Politics interfered with science in the U.S. Environmental Protection Administration's decision in 2018 to allow in-crop use of dicamba for another two years, one of its top administrators said in a recent email to employees.
"Over the past few years, I am aware that political interference sometimes compromised the integrity of our science," Michal Freedhoff, the new acting assistant administrator for the EPA's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, wrote in a March 10 email to all employees in her division.
"DTN/Progressive Farmer," an agriculture news outlet, on Friday first reported Freedhoff's email. The news outlet also reported that Freedhoff said at a recent conference of pesticide regulators that results of this year's crop season could bring a review of the Trump administration's decision last fall to register three dicamba formulations through the 2025 crop season.
"This is a new day, about communication, trust, transparency and the importance of science in our regulatory decision-making process," Freedhoff also wrote. "All of us are responsible for ensuring the scientific integrity of our work. All of us are responsible for creating a work environment where everyone feels free to speak up without fear."
The EPA's press office on Monday confirmed Freedhoff's email and comments.
Freedhoff, who came into her current job with the new administration of President Joe Biden, cited the dicamba decision as one of three specific instances where science was ignored.
The EPA on October 31, 2018 said that it would re-register three dicamba formulations for use through the 2020 crop season while being aware of some 1,400 complaints of dicamba damage at the time in Arkansas and other states where cotton and soybeans are grown.
Regarding dicamba, Freedhoff said in her email that senior leadership within the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention in the Trump administration "directed career staff to: (1) rely on a limited data set of plant effects endpoints; (2) discount specific studies (some with more robust data) used in assessing potential risks and benefits; and (3) discount scientific information on negative impacts."
Freedhoff's email reflected what the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported in November 2018, about three weeks after the EPA's announcement.
The newspaper, based on emails obtained at the time through the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, reported that EPA scientists had recommended dicamba restrictions that the agency's politically appointed administrators ultimately ignored.
The emails showed that EPA scientists had sought 443-foot in-field buffers between areas where dicamba is sprayed and where there may be endangered species. Those buffers, instead, were set at 57 feet in the new regulations announced by Andrew Wheeler, then the EPA's acting administrator.
Scientists with the agency's Environmental Fate and Effects Division sought the 443-foot buffers, based in part on the work of Jason Norsworthy, a weed scientist and professor with the University of Arkansas System's Division of Agriculture.
The larger buffers recommended by the EPA scientists arose from Norsworthy's 240-acre field trial that summer to test for dicamba's off-target movement, whether by physical drift as it was being sprayed or hours or days after being applied.
While acknowledging the flood of complaints of dicamba damage to crops and to non-agriculture vegetation in several states, the EPA said in the 2018 decision that dicamba's effectiveness against weeds now resistant to other herbicides outweighed the risks.
Last fall, the EPA announced a 5-year registration for dicamba formulations made by Bayer, BASF and Syngenta.
Freedhoff, in an online conference March 8 of state and federal pesticide regulators, suggested the EPA might review the new registrations after this growing season.
"I think we felt like we need a growing season worth of data under our belts to see what happens and make sure the measures put in place in 2020 were the right ones," Freedhoff told regulators at that meeting.
A federal appeals court ultimately threw out the 2018 registrations, saying the EPA had failed to assess certain risks and ignored evidence of other risks, all in violation of federal law setting how pesticides are approved.
The EPA press office on Monday said the EPA's decision last fall "includes many measures proposed by EPA's career scientists to prevent damage to non-target plants that may have occurred in recent years, while allowing use of dicamba in a manner both protective of the environment and responsive to that court decision."
Freedhoff, in her email to staff, also cited political interference in the EPA's risk assessment of an industrial compound called trichloroethylene and a toxicity assessment of a chemical found in water and food packaging.