Environmental Tobacco Smoke

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the public release by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of three draft documents dealing with environmental tobacco smoke. GAO noted that: (1) the EPA project manager responsible for the compendium sent a draft, without EPA management approval, to several external reviewers for review; (2) the external reviewer who wrote the chapter on heart disease released the compendium without EPA approval; (3) the author stated he released the compendium because EPA had released an earlier version of it under the Freedom of Information Act and did not believe he was releasing new information; (4) EPA does not intend to publish or perform any additional work on the compendium; (5) the Director of the EPA Indoor Air Division stated that additional work would not be performed because some of the compendium's data have become outdated and much of the remaining information was presented in the EPA risk assessment of the health effects of passive smoking; and (6) the risk assessment and the policy guide were not prematurely released and were made available for published comment when they were forwarded to the EPA Science Advisory Board for peer review.