Shredding Scientific Data, and Maybe Your Health Too

It’s a safe bet that most Californians have never heard of the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, part of the California Environmental Protection Agency. Yet the officially sanctioned monkey business contemplated by that agency would constitute a threat to the health and well-being of every resident of this state and an affront to notions of an open democracy.

The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (the acronym is pronounced o-e-ha by insiders) is the state’s environmental research arm. It analyzes data on the risk to human health posed by an enormous range of agricultural chemicals and industrial emissions. Regulators and health officials use OEHHA data and analyses to draft rules or issue policy guidelines governing the use of countless potentially dangerous substances.

Much uncertainty surrounds environmental science and disease origins. For that reason, the agency’s credibility rests in large measure on the broader scientific community’s assessment of its rigor and all its data. Last April, however, OEHHA in an internal memo outlined its proposed “records retention policy.” Under this curiously named policy, state scientists would destroy research data and internal records that differed from administrators’ final decisions. Suppose that an OEHHA administrator decided after viewing the evidence that a new pesticide was sufficiently safe to be used in the state. After that decision was made, the agency would shred any lab results, memorandums, medical results and computer runs indicating that the pesticide might cause human illness. Only the documents supporting the decision would remain in the agency’s files. Second thoughts would therefore have no documentary support.

The agency justified the shredding as protecting “frank and candid” internal deliberations and as guarding “against confusion caused by conflicting statements made in the course of deliberations and discussion.”

This policy is simply indefensible, violating both state law on administrative procedures and records retention and a fundamental tenet of democratic government--that information and decision making must be open and public.

Tuesday, Gov. Pete Wilson’s office suspended this Orwellian policy shortly before it was to take effect, but Cal-EPA lawyers retained the right to keep some materials secret. The National Resources Defense Council, which along with news and legal groups had sued to block the policy, said the secrecy too was unacceptable and that the suit would stay in force.

Secrecy is hardly an improvement from shredding. OEHHA must redraft this policy, first reviewing its own scientists’ many written statements strongly protesting the April memo--that is, if anyone kept them.