Risk assessment rebuff for OMB
An NRC committee sends OMB back to the drawing board in its efforts to improve government risk assessments.
The White House Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB’s) attempt to standardize risk assessments conducted by federal agencies has been unanimously rejected as “fundamentally flawed” by a National Research Council (NRC) committee. As a result, OMB will rethink its approach to developing improved guidance for risk assessment, according to Steven Aitken, acting administrator for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), an agency within OMB. It has yet to be determined whether OMB will revise its draft risk assessment bulletin, issue a new draft, or devise another alternative, he says.
OIRA, which oversees all of the government’s rulemaking, released its draft bulletin in January 2006 as former administrator John Graham’s 5-year reign at OIRA was coming to a close. The ground-breaking risk document followed OMB guidelines for agencies on peer review, data quality, and cost–benefit analysis. OIRA attempted to establish technical standards for all agencies on issues such as uncertainty analysis, determination of adverse effects, and what emphasis risk assessments should place on sensitive populations that are likely to be more vulnerable to a risk, such as environmental pollution.
But OIRA overstepped its authority, according to the NRC report Scientific Review of the Proposed Risk Assessment Bulletin, released in January. The committee strongly recommends that risk assessments be developed by agencies themselves because different agencies have different needs.
Harvard Center for Risk Assessment director James Hammitt, a former colleague of Graham’s, says he’s surprised that the committee was so critical. “Much of the bulletin reflects what I take to be common wisdom in the field,” says Hammitt.
Perhaps the issue is not so much how to conduct risk analyses, Hammitt says, as how much influence the White House should have. The NRC panel seems to be arguing for more White House deference to agency and departmental expertise, he notes.
But committee member and risk-assessment expert Joseph Rodricks noted in a teleconference about the report that, for uncertainty analysis, the draft bulletin set standards that exceed the current state of the science.
The NRC committee recommends that OIRA establish a baseline for the quality of each agency’s risk assessments before offering general guidance. For example, the U.S. EPA is routinely praised for its use of advanced risk assessment methods, but many other agencies are not as far along.
Rick Melberth at the advocacy group OMB Watch says he applauds the committee for rejecting the draft bulletin. Melberth has criticized the bulletin from the start. “The proposed bulletin’s criteria would have imposed on federal agencies a rigid assessment structure with little flexibility to account for widely varied risks and would have greatly hindered efforts to protect public health and safety,” he says.
The rebuff of the bulletin may mark the end of Graham’s more “hands-on, command-and-control approach” to OMB directives, says regulatory affairs consultant and former OMB analyst Richard Belzer. OMB has traditionally set targets and then let each agency figure out how to meet them, he says. Belzer predicts that OIRA will return to this less prescriptive approach by emphasizing cost–benefit analysis over detailed guidelines.
