Growing up in southeastern Washington State, Trisha Pritikin played among the waters and islands of the Columbia River and gave little thought to the looming neighbor upstream: the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a sprawling complex of factories where, beginning in the mid-1940s, the U.S. government secretly manufactured plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program. Pritikin, whose parents worked at the Hanford site, was unaware that radioactive residues from the facility had not only contaminated her riverside playgrounds but had also leached into her yard, tainted the milk she drank, and possibly even been tracked across the rugs in her family's home.

By the late 1980s, it became clear to Pritikin that living near Hanford posed serious health risks. At age 38 she was diagnosed with severe hypothyroidism, which caused joint deterioration and other debilitating ailments. Her father, who worked at Hanford as a nuclear engineer, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, which rapidly spread to his lungs and brain; he died in 1996. Three years later, her mother succumbed to malignant melanoma. Her older brother had died in 1947 amid an unexplained spike in baby deaths near the 560-square-mile reservation, which today is home to the nation's largest environmental cleanup effort.

Pritikin's illness, coupled with the release of federal documents that showed, for the first time, extensive radioactive releases from Hanford, inspired her to activism. In 1989, she organized a meeting in California of other Hanford-area expatriates who also may have suffered health problems associated with radiation exposure. Her scrutiny of Hanford increased as, one after another, her parents were overcome by illnesses she believes were tied to their workplace.

They counsel the Department of Defense on terrorism, help the National Institutes of Health dispense billions of dollars in grants and vet proposed food safety rules for the Department of Agriculture. They weigh in on human rights, climate change, Medicare, Social Security, sexual assault in the military, prescription drugs, national parks, child abuse and countless other subjects.

At least 900 committees, boards, commissions, councils and panels give advice to federal agencies and the White House, forming a vast but largely unnoticed network that influences policy throughout the government. Collectively these bodies have some 67,000 members, meet more than 7,000 times a year and spend almost
$400 million annually.

Many do commendable work, offering expert opinions to the executive branch on topics both broad and arcane. There is evidence, however, that the open, even-handed system envisioned by Congress when it passed the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972 (FACA) has mutated into something less desirable.

Some panels are packed with industry representatives, ensuring that other viewpoints go unheard. Members are added or removed for what appear to be political reasons. Subcommittees – also known as subpanels or working groups – are created to discuss matters behind closed doors. Records are sealed.

"We may need to amend FACA to be more explicit about openness, about how people are selected [for panels]," said Rep. Brian Baird, D-Wash. Baird has studied the federal advisory process and spotted what he believes to be serious flaws: needless secrecy, the choosing of panelists based not on their expertise but on their loyalty to the administration or their views on issues such as abortion.

Fourteen months after the fact, Dr. Henry Anderson and Richard Espinosa say they still aren't sure why they were removed from the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, a presidential panel that helps the government weigh claims for compensation by current and former nuclear weapons workers.

Anderson and Espinosa say they were told only that their terms on the board had expired, and that they would not be reappointed by President Bush. They found this odd, since there was no mention of term limits when they joined the board in 2001.

"I don't really know what happened," Anderson, chief medical officer with the Wisconsin Division of Public Health, told the Center for Public Integrity in a recent interview. "I know at the time there was a feeling that the board was being activist … very worker supportive. [The Department of Labor] was supposedly unhappy that they were having to pay out too much money, and felt we were responsible."

"We got the boot," said Espinosa, business representative for Sheet Metal Workers Local Union No. 49 in Albuquerque, N.M., and a former employee of Los Alamos National Laboratory. "It wasn't a random act."

Whether Anderson and Espinosa were ousted for political reasons by a cost-conscious administration or merely rotated off the board as part of a routine cycle may never be known. The White House won't comment.

But the comings and goings on the 12-member panel have heightened suspicion among members of Congress and claimants who believe the compensation program, administered by the Labor Department, is biased against ailing Cold War veterans and their survivors.

"You have to wonder what they [White House officials] were trying to do," said Rep. Tom Udall, D-N.M. "They seemed to be removing members of the board without any real justification."