And now, from the Department of Fairly Obvious News, we bring you a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, which concludes that the EPA is subject to political pressure that influences the agency's ability to enforce, manage, and set policy effectively.

What's not fairly obvious is just how pervasive they found the problem to be: 889 EPA science staff, 60 percent of the 1,586 respondents to the UCN's survey, report that they have personally experienced political pressure in the course of performing their duties. Nearly 400 employees said that they had observed EPA administrators, appointed staff, and higher-ups misrepresenting their findings, and 285 said that they had observed incomplete or biased information used to justify policies and management decisions.

The report points to the White House Office of Management and Budget as one of the worst offenders, demonstrating where most of this pressure is coming from. While this is not terribly surprising, it does attest to the depth of the problems at the EPA under the Bush Administration, and to the frustration and low morale of an agency being tugged in two diametrically opposed directions.

Now, this was a questionnaire sent to 5,419 EPA staffers who voluntarily responded. It could be that those who had experienced political interference were most inclined to complain about it and return the survey. However, we EnviroWonks are everywhere, including the EPA. The current and/or previous first-hand experiences of our brethren do nothing to disprove these allegations.

Following recent allegations that the White House unlawfully and unethically neutered the new ozone regulations at the eleventh hour, news that EPA employee-administrator cooperative agreements have been abandoned by employees in protest at political pressure, and administrator Stephen Johnson's stonewalling on the agency's court-mandated responsibility to regulate carbon emissions from cars, we're not inclined to doubt a word of the report. The Bush administration, for all its hand-wringing about regulatory trainwrecks, seems to have created one of its own.

UCN concludes that the EPA's effectiveness has been impaired by this inappropriate politicization of the agency's regulatory stance, and recommend that future presidential administrations work to protect whistleblowers, increase transparency, and depoliticize agency appointees. We couldn't agree more ... though a functional and unmolested EPA would leave us without much material to write about.