EPA has known for 20 years that it promotes toxic fertilizer

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

I’m Lauren Harper, the first Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), and welcome to “The Classifieds.” This is FPF’s weekly newsletter highlighting important secrecy news that shows how the public is harmed when the government keeps too many secrets.

EPA’s silence on ‘forever chemicals’ in fertilizer a public health risk

For over 20 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has promoted a fertilizer it knows contains “forever chemicals” linked to birth defects and cancer.

An investigation by veteran environmental reporter Hiroko Tabuchi for The New York Times shows that, in the early 2000s, chemical manufacturer 3M found high levels of the toxic chemicals it produced in the nation’s sewage supply. Because the wastewater was used to fertilize farmland as part of a practice promoted by the EPA, the company concluded its “chemicals were being unwittingly spread on fields across the country.”

3M told the EPA about its findings during a 2003 meeting.

The EPA sat on the study, continues to promote the fertilization method that may “permanently contaminate” soil, and does not require testing for forever chemicals in wastewater. The only reason we know about the public health risk at all is because Tabuchi dug through thousands of pages of records — all stored on CDs — that were released by 3M as part of a legal settlement.

For more information on the dangers of these same chemicals found in drinking water, which the EPA only recently began regulating, read here and here.

CIA’s mind-control programs declassified

The National Security Archive (where I used to work) recently published a collection of over 1,200 declassified documents on the CIA’s infamous mind-control research programs, projects MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD, and ARTICHOKE. The publication comes 50 years after journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story about the existence of the illegal programs in The New York Times.

The most infamous example of the CIA’s illegal experiments — often conducted on U.S. citizens who had no idea they were being targeted — may be Operation Midnight Climax. As part of this 1950s program, prostitutes working under the direction of the agency lured unsuspecting men back to CIA-run brothels in San Francisco and New York City. The CIA’s own records show the victims were unwittingly fed a variety of drugs, including LSD manufactured by companies like Eli Lilly. The prostitutes then attempted to coax information from the drugged victims so CIA officials, hidden behind one-way mirrors, could assess the drugs’ impact on the men’s ability to tell the truth.

The legacy of these projects, and the medical community’s willingness to support the agency’s illegal and unethical work, goes beyond mind-control experiments. Former New York Times journalist Stephen Kinzer notes that MKULTRA in particular “contributed decisively to the development of techniques that Americans and their allies used at detention centers in Vietnam, Latin America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and secret prisons around the world.”

Federal police accountability database issues first report. Will Trump maintain it?

The Justice Department released its first annual report assessing statistics from the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database. The database was mandated by President Joe Biden’s 2022 executive order, “Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing and Criminal Justice Practices To Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety,” and mirrors similar efforts by the Biden administration to bring accountability and transparency to local policing.

The database, which is used by agencies when making personnel decisions like hiring and promotions, contains information on federal law enforcement misconduct for 2018 through 2023. It currently consists of 4,790 records and shows 63% of incidents “were for sustained complaints or records of disciplinary action based on findings of serious misconduct.”

While the order mandates annual reporting, it’s possible President-elect Donald Trump will rescind the requirement and discontinue the database.

Incentivized lying plagued U.S. efforts in Afghanistan across decades

The Special Inspector General on Afghanistan Reconstruction will issue its final report this year.

SIGAR’s work has been instrumental in informing the public how the U.S. government lied for decades about its progress in Afghanistan, particularly concerning the effectiveness of the billions of dollars spent training Afghanistan’s security forces. A large part of the problem, which IG John Sopko highlights in a recent New York Times op-ed, is the “perverse incentive” for military officials and contractors to justify previous spending levels to keep their budgets from getting cut, no matter how ineffective or useless the programs were.

The IG’s office was, by its own assessment, “the only government agency reliably reporting on the situation” in Afghanistan, and did so in spite of “stiff opposition from officials in the departments of Defense and State, USAID and the organizations that supported their programs.” (SIGAR was not universally transparent with the public, however. Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock had to sue SIGAR under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain copies of the “lessons learned” interviews SIGAR conducted with policymakers, military officials, and contractors who worked in Afghanistan for his book, “The Afghanistan Papers.”)

What I’m reading

The American oil industry’s playbook, illustrated: How drillers offload costly cleanup onto the public (ProPublica). In more environmental secrecy news, ProPublica reports that the Interior Department has known for 35 years that unplugged oil and gas wells can leak dangerous material into the water supply. The public health impact of this problem needs get more attention as the incoming Trump administration works to “increase the number of sales for oil leases on public lands and shrink federal environmental agencies.”

Trump advisers seek to shrink or eliminate bank regulators (Wall Street Journal). The Trump transition team is exploring ways to eliminate the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, an agency that maintains “public confidence in the nation’s financial system.” The public regularly demonstrates its interest in the FDIC’s work, filing nearly 700 FOIA requests with the agency in 2023 alone. These requests seek a wide swath of information, ranging from bank acquisitions to communications with Congress.

He leaked Trump’s tax returns. Will Biden protect him? (The Intercept). Tax law professors are encouraging President Biden to commute the sentence of former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn. Littlejohn leaked Trump’s tax returns to The New York Times after Trump broke tradition and refused to release them. Littlejohn also leaked returns of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and other billionaires, showing how the superrich exploit the tax system.