EPA scientists decided TCE damages fetal hearts. The Trump White House rewrote their assessment.

For years, a battle has been quietly raging within the scientific community over the potential risks of TCE, a commonly-used chemical that many scientists believe is linked to health problems such as fetal heart deformations and kidney cancer.

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump’s EPA released an official assessment of the chemical, which rejected fetal heart malformations as a benchmark for safe exposure levels to the chemical. In coming to this conclusion, the report effectively downplayed years of established science.

Jennifer McPartland, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, called the findings “grave.” The report, she said, “not only underestimates the lifelong risks of the chemical, especially to the developing fetus, it also presents yet another example of this administration bowing to polluters’ interests over public health.” 

A report like this would be concerning on its own. But here’s the thing: reporter Elizabeth Shogren learned that those findings were altered radically at the direction of the Trump White House. She’s detailed that in the brand-new investigation featured in this week’s new episode.

Shogren has obtained a copy of the roughly 700-page draft assessment that EPA scientists initially signed off on. That internal draft, government scientists say, involved three years of work, as EPA scientists combed through decades of scientific research on TCE’s toxicity and how people get exposed. But then the draft went to the White House and other federal agencies for review. According to two government scientists, EPA scientists were directed to substantially rewrite their evaluation by discarding the science on TCE’s role in fetal heart defects. The instructions, they said, came from the Executive Office of the President.

Put another way, the White House had directed the EPA to override the findings of its own scientists. 

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Legislation targets caregiver abuse in California residential care facilities

Sweeping new legislation has been proposed in California to curb the pervasive exploitation and abuse of caregivers in residential care facilities.

The measure, recently introduced by Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Oakland, would require administrators and owners of residential care facilities for seniors, the mentally ill and those with developmental disabilities to undergo three hours of training on employment laws, including minimum wage rates and whistleblower protections. It also would require them to complete two hours of continuing education on employment laws every two years going forward.

Caregivers would be required to receive employment law training as well, including on whistleblower protections and how to file wage theft claims with labor regulators, among other employment laws.

The bill comes in response to our 2019 investigation, which found rampant exploitation and mistreatment of caregivers in the booming senior care-home industry. Reveal found care-home operators profited handsomely while paying workers, many of them immigrants, as little as $2 an hour. Caregivers often slept on floors or in garages and were charged for lodging. Some were victims of human trafficking. Workers frequently were harassed and fired if they complained. 

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