Findings of EPA Advisory Committee Misrepresented

Findings of EPA Advisory Committee Misrepresented

On December 18, 2017, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) responded to a request for information about its Agricultural Worker Protection Standard from Senator Tom Udall. In a letter to Senator Udall, EPA reported that it had extended the compliance dates for three key provisions of the standard, due to concerns regarding states’ ability to implement them.

The letter indicated that EPA’s Pesticide Program Dialogue Committee (PPDC) — a federal advisory committee with 50 members representing states, agricultural producers, farm worker advocates, and others — had been unable to reach “agreement on a practical way to alleviate stakeholder concerns.” However, according to a report by the Project on Government Oversight, PPDC members actually agreed that the provisions at issue “should go forward.”

In response to EPA’s letter, 7 PPDC members wrote that “the summary of the Dialogue Committee meeting in the letter to Udall is inaccurate,” and stated:

“We do not have an expectation that the EPA’s decisions will always correspond with our specific points of view, yet we do expect our views to be heard and we certainly do not expect them to be ignored or mischaracterized simply because they do not fit into a pre-determined political narrative.”