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[BOREALIS]

White House more concerned about PR nightmare over toxic water than about toxic water

Hunter
Daily Kos Staff
Tuesday May 15, 2018 · 1:55 PM CDT

Over in the Scott Pruitt-led Environmental Protection Agency, the hard work of dismantling regulations on polluters doesn't stop merely because the boss is up to his watering eyeballs in scandal. His underlings have apparently been a state of alarm over Centers of Disease Control recommendations ratcheting down the federal standard of what's considered a "safe" level of two industrial chemicals found in drinking water, redeclaring "safe" levels of PFOA and PFOS to be only about a sixth of what was previously tolerated.

And the Trump White House and EPA apparently have been trying to stifle the new findings—not because there's any scientific dispute that the chemicals are indeed substantially more dangerous than thought, but because revealing it would be a "public relations nightmare."
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/14/emails-white-house-interfered-with-science-study-536950
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“The public, media, and Congressional reaction to these numbers is going to be huge,” one unidentified White House aide said in an email forwarded on Jan. 30 by James Herz, a political appointee who oversees environmental issues at the OMB. The email added: “The impact to EPA and [the Defense Department] is going to be extremely painful. We (DoD and EPA) cannot seem to get ATSDR to realize the potential public relations nightmare this is going to be.”

More than three months later, the draft study remains unpublished, and the HHS unit says it has no scheduled date to release it for public comment.

The move will result in water supplies around certain factories and military bases being declared to have unsafe levels of the chemicals; they have unsafe levels now, according to the new findings, and the Trump administration is very alarmed about what will happen when those nearby residents find out.

[S]ome of the biggest liabilities reside with the Defense Department, which used foam containing the chemicals in exercises at bases across the country. In a March report to Congress, the Defense Department listed 126 facilities where tests of nearby water supplies showed the substances exceeded the current safety guidelines.

What's especially curious about this is that Pruitt has himself made noises about his EPA taking on this class of pollutants, with the EPA announcing a summit on the issue that will take place next week. https://www.epa.gov/pfas , https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-convene-national-leadership-summit-take-action-pfas
It's one of the few things Pruitt has shown specific initiative on.

How that meshes with apparent White House and EPA efforts to intervene in the ASTDR report is, shall we say, unclear. It may be that the Trump team wants the findings watered-down so that the resulting, quote, "public relations nightmare" is not as bad; it may be that Pruitt's team is especially alarmed that a signature Pruitt initiative is about to be revealed as far more of a crisis than Pruitt's team was letting on—thus obliging Pruitt to take far more aggressive action than he may have been planning on.

But in any event, the emails show members of the Trump administration seeking to intervene in the process to avoid an upcoming "public relations nightmare."

Not to protect Americans from drinking the chemicals involved, mind you; just out of concern for public relations.

https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-convene-national-leadership-summit-take-action-pfas