It amazes me that the halfway mark of my Congressional Science Fellowship will soon pass.  The past 5 months have been exciting, enjoyable, and enriching.  I have learned a lot about how Congress operates and have acquired a new respect for the members of Congress and their enthusiastic and able staffs.  They are as diligent, hardworking, and devoted as any group of people I have known.

The idea behind the Congressional Science Fellowship Program is to bring scientists from a variety of backgrounds into the legislative and political arenas in Washington, D.C., where Congress has found itself wrestling with increasingly technical problems.  By funding fellows to work for a year in members' offices or on committees in either the House or the Senate, the aim of the program is to avail Congress of the scientific expertise of the fellows on technical issues.  Although the Executive branch already has platoons of competent scientists representing many disciplines, the legislative branch does not have many in-house scientists on its payrolls.  To be sure, Congress has excellent scientific and technical support from several agencies, such as the Congressional Research Service and the Office of Technology Assessment, but there are few staff members and fewer members of Congress with scientific backgrounds.  Often, evaluations of a piece of legislation must be made on a moment's notice.  AGU is one of about 18 different organizations that annually sponsor some 35 Science Fellows, social scientists, and physical scientists.

Since former AGU Fellows Carroll Ann Hodges and Jack Fellows have thoroughly and eloquently described in their midterm reports (Eos, March 3, 1981, p. 89 and February 28, 1984, p. 77) the orientation program sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, it need not be described again in detail.  Following the 2 1/2-week orientation program, in which we learned about the workings of the legislative process and the operation of congressional offices, the Fellows were sent scurrying about the Hill in their attempts to find the ideal office in which to work.  After interviewing at a dozen offices, I decided upon a staff placement at the Subcommittee on Commerce, Transportation, and Tourism of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.  The subcommittee is chaired by James J. Florio (D-NJ).

Despite its name, the subcommittee has jurisdiction over hazardous waste legislation, such as Superfund, the Toxic Substance Control Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.  With my background in chemistry and oceanography and an interest in hazardous waste management, this placement turned out to be an excellent one.  Because Superfund's taxing authority is scheduled to end this fall, it must be reauthorized if it is to continue to supply money for the cleanup of abandoned hazardous waste sites.  Superfund is considered to be the major piece of environmental legislation that Congress will deal with this year, and it promises to keep our subcommittee extremely active.

My early weeks at the subcommittee were spent reading background material on hazardous waste issues, reading statutes, and attending several meetings a week with government officials, industry lobbyists, and environmentalists.  I responded to several letters sent to the subcommittee by residents of communities affected by hazardous waste sites.  However, most of my attention was on learning the ins and outs of Superfund: who our allies and opponents were, and what the substantive issues were for various provisions of the legislation.

In early December the tragic events at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, had a dramatic impact on the environmental section of the subcommittee.  The chemical disaster forced an immediate change in focus from the cleanup of abandoned dumps through Superfund to an examination of the ways in which a repeat of such a horrifying incident could be averted.  The subcommittee delved into the laws and regulations that deal with the production and transportation of hazardous chemicals and searched for improvements that could be made.  Researching these issues involved making dozens of phone calls to people across the country.  We spoke with chemical plant managers, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) investigators, Occupational Safety and Health Agency (OSHA) inspectors, and representatives from organized labor and environmental groups.  Our efforts involved gathering a vast amount of information in one place in a short time and then digesting and condensing the relevant material so that the chairman could be properly briefed on the issues and legislation written.  Finally, eleventh-hour phone calls were made to other members to seek cosponsors for our bills.

On February 6, the results of these efforts were evident in a package of four bills that Rep. Florio introduced in the House of Representatives.  I worked on two of those bills: the Chemical  Manufacturing Safety Act of 1985 and an amendment to the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA).  If adopted, the amendment to OSHA would remove federal preemption in the field of worker right-to-know laws.  It would allow those states that so desire to be more protective of worker health and safety than the federal standards now require them to be.  For example, individual states could demand that more information concerning hazardous materials be given to employee representatives or that more thorough labeling be carried out in the workplace.  The Chemical Manufacturing Safety Act includes the first national community right-to-know provisions that would require users of hazardous materials to provide a variety of information to local fire, police, and health officials as well as to make the information available to the residents in whose community the facility resides.  Rep. Florio's hope is that the public's awareness of the potential dangers of hazardous materials in their communities may start a process whereby those hazards can be reduced.  Now that this package has been introduced, the subcommittee is returning to the pending Superfund bill.

Most of the staff members of the subcommittee are lawyers.  I am at this time the only scientist.  It is too early to assess fully what effect my presence as a scientist has on the subcommittee.  It is likely that my contributions shortened the learning curve that led to our recent legislation, for example, but it seems that daily complementary interactions with other staff members have been at least as important.  The fact that I noticed that several columns of numbers in a recent EPA report to Congress did not quite agree with each other opened an interesting line of questioning that may have had some effect on our tactical approach to budget appropriations for Superfund.  We are now taking a closer look at other aspects of the report to evaluate the validity of its claims.  Also, the ability to engage in elementary mathematical modeling has been helpful in addressing some important issues in Superfund, such as the question of an appropriate funding level.  My relationship with the other Science Fellows brings to the subcommittee about two dozen contacts with other congressional offices as well as sources of information that we would otherwise not have; these contacts may be useful when legislative activity heats up in the future.

My meetings with parties involved with the Superfund legislation are becoming more frequent.  Phone calls continue to pour in, asking questions about our recent bills.  I'm told that the pace will quicken even more when the reauthorization bill for Superfund is introduced; I look forward to being a part of the legislative process ahead.

Eric Butler, AGU Congressional Science Fellow, 1984-1985.

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