EPA WEAKENING POLLUTION CONTROL

FELICITY BARRINGER, NY TIMES -  The Environmental Protection Agency has changed the way it sets standards to control dangerous air pollutants like lead, ozone and tiny particles of soot, enhancing the role of the agency's political appointees in scientific assessments and postponing the required review by independent scientific experts.

The change. . . largely tracks the suggestions of the American Petroleum Institute but also adopts some recommendations of the agency's independent scientific advisers. . .

The decision announced yesterday, the culmination of months of review and comment, drew a scathing response from environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Clean Air Watch, as well as the American Lung Association. Vickie Patton, a senior lawyer with Environmental Defense, said "the establishment of health-based standards are one of the single most important scientific decisions" the E.P.A. made.

The changes, Ms. Patton said, will compromise two aspects of the process "integral to scientific integrity and independence."

For one thing, agency scientists will no longer produce their own independent review of the latest science to start the process of deciding whether a pollution standard - for lead, say, or ozone - is tough enough to protect public health. Instead, initial reviews will now involve both agency scientists and their political bosses . . .

"They are using this idea of streamlined and expedited decision-making as a Trojan horse to infect the most important decisions the administrator makes with politics," Ms. Patton said.

In addition, she said, the role of the independent panel of scientific advisers - who act as auditors, reviewing the document produced by agency scientists and advising top management - has been diminished. The panel, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, will now comment on the agency's proposed actions after the public has been notified of them, giving the scientists essentially the same kind of participation as industry lobbyists and environmental groups.