EPA rule-making gives environmental justice short shrift, GAO says.

"In four phases of drafting three significant clean air rules between fiscal years 2000 and 2004, EPA generally devoted little attention to environmental justice," concluded a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. Although the EPA has an office to oversee this issue and has drafted internal guidance about it, the GAO found that the agency sidelined environmental justice issues in drafting rules, conducting economic reviews, and considering public comments. (GAO, Environmental Justice: EPA Should Devote More Attention to Environmental Justice When Developing Clean Air Rules, No. GAO-05-289 (July 2005).)

In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order No. 12898, requiring federal agencies to develop specific policies to ensure that their activities did not have a disparate impact on minority communities in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Shortly thereafter, the EPA's newly created Office of Environmental Equity (now Environmental Justice) developed guidance policies for complying with the order, including in the development and implementation of rules to enforce the Clean Air Act.

The EPA's rule-making process begins with a work group of staff that considers options and makes recommendations to managers, who draft a rule. Then, an economist prepares an economic review, and the proposed rule is published in the Federal Register and made available for public comment.

The House Subcommittee on Environment and Hazardous Materials asked the GAO to examine clean air rules promulgated between fiscal years 2000 and 2004 to determine how the EPA considers environmental justice in drafting and finalizing rules. It picked three rules--the 2000 gasoline rule intended to reduce sulfur in gas and reduce emissions from new vehicles, the 2001 diesel rule meant to reduce sulfur in diesel fuel and reduce emissions from new heavy-duty engines, and the 2004 rule to implement a new ozone standard--because only these included the terms "environmental justice" or "Executive Order 12898" in their final form.

The GAO found that work groups were not informed enough to consider environmental justice issues, although EPA guidance states that the matter should be brought up early in the rulemaking process. Agency guidance also requires that economic review consider environmental justice, but the GAO said the EPA "made no changes to how potential environmental justice impacts were addressed in the final economic reviews, and thus the final economic reviews generally did not provide decision-makers with an environmental justice analysis." The EPA received and reviewed public comments addressing environmental justice for all three proposed rules but did not address the subject in all final versions, the study also found.

In its report, the GAO recommended that the EPA

* give work groups the guidance and training to identify potential environmental justice issues, involve environmental justice coordinators in the groups, and ensure that the groups address the issue in the final recommendations they make.

* improve the economic assessment of environmental justice impacts by identifying appropriate data and developing modeling techniques to assess it.

* ensure that officials better explain the EPA's rationale and provide supporting data to respond fully to public comments on environmental justice aspects of proposed rules.

When given a draft of the GAO report to review, the EPA's assistant administrator for air and radiation responded that it "does not accurately reflect the progress we are making in achieving environmental justice with respect to air pollution; nor does it accurately reflect the way in which the three final rules GAO reviewed, and EPA's development of them, address environmental justice issues." The draft report "contains a number of factual inaccuracies and misleading statements, and omits important information," the administrator wrote.

In its final report, the GAO responded to the EPA comments and countered that the agency's claim that its rules have resulted in better air quality nationally is irrelevant in this context. It disagreed with the EPA's assertion that the study should have focused on the outcome of the process--the rules themselves.

"EPA generally did not respond to our four recommendations. We continue to believe that all of them are still warranted," the final report concluded. The full text of the report is available at www.gao.gov/new.items/d05289.pdf.