Western Congress Reps. Call for EPA to Ban Web Links

Two conservative House Republicans have attacked EPA for offering links from its website to environmental groups, demanding they be removed. The two, Reps. Barbara Cubin (R-WY) and Jim Gibbons (R-NV), made no comparable demand for removal of links to businesses, trade associations, or conservative political groups.

The two wrote EPA Jan. 20, 2004, demanding that EPA remove links to "two non-government, extremist, activist groups" from EPA's Web page on the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). Both groups offer public online access to EPA databases on toxics and other pollution.

One of the groups, the Right-to-Know Network (RTK Net), was giving the public online access to TRI data before EPA even had a Web site. Under the 1986 law that established TRI, EPA was required to make this data accessible online, and RTK Net was doing it earlier and more effectively than EPA itself. RTK Net is foundation-funded and has been affiliated with the watchdog group OMB Watch.

The other group, Scorecard, is actually a project of the advocacy group Environmental Defense. Scorecard acquires a host of EPA databases and integrates them in a user-friendly framework that allows people to look up pollution and other environmental impacts in their own immediate neighborhoods. Technically, it has been a step ahead of EPA's similar effort, Envirofacts, for most of a decade, and has consistently challenged EPA to meet higher performance standards.

Cubin and Gibbons are unhappy because of a Clinton-era decision by EPA to add mining industry wastes to the TRI. Mine-waste releases that occurred in 1997 were first reported in the 1999 TRI public data release. This change affected the economic interests of mining states like Nevada, which became the top generator of wastes if measured by volume alone.

Cubin and Gibbons' Jan. 20 letter went to Associate Administrator Kim Nelson, EPA's Chief Information Officer. Nelson promised in a Feb. 25, 2004, letter of response to Cubin that EPA would speed up an already-planned review of its web links policy.

Meanwhile, OMB Watch and other environmental groups have mounted a write-in campaign, calling on EPA to open up the review of its web-links policy to public scrutiny. OMB Watch says more than 2,000 people have written EPA asking that the review be opened up.

-- "Environmental Protection Agency Fast-Tracking Review of Website Link Policy," OMB Watcher, March 22, 2004.

-- EPA: "External Links from the EPA Public Access Web Site," Order 2190.3, approved Jan. 2, 2002.