Poster from a protest against Elon Musk by MoveOn, February 4, 2025. Geoff Livingston, Flickr, Creative Commons.

I worked for 2 years on Capitol Hill and 25 years for the US Environmental Protection Agency. During those 27 years I met many bureaucrats and a few Congressmen and Senators. I even met the mother of President Jimmy Carter and the Secretary of Agriculture, Bob Bergland.

This experience opened my eyes to the advantages of government served by well-educated, competent, honest, and dedicated civil servants. The industry perpetually seeks decisions from government agencies on their products. Some of those products seeking and requiring approval by the US EPA, for example, pesticides, can be lethal to wildlife and humans alike. So, government experts evaluating such chemicals must possess advanced knowledge of chemistry, biology, and toxicology. Unfortunately, these experts work in an environment dominated largely by politics, not science. This means that the lobbyists, not scientists, have the ear of policy makers. I came across and lived through this chaos: scientists making their arguments for human and environmental health protection in technical memos; the opposition from lobbyists representing companies, manufacturers, and powerful legal firms saying their products would save the farmers and increase prosperity. The cacophony and lies of deregulation disturbed me.

I attended hundreds of meetings of EPA scientists, and industry lobbyists and senior EPA policy makers. At times, the public interest of safety prevailed, as in the early years of the EPA, 1970s. But many times, the political appointees made decisions that favored the industry. These decisions, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, explain why conventional, not certified organic, food is probably laced by neurotoxins and carcinogens while ecosystems and wildlife have been threatened with diseases, destruction, and extinction. I protested such policies and, immediately, senior people branded me with a slander of not being a “team player” and, worse, tried firing me. In 1990, they took steps for firing me, but the administrator, William Reilly, rejected their efforts.

My life at EPA became precarious. I had to be very careful. Senior managers even planted a spy in my office who provoked me and, no doubt, reported me to his bosses. A colleague warned me about the spy. The consequences of this treatment were severe. I was promoted only once. So, speaking out was very hazardous and expensive. Despite the antagonism between me and a few senior officials over policy, I persevered. I simply could not accept fashionable deregulation, which compromised science and public and environmental health in order to profit agribusiness. This moral dilemma angered and astonished me. For some time, I refused to accept the US was falling from the rule of law and civilization. No civilized society would willfully feed its people tainted food and risk life on Earth.

Some of my colleagues shared my frustrations. They suspected I was going to write about corruption at EPA. At appropriate times spanning more than 2 decades, they gave me their memos and other reports they authored. The information and knowledge in those documents and my personal experience helped me write my 2014 book, Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA.

Public good

I never gave in to the corrupt temptations for career advancement. Call it stubbornness or moral commitments to science-based decisions for the protection of human and environmental health. I came out of Greek........

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