incumbent. Food and farm groups thus had to sue again to protect the public from this politically motivated anti-science. Those groups hope this new IG report will spur the Biden Administration to overturn the latest bum dicamba rules. Encouragingly for those groups’ cause, the Biden Administration is acknowledging the EPA’s failure to act responsibly on dicamba:
“The dicamba incident described in this draft report did not occur due to a lack of awareness of or training on the agency’s scientific integrity policy,” said Michal Freedhoff, principal deputy assistant administrator, Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. “It occurred because [the office’s] past senior leadership consciously chose to advance a policy outcome in a manner inconsistent with the scientific integrity policy.”
…Freedhoff, the EPA official, did promise a new approach going forward at EPA, saying scientific conclusions “must be based exclusively on scientific (not policy) considerations” and her office was in the process of “emphasizing these points to all our managers” [Eric Katz, “EPA Admits to Altering Science… Pledges New Course,” Government Executive, 2021.05.25]
The October dicamba surprise actually rubbed Big Ag practitioners the wrong way, as it still imposed too many restrictions on their factory farming practices, including 300-foot buffer requirements in several South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska to protect an unnamed endangered species. The South Dakota Department of Agriculture hasn’t updated its guidance on dicamba since last June’s ban. But if you’re trying to figure out which chemicals are safe to use on then farm, your best bet is to ignore anything the EPA said between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021.
Well you could just say that since the trade war trump, killed their markets, he and his boys had to to buy them off in more ways than one. What’s a little cancer among freedom loving friends anyway.
Can’t believe that this only warrants one comment. Just look at how this was done and think really hard before you eat your next meal. Just how safe are we because this sort of thing isn’t just being done with EPA. You can bet that it is being done at FDA and plenty of other places. Years ago I caught a line in a farm magazine just mentioning in passing that farmers were six times more likely to come down with Non Hodgkin’s Lymphoma than the general public. Never made the news….my doctor hadn’t heard anything about it. Turns out now that is being blamed on Round Up, something farmers were told was safe enough to swim in if we wanted to. Well, I’m not going to but everything I eat has traces of it.
Clyde, this is pretty much confirmation of what has been already well-established regarding dicamba, and the Trump administration corruption of agency scientific and regulatory matters generally, as you point out. Most of the stuff Trump did is going to be outed and reversed, but it will take time and more people will die or get sick as a result.
Mr. Clyde, it is usually only Mr. Pay and grudznick who care enough to blog about environmental issues on this here blogging place. Mr. Pay cares more about water, and I care more about mining. Between the two of us, and of course Dr. McT, we comprise about 93% of the scientific knowledge on this blog.
Go back a few short years and you will discover the EPA allowed Monsanto lobbyists to write the EPA’s assertions that RU was safe for humans. I believe it started in Obama’s EPA and carried into drumpf’s reign of environmental terror.
Donald Pay has voiced concerns about mining and test bore holes at least as much as he has argued for clean water.
Grudzilla’s standard answer is for mines and water is to quit whining and get a second job and get off the gubmint teat.
And, Governor Noem’s position on dicamba and Trump’s EPA lying to farmers is ???
For quite a number of years I participated in a study of agricultural health overseen by UNC and dropped out a year or so after I was put on disability and no longer was active in farming. They still send yearly reports and a questionaire every now and then.
My new yearly report has an article about dicamba use and cancer of the liver nd intrahepatic bile duct. Applicators with the highest use of dicamba were 12.8 times as likely to be diagnosed with this cancer as those who did not use dicamba.
This is a rare cancer; only 71 cases diagnosed in 49,992 applicators from enrollment in the mid 1990s through 2015. More study is needed.
You can email http://aghealth.nih.gov/ or call 1-800-424-7883 for more info.