Sir

Legislation intended to “boost science” at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — which was discussed in your News story “Congress hears plan to boost science at environment agency” (Nature 411, 405; 2001) — is being aimed at the wrong target.

The agency's new deputy head would primarily be responsible for “coordinating the EPA's research portfolio”, but its management of research, while dismal, is less a problem than its regulatory programmes, where policies seem determined more by environmental politics than environmental science.

Adherence to scientific principles in the formulation of policy has for a long time been alien to the EPA's corporate culture. An analysis by Resources for the Future, a Washington DC-based environmental think tank (M. R. Powell Science at EPA. Resources for the Future, Washington DC, 1999), concluded after an investigation of eight major programmes: “EPA for a variety of reasons is unwilling, unable, and unequipped to address and acknowledge the uncertainties in the underlying science.”

This analysis echoes the conclusions of an expert panel that was commissioned ten years ago by William Reilly, then EPA administrator (Safeguarding the Future: Credible Science, Credible Decisions. The Report of the Expert Panel on the Role of Science at EPA. EPA document 600/9-91/050, March 1992)

Fixing the EPA will require far more sweeping and fundamental changes than those currently being proposed. These could range from the creation of an ombudsman panel with the power to impose sanctions on EPA officials who are responsible for unscientific and flawed policies, to dismantling the EPA and redistributing its few essential functions to less scientifically challenged agencies.