President Ronald Reagan famously asserted, "The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program."
He might have added that the second nearest thing is a completely discredited left-wing cause. Exhibit A: Since the left can't convince the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to outlaw the chemical BPA, it wants the Environmental Protection Agency to take over.
Bisphenol-A (BPA) is widely used in the production of plastics and resins. It has been around since the 1960s, and yet the FDA has never found any evidence that the product has any negative impact on humans, animals or the environment.
Anti-BPA activists have charged that the agency is ignoring numerous scientific studies and is violating its own internal guidelines in rejecting their concerns. But the FDA disagrees, claiming, "researchers have been conducting in-depth studies of BPA since September 2008."
The agency has concluded that "the level of BPA from food that could be passed from pregnant mothers to the fetus is so low that it could not be measured." Moreover, "exposure to BPA in human infants is from 84% to 92% less than previously estimated."
And it's not just the FDA shaking its head. The European Food Safety Agency has also undertaken a close examination of the claims that BPA is harmful and has found no evidence to support them.
Having lost on the merits of their case, BPA opponents are deriding the agency's research and approval process for being too lenient. That's rich, given that the FDA is one of the most risk-averse federal agencies.
The most frequent criticism of the FDA is that the agency slow-walks, restricts and often denies access to certain products, especially new prescription drugs that could benefit some patients.
In other words, the biggest complaint about the FDA is that it overprotects the public, not underprotects it. And it's easy to see why. If a newly approved drug works well and patients benefit from it, the FDA gets little or no recognition.
But if there is some negative reaction to a new drug, even though the problem never emerged in clinical trials that included thousands of patients, the media pounce and members of Congress lick their chops in anticipation of getting some TV time harassing FDA officials at the oversight hearings.
Thus if the overly cautious FDA says BPA poses no risk, the public can be assured there is no risk.
Having lost on the science, BPA critics are turning to political pressure; they are pushing to have the product's oversight transferred to what, especially under this presidential administration, has become one of the most politicized and heavy-handed agencies in Washington: the EPA.
Where the FDA is cautious, the EPA is reckless. Where the FDA is science-driven, the EPA is ideologically driven. Where the FDA demands benefits that are proportionate to or exceed the costs, the EPA ignores the costs as long as it thinks it can claim some benefit.
Just consider the EPA's recent track record. It has aggressively pushed novel interpretations of the Clean Air Act to impose new greenhouse gas restrictions on companies and states and the Clean Water Act to limit development and mining. The agency bizarrely fined oil refiners for not hitting EPA-imposed targets for mixing in millions of gallons of cellulosic biofuels with gasoline, even though there was no commercially available cellulosic biofuels available. The EPA backed off only when the courts forced it to.
And remember when EPA regional administrator Al Armendariz was caught on tape explaining how the EPA would make examples of some companies just as the Roman army would enter a town and execute some of its leaders to ensure everyone knew who was boss. That revelation even prompted the Washington Post to editorialize, "The EPA is earning a reputation for abuse."
And now we learn that the EPA worked with environmental activists to preempt a full scientific review of the environmental impacts of Alaska's Pebble mine in order to shut down the project.
Giving the current EPA control over BPA would guarantee that ideology and not science would decide the chemical's future. To put it another context, even if you like your plastics, you wouldn't be able to keep them.