In case you weren't outraged enough already, check out this older article about the Data Quality Act.

On its face, it seems like a pretty damned good law:

The Data Quality Act -- written by an industry lobbyist and slipped into a giant appropriations bill in 2000 without congressional discussion or debate -- is just two sentences directing the OMB to ensure that all information disseminated by the federal government is reliable.

However:

"'The level of official dissembling from federal, environmental, and resource agencies has never been worse,' he said. 'The federal government today is thoroughly corrupt.'" -- Jeff Ruch, Executive Director of Public Employees For Environmental Responsibility (PEER), speaking to journalist Daniel Smith in the article "Political Science" in today's issue of the New York Times Magazine.

He refers to a "severe disinformation syndrome" in the federal government's dealings with the public. He'd been invited to speak before Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs of the House Committee on Government Reform about the Data Quality Act, enacted in 2001.

What does he mean by disinformation?

Well, you know, if you were representing the interests of a corporation whose products had been shown -- in various studies -- to have harmful effects, you might just be tempted to use the DQA to point out that there weren't *enough* studies done, or that the lack of standardized and federally improved criteria for determining the measure and scope of those hypothetical harmful effects made the information within those studies unreliable.

Certainly, this is what Syngenta Crop Protection did in order to ensure that atrazine -- a weedkiller which demonstrably mutates frogs into hermaphrodites -- remained on the market:

... Herbicide approvals are complicated, and there is no one reason that atrazine passed regulatory muster in this country. But close observers give significant credit to a single sentence that was added to the EPA's final scientific assessment last year.

Hormone disruption, it read, cannot be considered a "legitimate regulatory endpoint at this time" -- that is, it is not an acceptable reason to restrict a chemical's use -- because the government had not settled on an officially accepted test for measuring such disruption.

Those words, which effectively rendered moot hundreds of pages of scientific evidence, were adopted by the EPA as a result of a petition filed by a Washington consultant working with atrazine's primary manufacturer, Syngenta Crop Protection.

That's right. The law says that the government cannot lie to you, or offer only partial/'partial' truths.

Here's another DQA petition that just warms my heart:

The American Chemistry Council and others challenged data used by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) as it sought to ban wood treated with heavy metals and arsenic in playground equipment.

... yeah.

*This* is how the law is being implemented. To protect we poor, hapless American citizens from rapacious researchers who might have a few things to suggest about the safety of products being offered by various industries. Yay. Really, it's ingenious in kind of an insane, didn't-we-grow-out-of-this-when-Teddy-Roosevelt-was-president kind of way.

Step one: Introduce a product.

Step two: Have product shown to be, in some way, harmful by meddling research scientists.

Step three: Point out to the EPA (and/or FDA, for that matter) that the tests performed on your product have yet to be standardized by the American government -- as opposed to, say, MIT or the Sorbonne or some other such fly-by-night organization.

Step four: Sell product at will.

Will someone please tell me I'm overreacting? And, like, give me reasons for it? Please?