Budget cuts increasingly damaging to EPA
Now that Congress has returned from its spring recess, members have begun drafting the funding bills for federal science agencies. The Bush Administration's $7.2 billion proposed budget for fiscal year 2008 for the U.S. EPA is a $400 million cut from last year, marking the lowest overall funding request in this century in real dollars, critics say. The continuing erosion in EPA's budget, including a sharp drop in funds for science research, is beginning to cripple the agency's ability to do its job. Morale at the agency is at its lowest point in 25 years, according to several senior EPA scientists who spoke to ES&T on condition of anonymity.
Senior researchers at several EPA labs say that they are struggling to cope with the cuts. Budgets have become so lean that even though these scientists can keep their labs running, they are having trouble conducting studies that support policy or regulations because they can't obtain supplies, equipment, laboratory animals, or skilled technicians. Increasingly, they say, they are turning to regulated industries or industrial consortia to ask for crucial toxicological or engineering data because EPA doesn't have the money to obtain the information independently.
A scientist supervising research directly related to a current drinking-water study says that thanks to a shortage of full-time agency technicians she has to supervise half a dozen untrained contractors. Not only do these contractors lack the skills needed for the research, the scientist says, but her own work has slowed to a crawl because she also has to handle the paperwork for the contractors. Any training and mentoring being done with the outside workers will be lost when the contractors leave, she adds.
The scientists complain that concerns for the future raised during congressional testimony in March by Granger Morgan, chair of the agency's independent Science Advisory Board (SAB), are already coming to pass. SAB members fear that the continued decline in financial support could hurt morale and result in an accelerating loss of outstanding people and increase recruiting difficulties, Morgan said. He also predicted that as budgets shrink a higher proportion of funds will go to salaries and less to other costs, such as laboratories, field studies, and computers.
Support for research and development at EPA has declined by 25% in inflation-adjusted terms between the recent high point in 2004 and the proposed 2008 budget, according to figures from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"Morale has never been so low here since the days of Anne Gorsuch (later Burford), and even then there was more money," says one scientist, referring to the time during the early 1980s when former administrator Gorsuch, who resigned under a cloud, did her best to shrink the agency.
But George Gray, assistant administrator for the agency's Office of Research and Development (ORD), says he fully supports the proposed budget. "This budget fulfills every presidential environmental commitment and maintains the goals laid out in the EPA's strategic plan, while spending less," he says. The budget cuts come on the heels of EPA's program to cut $2 million from the agency's fund for specialized libraries.
The scientists' difficulties are likely to increase if the proposals in a June 2006 memo from Lyons Gray, EPA's chief financial officer, are carried out. The memo, which was released by the advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) directs ORD to reduce laboratory physical infrastructure costs by a minimum of 10% by 2009 and another 10% by 2011. The memo suggests that this will require closing, relocating, and consolidating EPA's laboratory and field locations, as well as reducing or relocating staff. ORD chief George Gray told Congress that EPA does not intend to shut down any labs or get rid of any scientists during the current administrator's tenure.
Meanwhile, EPA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) intends to cut staff by 10%, according to internal documents also released by PEER. OIG, which currently has 262 workers and a budget of about $50 million, has a record of exposing internal agency shortcomings, including EPA assurances made but unsubstantiated about the effects of contamination from the fallen World Trade Center and problems cleaning up asbestos contamination in Libby, Mont. (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2007, 41, 1808–1809). The administration recently withdrew its nomination of Alex Beehler, a Department of Defense official, to head OIG because of criticism about his attempts to exempt Pentagon operations from environmental laws.
