Arnold School scientist says Bush administration
 risk assessment plan was flawed

Posted 01/19/2007

A plan by the Bush administration to rewrite the way federal agencies conduct risk assessments was too broad and failed to consider the costs, says an Arnold School scientist who served on an expert panel that nixed the proposal.

The goal was laudable, but the panel found that “one size doesn’t fit all” (types of risk assessments), said Dr. Gene Feigley, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences.

Feigley served on an 18-member panel appointed in spring 2006 by the National Academy of Sciences to review the bulletin proposed by the White House Office of Management and Budget.

The OMB offered the new guidelines to improve the quality of risk assessment by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Transportation, and other agencies.

Feigley has served on numerous committees of the highly regarded NAS, including the Committee on Toxicology.

He said the review panel recommended that OMB withdraw its guidelines and suggested that any new OMB guidelines be very general, leaving detailed requirements to the various agencies.

The subcommittee experts described the proposed guidelines as "too simplistic" and that might "create confusion" in individual agencies.

Some agencies, such as the EPA, already have quite detailed risk assessment guidelines and procedures in place. “Sometimes there’s a question about how well they follow them,” he said tongue-in-cheek.

Feigley says a main concern of his about the proposal was that the OMB failed to do a cost-benefit analysis on the impact of the guidelines, a policy it insists that that regulated agencies follow.

He added that the guidelines also seemed to be weighted heavily in favor of health risk assessment, but would be difficult to apply to risk assessment for accidents and structural failures.

In the wake of the subcommittee's criticism, OMB regulatory chief Steven Aitken said that the White House will modify its plan before making it final.

He didn't say how it would be modified, however.

Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, applauded the move and urged the OMB to abandon the effort altogether, saying it "ignores the specific statutory directives" Congress gives federal agencies.

John F. Ahearne, director of the ethics program at Sigma Xi, an international scientific honor society, who chaired the review committee, said that in his decades of experience working on such reviews for the National Academies, he could not recall any other instance when the conclusion was to reject a government proposal completely.

"We had expected that we would review the bulletin in detail, then recommend some modifications and improvements," he said.

Instead, the 18-member group of experts voted unanimously to recommend that it be killed.