PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse, a former senior attorney at the Environmental Protection Agency, said agencies have more freedom to relocate members of the career Senior Executive Service, compared to rank-and-file federal employees. “They can move SES employees and their ...

Congress passed the Administrative Leave Act to put tighter restrictions on how long agencies can put their employees on paid administrative or investigative leave. But OPM is more than seven years late in providing guidance to agencies on how to implement the legislation. Public Employees ...

Kyla Bennett, director of science policy at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, is representing farmers who are suing EPA to force regulation of PFAS in biosolids. Bennett said the “patchwork approach” to regulation employed so far won’t work because the pollution can ...

Still, a breakdown in the relationship between the EPA and its watchdog increases the chances that people and the environment will suffer, said Jeff Ruch, Pacific director of the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Ultimately, the inspector general can’t ...

One water well yielded PFAS levels measured at 268.2 ppt while one of the ponds had over 1,333 ppt of PFAS. The flesh of a stillborn calf tested at 610,000 ppt of PFOS, according to PEER’s analysis of the testing results, which was released in February. Two catfish tested had 74,000 and ...

Former members of the Trump administration say that EPA under his watch laid the groundwork for the Biden administration’s efforts to address PFAS contamination. But health advocates say the Trump administration downplayed the risks of the chemicals, was slow to take action on PFAS and ...

Furthermore, stormwater now must stay onsite for a certain period of time to minimize flooding in a vault or a tank, which will increase the project’s costs. Downie and Farrell explained that the drainage system is under the field. “The only way it’s going to get into the drainage ...

At last count, water systems with levels of PFAS above Environmental Protection Agency standards are serving between 83 and 105 million people throughout the country, according to the EPA. Arizona already has eight projects underway to address this issue. “To continue to allow Americans ...

Jeff Ruch, director of PEER’s Pacific office, said the report pointed to the BIE’s “lack of administrative competence and responsible oversight. So for example, I mean, one of the most attention-grabbing parts of the report was reports of sexual assault on students that was drawing ...

That leaves regulators attempting to protect the public without essential information for some chemicals and in effect creates a “shadow regulatory government” in the EPA, said Tim Whitehouse, a former EPA attorney who is now director of Public Employees for Environmental ...

The EPA’s inspector general office, in a string of partially redacted reports, found managers in the EPA’s New Chemicals Division, part of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, retaliated against employees who raised concerns about chemicals being approved for ...

As the Tyler Morning Telegraph and Longview News-Journal reported last year, some rural East Texas water utilities feared the rule would require the installation of expensive plant upgrades if PFAS contamination was found. “I think the PFAS drinking water standards are one of the first ...

After they were forced to leave their jobs assessing new chemicals, the scientists filed the first of what would be six complaints with the EPA inspector general in June 2021. Their allegations, which detailed industry pressure that continued under the administration of President Joe Biden ...

The problem, the coalition said Monday, is that the plan does not protect infringement on Old Spanish Trail rights of way. The agency failed to incorporate its trail management policies when developing the big plan, according to the group that includes Western Watersheds Project, Public ...

Laura Dumais is staff counselor at PEER, which is currently working with two separate farmers outside of Dallas Fort-Worth. Following the spread of illness and loss of cattle, the families brought their concerns to the county. “There was a huge dump of sewage sludge biosolids on a ...

What’s more, BLM violated the National Environmental Policy Act by not properly evaluating potential impacts to the national trail system from encouraging solar applications within trail boundaries, the coalition, led by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said. ...

The U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) are currently in a legal dispute about sewage sludge used in farm fertilizer. According to PEER, the Clean Water Act (CWA) requires that the EPA must regulate these contaminants, but ...

Now that this longstanding conflict has become intertwined with the cause of carbon reduction, it is pitting an older generation of eco-warriors against a younger breed of climate activists, as well as local unions eager to get in on energy transition jobs. Unfortunately for Maine ...

Kyla Bennett, director of policy at the organization Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), who filed the complaints on behalf of the scientists, said the problems flagged by the scientists have continued under the Biden Administration. PEER says the affected EPA ...

“EPA has received the Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) reports on five whistleblower complaints in the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention’s new chemicals program,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The events ...