EPA retaliated against employees who raised concerns about deadly chemicals being commercially approved In a series of partially redacted reports, the EPA's inspector general office found that managers within the EPA's New Chemicals Division retaliated against employees who spoke out by passing them up for promotions, reassigning them to other divisions within the agency, and punished them with lower performance evaluations.
Many of the employees at the EPA who faced retaliation worked as chemists and toxicologists.
Five EPA scientists contacted the PEER hotline to complain about the mistreatment and substantiate the claims of three other employees, including one who was retaliated against for being a whistleblower.
PEER filed the hotline complaints with the EPA IG's office on behalf of these employees.
"They would do these risk assessments on new chemicals and they'd say, 'Okay, we found that this one causes cancer,' for example," explained Kyla Bennett, director of science policy for the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
The Toxic Substances Control Act, which was last amended in 2016, requires EPA employees to conduct a full assessment for every new chemical within 90 days of its introduction.
And it was happening over and over and over, and then they started getting retaliated against when they were pushing back."
No comments:
Post a Comment