By Janet Pelley, Environmental Science and Technology Online
The Bush Administration’s campaign for regulatory reform has now taken aim at guidance documents, a potpourri of messages from federal agencies that tell businesses how to implement regulations. A new directive from President Bush orders agencies to submit significant guidance documents for review by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It’s uncertain how broadly OMB will interpret its new authority. Yet the directive set off a firestorm of alarm among environmental and public-health advocates, who say that an aggressive White House could impede or change agency guidance.
Executive Order 13422, issued by President Bush on January 18, 2007, is accompanied by OMB’s Final Bulletin for Agency Good Guidance Practices. These two documents boost White House control over a wide range of regulatory activities.
During the Bush Administration, OMB has often operated under the public radar by issuing documents that attack environmental science; it appears to be the White House’s favorite approach toward weakening environmental and public-health regulations, says David Michaels, an epidemiologist at George Washington University. “This was clearly written to target risk assessments by the EPA,” Michaels says.
(Origianl Article)