Senate Democrats slam Bush nominee to oversee federal regulations

Those "provocative ideas" that Harvard Professor John Graham expressed over a decade about the folly of some environmental rules haunted him Thursday during a Senate Governmental Affairs hearing on his fitness to run the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., charged Graham has "trivialized environmental regulations" in the past by saying that smog might be good for human health because it blocks the sun's ultraviolet rays--and by questioning the need to regulate some toxins.

Durbin also suggested that Graham has compromised his integrity by soliciting donations from polluting industries and tobacco interests for the institute he founded--the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.

For 15 years Graham has been teaching students at Harvard how to analyze the costs and benefits of government efforts to reduce environmental and public health risks. As an academic, he acknowledged, he has been "speaking provocative ideas"--a practice that he promised will end if he is confirmed as administrator of OIRA, the part of OMB that reviews all new federal rules.

He promised that he would be "enforcing the laws as Congress wrote them."

Governmental Affairs Chairman Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., and other Republicans praised Graham as the expert in his field of risk analysis--and cited a long list of endorsements of his nomination by academics in the field of environmental science and public health.

Thompson questioned how anyone in Congress could object to Graham's use of corporate funding to run his center, given politicians' need for campaign contributions. "I don't think we ought to get too high up on our high horses with regard to that," Thompson said.

But Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said opposition to Graham from environmental and consumer groups was based on the Bush administration's early assault on environmental rules, not Graham's credentials.

"If the Bush administration had not taken action early on that raised questions about the administration's attitudes toward a whole range of protective regulations ...there would be a lot less anxiety about your nomination," Lieberman told Graham.