OPNION/COMMENTARY

The Science Haters Target Johnson

Stephen L. Johnson, President Bush's nominee as EPA Administrator, is the first career scientist considered for this key position. All agree that the EPA could do with a good dose of science -- or do they? Science has traditionally been in short supply at the EPA -- politics and ideology generally rule the day (it was under the first EPA boss, William Ruckelshaus, that DDT was banned in 1972, in direct contempt of his own scientific advisors, leading directly to the deaths of millions from malaria in the Third World). So it was a hopeful sign when the name of Mr. Johnson was put forward, seemingly blemished by neither politics nor ideology. But the environmentalist fringe found something to attack him for: a never-implemented program, proposed last year, to assess the exposure and effects of common household chemicals and pesticides on toddlers in the Jacksonville, Florida area. This analysis, brightly called CHEERS (Children's Health Environmental Exposure Research Study), aimed to use financial inducements to poor families (almost one thousand dollars each) to allow investigators to monitor their youngsters' exposure to common household products over the course of two years. This doesn't sound like a big deal -- to those of us concerned with accumulating scientific data to benefit the American consumer. But activist groups -- especially the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), to no one's surprise -- and two U.S. senators have accused Johnson of everything from conspiring with industry to child molestation in their intemperate assaults on his never-initiated (and now canceled) program. Why did Johnson initially think this would be a useful program?

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