Graham Confirmed For OMB Position

A controversial and prominent Harvard expert on risk analysis was confirmed by the Senate last week to a powerful regulatory post in President Bush’s administration.

School of Public Health (SPH) Professor for Policy and Decision Sciences John D. Graham will serve as the administrator for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), part of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

As head of OIRA, Graham will be responsible for reviewing all federal regulations submitted by the various agencies of the executive branch.

In an interview this week with The Crimson, Graham said he looked forward to the move from the academic arena to government and policymaking.

“One of the exciting things about this job is that I will now have a chance to implement many of the academic theories and tools that I’ve taught my students,” Graham said.

Until he left for Washington, Graham was the founding director of Harvard’s Center for Risk Analysis (HCRA) at SPH.

Graham has resigned from HCRA and is on leave from SPH. George M. Gray, lecturer on risk analyis, will serve as acting director of HCRA, while the future administrative structure of the center is examined.

Graham’s record as director of the center and as an academic was subject to conflicting interpretations.

Supporters say he is a champion of fact-based approaches to questions of public health and safety.

However, others stress his association with the regulation-slashing efforts of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and claim that he is beholden to big business.

Graham was nominated by President Bush in March and approved in May by a 9-3 vote of the Senate Committee on Government Affairs.

But a vote on the Senate floor was put on hold by Democrats led by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Senate debate finally began last week and last Thursday, Graham was confirmed by a 63-37 vote, with all 37 votes in opposition coming from Democrats.

Opposition to Graham’s confirmation rested largely on critics’ analysis of his record at HCRA.

Public Citizen, a non-profit watchdog organization founded by Ralph Nader, vocally opposed Graham’s nomination and lobbied senators against it.

The group issued a 130-page report that criticized Graham’s record on the environment and other causes and pointed to the corporate financial support of HCRA as evidence of ties with big business.

The report cited cases in which Graham’s research found results favorable to the center’s backers.

Democrats opposing Graham’s confirmation shared many of Public Citizens’ concerns during Senate floor debate. Durbin called the corporate sponsors of HCRA “a veritable list of who’s who of industrial sponsors.”

“These corporate clients came to Professor Graham not to find ways to increase regulation on their businesses, but just for the opposite, so that he can provide through his center a scientific basis for resisting government regulation in the areas of public health and the environment,” Durbin said.

Durbin and others said Graham held a bias against regulation of any sort.

Supporters of Graham maintained that criticism of HCRA has been already adequately addressed, and that opposition was largely partisan in nature.

HCRA’s Director of Risk Communications David Ropeik said that previous criticism of HCRA’s objectivity led to an intensive self-examination, but that in the end SPH determined that the center was acting properly.

“All of this examination by us and the school lead to a very comfortable recognition that we’ve done nothing wrong,” Ropeik said. “We found out that we had tighter conflict of interest rules and more oversight than most other centers at Harvard,” he said.

Graham said that HCRA’s efforts at fully disclosing sources of funding sufficiently addressed the criticism.

“The fact that our industry funding was well disclosed neutralized [the validity of] criticism,” Graham said.

A number of Harvard colleagues lobbied on Graham’s behalf, writing Senators to assure them of Graham’s ethics and credentials.

Letter writers included former University Provost and former Dean of SPH Harvey V. Fineberg `67 and current SPH Dean Barry Bloom.

Prior to the floor debate, these letters, Graham’s resume and other materials regarding his professional record were placed on SPH’s website, along with links to the websites of three of Graham’s critics.

Ropeik said that the center was being careful not to lobby for Graham. The webpage on Graham, Ropeik noted, became available only a few days before the confirmation debate and was intended only to respond to press inquiries.

Ropeik said that he felt the Senate debate on Graham was in some part partisan politics, but also the result of conflicting notions of how risk should be assessed.

“The debate may have devolved into partisanship but there were underlying conflicting views of risk,” Ropeik said. The disagreement was “how large a role [in assessing risk] should facts have in comparison with values and fears.”

Graham agreed that the debate hung on an intellectual issue, pointing to the number of Democrats—13—who crossed party lines to support his nomination.

But Joan B. Claybrook, the president of Public Citizen, said that she thought the Democrats in question were reluctant to oppose Bush’s nominee and that Republicans felt duty-bound to back Bush.

Durbin explained during his floor speech that he had rarely acted to oppose a President’s nominee.

“I think it is the first time in my senate career…where I have spoken out against a nominee and attempted to lead the effort to stop his confirmation,” Durbin said. “Many members of the Senate will give the President his person, whoever it happens to be,” he said.

Graham said he was relieved to finally be confirmed. “I knew it could take a while, but I was expecting closer to Memorial Day,” he said.

But according to Claybrook, Public Citizen’s scrutiny of Graham will continue.

“Graham was the epitome of science for sale,” Claybrook said. “Now we’re forming a group to watch what regulation Graham is nixing early on, and what type of influence he is exerting behind the scenes,” she said.

—Staff Writer David H. Gellis can be reached at gellis@fas.harvard.edu.