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"Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC), the subcommittee' s chairman,
said in a statement to ProPublica regarding Frumkin's
reassignment. "The nation needs ATSDR to do honest,
scientifically rigorous work. There are many capable
professionals at ATSDR who are committed to doing just
that."

by Joaquin Sapien, ProPublica - January 22, 2010 5:56 pm
EST

Dr. Howard Frumkin, the embattled director of a little-
known, but important division of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, has been reassigned to a position
with less authority, a smaller staff and a lower budget.

Frumkin had led the CDC's Agency for Toxic Substances and
Disease Registry (ATSDR) and the National Center for
Environmental Health since 2005. For the past two years he
had endured scathing criticism from Congress and the media
for ATSDR's poor handling of public health problems created
by the formaldehyde- contaminated trailers that the
government provided to Hurricane Katrina victims. The
agency, which assesses public health risks posed by
environmental hazards, also was criticized for understating
the health risks of several other, less-publicized cases.

An internal CDC e-mail sent by Frumkin on Jan. 15 and
obtained by ProPublica said he was leaving his position
that day and would become a special assistant to the CDC's
director of Climate Change and Public Health. His old job
will be temporarily filled by Henry Falk, who led ATSDR
from 2003 to 2005.

In the e-mail, Frumkin praised his staff and described more
than 20 ATSDR accomplishments during his tenure. They
include strengthening the agency's tobacco laboratory and
creating the Climate Change and Public Health program.

A CDC spokesman said Frumkin's transfer shouldn't be
considered a demotion but rather a change of function and
responsibilities that the CDC's director, Dr. Thomas
Frieden, said would benefit both the agency and Dr.
Frumkin, who is a recognized expert on climate change. But
Frumkin's authority has been sharply reduced, even though
his salary won't change. Previously, he oversaw two
departments with a combined budget of about $264 million
and 746 full-time employees. Now he will be an assistant to
the director of a new program that has a budget of about
$7.5 million, five full-time employees and five
contractors, two of whom are part time.

Through a CDC spokesman, Frumkin declined a request to be
interviewed for this story.

In 2008, ProPublica reported [1] that Frumkin and others
failed to take action after learning that ATSDR botched a
study [2] on the trailers provided to Katrina victims. The
Federal Emergency Management Agency used the study to
assure trailer occupants that the formaldehyde levels
weren't high enough to harm them. ATSDR never corrected
FEMA, even though Christopher De Rosa, who led ATSDR's
toxicology and environmental medicine division, repeatedly
warned Frumkin that the report didn't take into account the
long-term health consequences of exposure to formaldehyde,
like cancer risks.

Frumkin eventually reassigned De Rosa to the newly created
position of assistant director for toxicology and risk
analysis. De Rosa went from leading a staff of about 70
employees to having none. He has since left the agency and
is starting a nonprofit that will consult with communities
close to environmental hazards.

The involvement of Frumkin and ATSDR in the formaldehyde
debacle was the focus of an April 2008 Congressional
hearing held by a subcommittee of the House Science and
Technology Committee. A report [3] by the subcommittee' s
Democratic majority, released that October, concluded that
the failure of ATSDR's leadership "kept Hurricane Katrina
and Rita families living in trailers with elevated levels
of formaldehyde. ..for at least one year longer than
necessary."

About six months after the report came out, the same panel,
the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, held
another hearing [4] that touched on other problems at ATSDR.

Before that hearing, the Democrats on the subcommittee
released a report [5] that revealed other cases in which
the agency relied on scientifically flawed data, causing
other federal agencies to mislead communities about the
dangers of their exposure to hazardous substances.
For example, an ATSDR report about water contamination at
Camp Lejeune, a Marine Corps base in North Carolina, said
the chemically-tainted drinking water didn't pose an
increased cancer risk to residents there. The report was
used to deny at least one veteran's medical benefits for
ailments that the veteran believed were related to the
contamination.

A month after the subcommittee hearing, ATSDR, rescinded
[6] some of its findings, saying it didn't adequately
consider the presence of benzene, a carcinogen that it
found in the water.

Eight months later, the agency said it would modify another
report that was criticized at the hearing, about a bomb
testing site in Vieques, Puerto Rico. For decades, the U.S.
military used the site to test ammunition that contained
depleted uranium and other toxins. In a 2003 report, ATSDR
said that heavy metals and explosive compounds found on
Vieques weren't harmful to people living there. But Frumkin
decided to take a fresh look at those findings because
ATSDR hadn't thoroughly investigated the site.

Subcommittee investigators acknowledged that Frumkin
inherited many of the problems in the report from previous
ATSDR directors— the original Vieques and Camp Lejeune
reports were both done before Frumkin was named director in
2005. But the investigators said he was aware of the
agency's problems and did little to fix them unless he was
under political pressure. A CDC spokesman said that
Frumkin's reassignment had nothing to do with the
congressional inquiries.

"Americans should know when their government tells them
that they have nothing to worry about from environmental
exposure that they really have nothing to worry about,"
Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC), the subcommittee' s chairman, said
in a statement to ProPublica regarding Frumkin's
reassignment. "The nation needs ATSDR to do honest,
scientifically rigorous work. There are many capable
professionals at ATSDR who are committed to doing just
that."

Write to Joaquin Sapien at joaquin.sapien@ propublica. org
[7].

http://www.propublica.org/feature/senior-cdc-official-
reassigned-howard-frumkin

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