The Center for Public Integrity

July 3, 2002 — Because of a column by Paul Krugman that ran in The New York Times and a follow-up Washington Post story, there has been renewed interest in two reports the Center published concerning George W. Bush's days as a director of Harken Energy. We published the first on October 2, 2000 and the second on April 4, 2001.

HOUSTON, May 31, 2002 — In a discovery with national implications, a group of government, academic and private researchers involved in a $20 million study of Houston's air quality have found that operators of petrochemical plants in the city's vast industrial complex have been significantly underestimating emissions of key air pollutants in required reports to regulators.

WASHINGTON, May 15, 2002 — The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, nearing the end of a lengthy investigation, has concluded that federal regulations designed to prevent catastrophic accidents involving a widely used group of hazardous chemicals are "inadequate."

WASHINGTON, April 11, 2002 — The Bush administration quietly shelved a proposal to tighten regulations on a group of hazardous chemicals despite evidence linking dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries to accidents involving those chemicals, an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity has found.

February 12, 2001 — The composition of the team that advised George W. Bush on the Environmental Protection Agency during his transition to the presidency signals a new era of a weakening federal role and a bias toward free-market solutions in complying with environmental regulations, say veteran EPA observers.

October 27, 2000 — Since 1999, The Public i has attempted to obtain information about the bidding process in the sale of the Elk Hills oil reserve, which was sold for $3.65 billion in 1997 to Occidental Petroleum Corp. The Center for Public Integrity filed an administrative appeal of the Department of Energy's refusal to release the information under the Freedom of Information Act. The transaction was the largest government land sale in U.S. history.

WASHINGTON, September 5, 2000 — For nearly a quarter-century, almost since the very day of his swearing in as a U.S. senator, Utah Republican Orrin Hatch and others have waged war on the federal Clean Air Act, using virtually any and every weapon at hand. But when Hatch, former White House counsel C. Boyden Gray and Representative Tom Bliley, R-Va., fired their latest shot — a "friend of the court" brief filed in federal court arguing that the law is unconstitutional — they advanced the cause of corporate polluters — and arguably violated congressional ethics rules.

October 2, 1999 — On the Friday before Labor Day 1998, with much of official Washington already on its last summer trek to seashore or home congressional district, a brief statement appeared in the Federal Register. Only a paragraph long, the notice was six years in the making. The Environmental Protection Agency had, at last, finished its study on the risks of dry cleaning and the availability of safer alternatives.