Memoirs of a Whistleblower by William Sanjour

FROM THE FILES OF A WHISTLEBLOWER Or how EPA was captured by the industry it regulated By William Sanjour 12/25/13 [Suggestions welcomed at [email protected]] [The easy access to this Website is http://www.sanjour.info] 1 CONTENTS Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………….. 3 Chapter One – My Personal Crises …………………………………………………..…… 7 Chapter Two – The Grass Roots NIMBYs ………………………………………………. 17 Chapter Three – Reagan’s Hoodlums …..…………………………….…………………. 24 Chapter Four – Congressional Office of Technology Assessment ………………………. 29 Chapter Five – Federal Recycling ……………………………………………………….. 35 Chapter Six – The GSX Saga ……………………………………………………………. 37 Chapter Seven – LWD in Kentucky ……………………………………………………... 47 Chapter Eight – Environmentalists vs. Environmentalists ………………………………. 55 Chapter Nine – Georgia & North Carolina (again) ………………..…………………….. 61 Chapter Ten – Grounded ……………………………………………………………...…. 70 Chapter Eleven – Why EPA Is Like It Is and Barney Frank’s Congressional Hearing …. 83 Chapter Twelve – Ohio ………………………………………………………….………. 92 Chapter Thirteen – Monsanto ………………………………………………….….…… 104 Chapter Fourteen – The Ombudsman ……………………………...………….……….. 111 Chapter Fifteen – Lessons Learned ………………………………………….……….… 119 2 Introduction Thirty-five years ago the nation became aware of a serious problem. At Love Canal, in upstate New York, toxic wastes from the disposal site of a nearby chemical plant were leaking into the basements of surrounding houses causing birth defects, miscarriages, respiratory ailments, and cancer. Industrial wastes dumped in Woburn, Massachusetts, for years were causing childhood leukemia and kidney cancer. Thousands of leaking drums of industrial toxic waste dumped in Hardeman County, Tennessee, were poisoning wells with a half dozen cancer causing chemicals. Hundreds of other examples of the damage being done by industrial waste dumping were coming to light. A serious federal program was created to solve this serious national problem, but just when it was about to go into effect it became a political football. Implementation was delayed and corrupted for frivolous political reasons unrelated to the serious purposes of the program. Opportunists rushed in, like jackals to a wounded animal, to engorge themselves. I was a mid- level manager in this program at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, thoroughly disgusted with the goings-on, but I stuck with it and became a whistleblower in order to inform the public, Congress and the press on what was happening. My activities as a whistleblower brought me to speak at grass-roots environmental citizen meetings in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Georgia, Missouri, and Canada. I testified at legal proceedings in Colorado and Puerto Rico. I addressed grass-roots leadership conferences in Ohio, Kentucky and Virginia. I testified at state legislatures in West Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina. I was asked to testify in the U.S. Congress on my own views on five occasions. I’ve written many articles on hazardous waste issues and about EPA policies, and I have appeared on several TV and movie documentaries. I believe my knowledge and ideas have been influential in the passage of many state and federal laws governing hazardous waste. In short, I believe my blowing the whistle so loud and shrilly was quite effective. But you might well ask the relevance today of events that occurred more than three decades ago at an obscure government agency. I didn’t write this little book to reminisce about past adventures (although that was fun) but to tell about the lessons learned from them. Lessons learned which are not obvious to most people, in some cases counter-intuitive, but which are very relevant today. The political right is correct that regulatory agencies are bloated and over regulating. The left is correct that they are ineffective and easily corrupted. In all these years the government has been regulating it has still not figured out how to do it. While things keep changing; the more they change the more they remain the same. The kind of work I did --- as a policy analyst and operations research analyst --- before coming to EPA, prepared me to analyze these issues. I got paid to accumulate and sift through stacks of data, using a wide variety of techniques, to find significance, insight, and relevance. My first job out of graduate school was with the U.S. Navy’s think tank, the Center for Naval Analysis, which boasts of its “cutting-edge, expert analysis and high quality, impartial information for effective decision making.” After four years, that was followed by several positions in industry in which I did the same sort of thing. I then became a management consultant with the firm of Ernst & Ernst (now Ernst & Young) where I managed research and analysis projects for clients such as the U.S. Postal Service and the National Air Pollution Control Administration*. The later research resulted in discovering what came to be called “Cap * Part of the Department of HEW. In 1970 became the Air Office of EPA. 3 and Trade” as the most cost-effective method of air pollution control. The work I did in air pollution control led, in 1974, to my appointment as a branch chief in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) where I was to put my research management and policy analysis skills to help guide the agency in implementing its new responsibilities regulating industrial hazardous waste disposal. This is where this memoir begins. My experiences, described in this book, cover the years 1974 to 1995 and constitute my data base which I analyzed as I went along, and occasionally wrote articles (I was accused of being a “thinkaholic”). The results of this thinking are presented in the last chapter. The point is that there is nothing about this analysis that is peculiar to the EPA or hazardous waste or the two decades covered by the book; they just constitute the data base. Any two decades in most federal regulatory agencies since 1950 would generate similar data. Nothing has changed. The whole process of federal regulation in America is dreadful. It is stupid, corrupt, ineffective, inefficient, and is just as bad now as it was then. The insight I have gained “for effective decision making” to help make the system work is just as valid now as it was then. I understand why federal regulators did not prevent the abuses which led to the great recession, or the gigantic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, or the recent mine collapses, or any one of dozens of other such failures. In the last chapter I explore measures to make EPA, and perhaps other regulatory agencies, more efficient and less susceptible to corruption. I suggest the four steps necessary to make EPA work as the public expects them to. These are: 1) Agencies which enforce regulations should not write the regulations. Specifically, the President of the United States, the nation’s chief enforcement officer, should not have authority over the drafting of regulations he is charged with enforcing. 2) The revolving door should be shut. Regulatory agency employees should be prohibited from working for companies they regulated for a fixed number of years. 3) Whistle blowers should be protected, encouraged and rewarded. They are the most effective and inexpensive enforcement personnel. 4) To the greatest extent feasible, those whom the regulations are intended to protect should participate in writing and enforcing the regulations. I believe that implementing these reforms would make regulatory agencies smaller, more efficient, less susceptible to corruption, and less likely to write stupid regulations. I became a whistleblower because my attitude has always been that the public has paid for the information that I had acquired on my job and that the public is entitled to what it paid for. Just as it is wrong for employees of a corporation to withhold information about how the corporation’s management was lying, cheating or stealing from the stockholders, it is wrong for government employees to withhold such information about the government from the public, who are, in a essence, the stockholders of the United States. Indeed federal law requires federal employees to report government waste fraud and abuse. It is sad that so few have the courage to do so and so many have the ambition to avoid doing so. 4 I confess I have a terrible memory and at eighty years of age it’s not getting any better. Because of my bad memory I’ve always saved documents, newspapers, and anything I thought might come in handy. However on becoming a whistleblower this became doubly important as the government was constantly trying to invent ways to fire me. I have a filing cabinet next to me with four drawers of documents covering my thirty years at EPA as well as several boxes of documents. This collection has served me well over the years. It has provided source material and supporting material for many things I have written and said. It has saved my backside on many occasions and has even earned me some money. This memoir is being written as I sift through those files and it consists largely of those files. 5 Figure 1. 6 Chapter One – My Personal Crises There is a streak of stubbornness that runs through members of my family; a stubborn refusal to be cowed when you know you are right. My ancestors and relatives have been jailed and persecuted for this streak, which also resides in my own genes. In my case it surfaced on June 15, 1978. The events of that day would cause me to commit the overt acts which would launch a twenty-two year career as a whistleblower against the government of the United States. On that day, my boss, Jack Lehman, the director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Hazardous waste Management Division, had his staff assemble in a conference room so that he could tell us the results of his meeting with Tom Jorling, the politically appointed assistant administrator.

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