It’s bad enough when tax-exempt foundations and activist groups use junk science and scare campaigns to promote excessive regulations and set the stage for class action lawsuits against perfectly good products. It’s intolerable when our tax dollars directly finance U.S. and EU government agencies that do likewise.

A particularly egregious example is the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, a National Institutes of Health agency in the Department of Health and Human Services. Evidence is piling up that Director Linda Birnbaum’s $690-million-per-year NIEHS has been colluding with activists in international agencies, anti-chemical pressure groups, and even trial lawyers, to undermine the U.S. regulatory process.

Its principal collaborators are the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in France and Ramazzini Institute in Italy. The three groups have become adept at using the “precautionary principle” and manipulating science to label modern industrial and agricultural chemicals as somehow dangerous and carcinogenic, despite thorough safety testing by regulatory agencies in the USA, Europe, and elsewhere.

Birnbaum & Co. waged a 15-year, $170 million campaign against Bisphenol-a (BPA), a high-performance compound found in many plastics. Their current target is glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide RoundUp, but they have many other chemicals, food additives, and GMOs (genetically modified organisms) in their crosshairs.

Over the past 40 years, virtually every reputable regulatory agency and scientific body has determined that glyphosate does not cause cancer – including the European Food Safety Authority, European Chemicals Agency, German Institute for Risk Assessment, and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Over 800 studies demonstrate its safety.

The IARC alone says glyphosate causes cancer – just as it hasall but one of the 900-plus chemicals it reviewed over the decades, often using studies conducted by Ramazzini, which is behind bogus claims that cell phones and artificial sweeteners cause cancer.

Regulatory bodies from Europe to the United States and New Zeeland have investigated and criticized Ramazzini’s sloppy, substandard pseudo-science. But Dr. Birnbaum (in yellow) is still a member of the Collegium Ramazzini and has directed over $90 million in NIEHS/taxpayer funds to her Ramazzini colleagues, who have served on many IARC “expert panels.”

Primarily through the NIEHS, the U.S. is also the IARC’s biggest donor. It even earmarked $4.2 million to support the IARC’s current effort to list more agricultural and industrial chemicals as carcinogens. The NIEHS also plays a lead role in coordinating and directing these activities.

The end result, if not the goal, is to undermine public confidence in science-based risk assessments, lend credibility to agitator claims that countless chemicals contaminate our foods and imperil our health, frighten consumers about products, and let predatory lawyers run roughshod.

Indeed, more than 1,000 U.S. lawsuits already claim glyphosate causes cancer, and law firms are running ads saying anyone who has cancer and was ever exposed to glyphosate in any form or amount may be entitled to millions in compensation.

A similar tactic makes the oft-repeated but never-proven claim that “endocrine disrupting” chemicals which don’t cause cancer or other harm in high doses somehow do so at barely detectable levels. Another clever ploy claims no exposure is needed; kids get cancer because their parents or even grandparents were exposed to something.

Just as troubling, the 2014 advisory group that decided which substances the IARC would review was led by activist scientist Dr. Christopher Portier, who worked for years for NIEHS and Birnbaum.

Investigative journalists David Zaruk and Kate Kelland found that Portier also served for years as the U.S. government liason to the IARC – driving the glyphosate review while working for the anti-pesticide Environmental Defense Fund, and serving as the only “consulting expert” on the working group that labeled glyphosate carcinogenic. Meanwhile, Portier was being paid by the lawyers who are bringing the glyphosate lawsuits – an engagement that has netted him at least $160,000 so far.

Even more outrageous than these blatant conflicts of interest is the way the IARC secured its guilty verdict on the RoundUp chemical. As Ms. Kelland explained in a separate article, the IARC repeatedly ignored or altered studies and conclusions that exonerated glyphosate.

One report clearly said the researchers “unanimously” agreed that glyphosate had not caused abnormal growths in mice they had studied. The IARC deleted the sentence.

In other cases IARC panelists inserted new statistical analyses that reversed a study’s original finding; quietly changed critical language exonerating the chemical; and claimed they were “not able to evaluate” a study because it included insufficient experimental data, while excluding another study because “the amount of data in the tables was overwhelming.”

This is not science. The evidence suggests it is manipulation, corruption, and fraud – supported by our tax dollars, and used to destroy companies and enrich class-action lawyers.

Thankfully, Congress is holding hearings, sending letters to the HHS and the IARC, demanding explanations, data, and emails – and summoning agency directors and employees to Capitol Hill. Shortly after House investigators summoned IARC Director Chris Wild to a hearing, the agency posted a notice saying he would resign.

In the meantime, Wild and his agency are stonewalling congressional requests. Perhaps they will change their tune if the Congress, White House, and HHS let them know there will be no more U.S. grants until they cooperate.