EPA officials retaliated against 3 scientists, watchdog says

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) internal watchdog has found that top agency officials retaliated against three staffers for expressing different scientific opinions.

The employees who were victims of this alleged retaliation thought chemicals should be considered more toxic, while top officials sought to consider them safer, according to the reports from the EPA’s inspector general.

In one such case, EPA scientist Sarah Gallagher says she thought the agency should consider the chemical as toxic to fetal development, while another official wanted to classify it as a lower-priority body weight issue.

In another case documented in a report finding retaliation against scientist Martin Phillips, a senior science adviser allegedly changed an assessment in a way that removed “reproductive toxicity” as a concern from safety information that goes to people who work with the chemical.

In a third report finding retaliation against scientist William Irwin, a manager also allegedly tried to remove evidence of reproductive toxicity.

As a result of these incidents, Gallagher, Phillips and Irwin suffered lower marks on their performance reviews, while Gallagher lost out on a bonus and Irwin was even reassigned to a different division, according to the office of the EPA’s inspector general.

Gallagher told The Hill she felt like she couldn’t do her job without facing retaliation.

“I was definitely scared,” she said. “I felt that nothing I could do would allow me to both protect human health and my career.”

In addition to the implications for these staffers’ own careers, the watchdog reports pointed out that these instances appeared to have a chilling effect that could impact other agency scientists’ willingness to stand up to management.

“Other assessors noticed how those who disagreed with management were perceived,” the reports said.

They added that a person whose name was redacted testified that disagreeing or delaying the resolution of backlogged cases could cause management to label an employee “problematic.”

The incidents are alleged to have occurred during President Trump’s administration, but the whistleblowers said science integrity issues at the agency are ongoing.

The reports issued Tuesday also knocked how the complaints made on behalf of the staffers were handled in 2021, noting that a scientific integrity official did not redact the names of the whistleblowers before distributing the complaint.

After the complaint became public, Gallagher said, a dead roach ended up on her desk.

The reports from the inspector general’s office also detail alleged harassment faced by the employees.

It particularly recounted an incident in which an office’s deputy director allegedly told employees who were assessing a new chemical that was largely composed of a cancer-causing solvent that they should not consider the solvent’s hazards in their assessment.

The top official then “threw a stack of memorandums related to solvents across the conference table, and they scattered everywhere,” the report said.

While no officials are named in the report, Tala Henry served as the office’s deputy director at that time. Henry, who remained at the EPA during President Biden’s administration but has since left, declined to comment.

“I sort of naively thought that working with pretty much all Ph.D. level scientists, that we would settle matters by looking at the science and having scientific discussions,” Phillips told The Hill. 

“Instead, what we got was bullying, harassing, name-calling, directions to just override things without any explanation or rationale,” he added. 

An EPA spokesperson noted that the instances occurred during the previous administration, saying they took place during a time “when the political leadership placed intense pressure on both career managers and scientists in EPA’s new chemicals program to more quickly review and approve new chemicals.”

“Since day one, the Biden-Harris Administration has restored scientific integrity as the cornerstone of its work to protect public health and the environment, including reinstating key whistleblower protections that empower employees to share their own, differing scientific opinions,” the spokesperson said.

Kyla Bennett, director of science policy at the organization Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, disagreed with the characterization. 

“Things under the Trump administration were horrific,” Bennett said, but, she added, “all of these same issues are occurring under the Biden administration — both the retaliation and the underlying scientific issues.”

“Things have not gotten a lot better,” she added. “They’ve gotten a little better, but not a lot better.”

The report comes after complaints filed on behalf of the scientists by Bennett’s organization. 

The complaints focused on alleged instances of interference in science at the agency, including the deletion of language identifying potentially adverse impacts of chemicals and other efforts to minimize concerns of chemical toxicity.

While the reports issued this week detailed certain scientific disagreements, the inspector general’s office has not said whether the accusations of interference were substantiated.

In a written statement accompanying the report, EPA Inspector General Sean O’Donnell said the results show that “more work is needed” to meet the agency’s scientific integrity commitments.