Ex-EPA official calls for new agency to oversee nanotech

April 28, 2009: A former official with the US Environmental Protection Agency is calling for a new environmental and consumer protection agency to oversee nanotechnology.

Existing existing health and safety agencies are unable to cope with the risk assessment, standard setting and oversight challenges of advancing nanotechnology, according to J. Clarence (Terry) Davies. In a recently released paper, Oversight of Next Generation Nanotechnology, he calls for a new Department of Environmental and Consumer Protection to oversee product regulation, pollution control and monitoring and technology assessment.

“Federal regulatory agencies already suffer from under-funding and bureaucratic ossification, but they will require more than just increased budgets and minor rule changes to deal adequately with the potential adverse effects of new technologies,” according to Davies. “New thinking, new laws and new organizational forms are necessary. Many of these changes will take a decade or more to accomplish, but there is an urgent need given the rapid pace of technological change to start thinking about them now.”

In the report’s preface, first EPA administrator William D. Ruckelshaus points out that the proposed new agency “…would be more of a science agency than the current regulatory ones and would incorporate more integrated approaches to oversight and monitoring.”

The proposed agency would foster more integrated oversight and a unified mechanism for product regulation to deal with current problems like toxics in children’s toys and newer challenges like nanotechnology. A more integrated approach to pollution control was necessary even before EPA was created, and since that time the need has only increased, according to Davies.

Davies served during the George H.W. Bush administration as Assistant Administrator for Policy, Planning and Evaluation at the US Environmental Protection Agency. In 1970, as a consultant to the President’s Advisory Council on Executive Organization, he co-authored the plan that created EPA. As a senior staff member at the Council on Environmental Quality, he wrote the original version of what became the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

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