A long investigative piece in the Washington Post is worth reading. One is staggered. After all the shouting about cost benefit analysis the conservatives made under Reagan one shouts: what about life benefit analysis? How many lives grind to difficult ends because of all that has not been done? Damage known. Action none.

“In my 24 years at the Agency, I have never experienced such indecision and delay,” [OSHA epidemiologist Peter] Infante wrote in an e-mail to the agency’s director of standards in March 2002. Eventually, top OSHA officials decided, over what Infante described in an e-mail to his boss as opposition from “the entire OSHA staff working on beryllium issues,” to publish the bulletin with a footnote challenging a key recommendation the firm opposed.

Current and former career officials at OSHA say that such sagas were a recurrent feature during the Bush administration, as political appointees ordered the withdrawal of dozens of workplace health regulations, slow-rolled others, and altered the reach of its warnings and rules in response to industry pressure.

The Philadelphia Inquirer offered a similar well researched and hard hitting article early in December — sourced on background by a friend. It focuses on Steven L. Johnson, the Administrator of the EPA, and the false story he rode in on, the ruins he is leaving.

Two sentences in Johnson’s draft [report on climate change to the White House] stood out. In sum: The U.S. emits more greenhouse gases from cars than most countries do from all pollution sources. This fact is so compelling that it alone supports The Administrator’s finding.

At 2:10 p.m., Associate Deputy Administrator Jason Burnett e-mailed the climate-change draft to the White House as an attachment.

What happened next became Johnson’s defining moment and cemented President Bush’s environmental legacy, serving as the low-water mark of a tumultuous era that has left the EPA badly wounded, largely demoralized and, in many ways, emasculated.