Throughout the ordeal, the EPA "lost two years of valuable research," Rimar says. "I know there's politics, I know there's give and take, I know there's compromise. That's totally understandable. But there's a huge gap between recognizing the scientific reality and compromising with that, and trying to silence scientific reality and persecuting those people who are trying to tell the truth."
"What happened in Brian's situation is fairly widespread. The thing is, not many people fight it," says Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER. In the government workplace, subtle things can happen that push scientists off their career paths--like being left off memos or not invited to conferences. "It may sound petty, but if you're a scientist in a particular field, it's the difference between being a star and being mediocre," says Ruch. "We call it 'death of a thousand paper cuts.'"
David Lewis's experience was not so subtle. The respected Atlanta microbiologist and nearly thirty-year employee of the EPA has become one of the agency's most vocal critics.
Lewis, who is now embroiled in his third lawsuit against his employer, charges the EPA with "an insidious problem where science takes a backseat to politics. It's not a new situation," he says. In fact, a 1996 survey of the EPA's Office of Research and Development noted that a "major source of frustration [and insecurity] to ORD employees is that the research direction and even the very existence of ORD is determined by politics."
The EPA was likewise skewered in a May 1998 report by the right-leaning National Wilderness Institute, which accused the agency of "corrupting agency ethics rules to silence whistleblowers," among other charges.
"EPA should be the one setting the example of encouraging whistleblowing," says Lewis's Washington attorney, Stephen Kohn. "Instead, they're the worst offender." The EPA is more often charged with violating its own policies than any private company or other government agency, says Kohn.
Despite environmentalists' initial elation when the outwardly green Al Gore became vice president, "the brain drain at EPA has accelerated in the Clinton administration," Lewis says. "That is the inevitable outcome when an agency deigns to disregard the expert opinion of its own scientists."
The rising persecution of EPA whistleblowers started in 1993, says Lewis, when Representative John Dingell (D-Michigan) put pressure on the EPA's OIG to more aggressively prosecute unethical and criminal behavior within the agency. Lewis experienced the whistleblower's fate firsthand after he eulogized the demise of sound science at the EPA in a June 1996 commentary in the journal Nature. Two years later the conservative Washington Times published a letter signed by Lewis, Rimar and eleven other scientists charging the EPA with harassing and intimidating whistleblowers. The letter spurred U.S. House science committee chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) to request a full investigation by the General Accounting Office.
If the GAO report--whose conclusions remain secret until its release later this month--sparks congressional hearings, Rimar plans to travel to D.C. to tell his story. His testimony might include what he was thinking during the OIG investigation: "This is Kafka, this is star chamber, this is the old Soviet Union. This is not the United States of America.
