By Catherine Clabby
Two conservative leaders of the U.S. House science committee claim one of North Carolina’s most prominent scientists may have violated federal anti-lobbying rules in an academic journal editorial.
That’s true, they say, even though the article she co-wrote did not push for passage of legislation.
In letters to the Inspector General and acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Republican Congressmen Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ), spell out their dissatisfaction with Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
Birnbaum co-wrote “Regulating toxic chemicals for public and environmental health,“ published last month by Public Library of Science (PLOS) Biology. It accompanied a collection of articles by scientists exploring the gaps between research evidence and U.S. policies regulating chemicals.
“Closing the gap between evidence and policy will require that engaged citizens, both scientists and nonscientists, work to ensure our government officials pass health-protective policies,” the editorial states.
That may be enough to violate both the Anti-Lobbying Act and HHS ethics guidelines banning executive branch employees from lobbying activities, said Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and Biggs, who leads its environment subcommittee.
Through a spokeswoman Tuesday, Birnbaum, who has been attacked by Republican members of the House science committee before, characterized the writing differently.
“The editorial reminds us that health policy needs to be updated as research provides us with new information,” her statement said. “It simply acknowledges the fact that public opinion plays a role in the policymaking process.”
Veteran researcher, institute director
A highly regarded toxicologist and a longtime federal scientist, Birnbaum has been director of NIEHS since 2009. The institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, funds science that explores ways that environmental exposures, to industrial chemicals and many more things, may harm human health.
NIEHS, whose budget is $681 million, does not create federal environmental policy at its headquarters in Research Triangle Park in central North Carolina. The research it funds at many different locations influences policy at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere.
In their letter to HHS Inspector General Daniel R. Levinson, Smith and Biggs ask his office to assess whether Birnbaum’s writing merits a “full-scale” review. “She is prohibited to pressure citizens to contact their government representatives to favor or oppose any policy, even before the introduction of an actual piece of legislation,” they wrote of Birnbaum.
Co-written with PLOS Biology senior editor Liza Gross, the editorial last month appeared with “Challenges in Environmental Health: Closing the Gap between Evidence and Regulations.” The journal’s “special collection” is a series of peer-reviewed commentaries that explores the divides between scientific evidence and environmental policy.
Birnbaum advised PLOS Biology on topics and authors for the series. Among other topics, the commentaries considered “regulatory flaws that allow hazardous chemicals to contaminate the environment, technical challenges in assessing risks from short-lived compounds and from multiple, simultaneous exposures; and the failure to ban chemicals even in the face of overwhelming evidence of harm.”
The series notes, among other things, that in the past three decades evidence has grown that some chemicals can have ill effects at doses once considered harmless.
Congressional committee “probe”
Smith, the House science committee chairman who has presided over a number of controversial bills over the past five years, is leaving Congress this year after three decades. He has been criticized frequently by Union of Concerned Scientists, in part because of his attacks on federal scientists.
Biggs was named chairman of the committee’s environment subcommittee during his freshman year on Capitol Hill last year.
[sponsor]NIEHS research sometimes gets challenged by industries that oppose its findings and subsequent environmental regulation. Smith and Biggs are both anti-regulation legislators, as assessed by the Americans for Prosperity.
The conservative political advocacy group funded by brothers David H. Koch and Charles Koch, scores voting by each legislator on “economic freedom” topics at 100 percent.
Thea McDonald, the House committee communications director, described scrutiny of Birnbaum’s writing a “probe.”
She compared it to efforts by Smith that contributed to a 2015 Government Accountability Office finding that the EPA circulated “covert” propaganda and violated federal provisions with social media messaging supporting for President Obama’s Waters of the United States rules.
Lamar and Biggs requested a reply from Levinson by the end of this month.
The last time Republican members of the House science committee complained about Birnbaum was 2013 when they sent a letter to the NIH director Francis Collins complaining about her journal article “When environmental chemicals act like uncontrolled medicine” in Trends in Endocrinology & Metabolism.
Committee members questioned the validity of some of her statements in a review of cancer-causing chemicals, charging some might be opinion more than fact.
Committee members wrote Collins months later to express dissatisfaction with the response from NIH Principal Deputy Director Larry Tabak.
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As a science writer and fellow environmental health researcher, I fully support Linda Birnbaum, who is among the most brilliant and effective public health scientists working today. Among many other mentions of her work on endocrine disruption in my own writing, her research on atrazine exposure and its impact on breast development is featured in Living Downstream (both the book and the film).
Birnbaum rightly encourages fellow scientists and citizens to speak out about the dangerous disconnect between the evidence for the harms of toxic chemical exposures (which is growing) and the responsiveness of public policy to that evidence (which is shrinking). To label such a call “lobbying” is an outrageous, dishonorable act of intimidation against the entire public health community by a couple of Congressmen whose own pockets are lined by the fossil fuel industry. Their harassment of Birnbaum is one more salvo in the ongoing GOP-led war on science.
Dr. Birnbaum is revered by academicians as a scientist who calls the data as they lay and who encourages citizen engagement in the policy-making process that directly affects their lives. For this, she deserves praise, not baseless attacks.
U.S.M.C. Camp Lejeune North Carolina 1950-1985 35 years of Toxic Drinking Water. TCE,PCE,DCE,Vinyl Chloride Benzene ….. was for a fact in the drinking water at Camp Lejeune North Carolina for 35 years. The studies are real. How many need to die? Please let Dr. Birnbaum help stop this sort of toxic exposure. Camp Lejeune victims need justice and proof that environmental health and research advances with new science. You should not dismiss the facts. Many Camp Lejeune Marines and families members are very sick today, due to the toxic drinking water, air and soil exposure, but we are not stupid. We have lost many of our loved ones. And at this is why we will not give up. Please stop the harassment of Dr. Birnbaum.
The biggest threat to America is when the Republican “Supreme Court” made money speech. These “Representative” (Republicans ) prove this every day . Don’t bite the hand that Bribes me. (The Corporate State)