Departures of Scientists From EPA Could Complicate FCC Work on RF Issues
Staff departures from the Environmental Protection Agency could slow FCC work on RF issues, industry officials said. The New York Times reported that 700 people, including more than 200 scientists, have left EPA since President Donald Trump took office in January, about a quarter of the staff reductions planned by his administration. In the last major development from the FCC, the Office of Engineering and Technology launched an inquiry to gather more comments on RF safety in 2013 (see 1304010037). The notice of inquiry was the agency’s first on the biological effects of RF since 1979. The FCC didn't comment.
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Michael Marcus, former FCC engineer, now a consultant, said the FCC in the past has said it isn't an expert agency on health effects and took action only after consulting with the EPA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
Deploying 5G “will depend on hundreds of thousands of small base stations,” Marcus said. “These were not considered in the RF safety rules adopted decades ago and certainly the labeling requirements of the present rules make no sense for them in many cases. Thus the rules need some fine tuning, not to put new burdens on CTIA members, but in many cases to lower inappropriate burdens.” The public image of the EPA “in certain circles is harassing businesses with restrictions,” but its role in “blessing” FCC RF safety standards protects FCC-regulated companies “from local regulations and moderates their product liability insurance costs,” he said.
Devra Davis, president of the Environmental Health Trust (EHT), said the FCC already has a bad record on RF. "EPA programs to advise the FCC on wireless radiation have been mothballed for two decades,” Davis told us. “Congress under the Democrats and the Republicans has eliminated the government’s capacity to study health effects of RF such as that from cellphones, antennas, Wi-Fi routers, and the growing numbers of tablets, games, baby monitors, and yet-to-be invented devices that are flooding our wireless airways.” A review of FCC radiation limits has been “languishing” for more than four years, she said.
Budget cuts at the EPA “effectively undermine” its ability “to do the job that Congress has assigned it,” Davis said. Last year, the French government confirmed that cellphones can expose consumers to radiation exposures that exceed FCC limits and the U.S.-based National Toxicology program “showed clear evidence of damage yet the FCC and EPA have no staff charged with responding nor updating our decades-old policy based on these fundamental advances in science,” she said.
“Americans' health is important to CTIA and the wireless industry, and we encourage consumers to consult the experts,” a CTIA spokesman said. According to the Food and Drug Administration, the FCC, the World Health Organization, the American Cancer Society and other health experts, “the scientific evidence shows no known health risk due to the RF energy emitted by cellphones,” the spokesman said. “The FCC monitors scientific research on a regular basis, and its standard for RF exposure is based on recommended guidelines adopted by U.S. and international standard-setting bodies. That’s why the FCC has determined that all wireless phones legally sold in the United States are ‘safe.’”
Meanwhile, EHT warned parents last week against buying smartphones and toys that comment to the internet through Wi-Fi without considering the RF effects. “Parents are often unaware that these child-friendly devices are basically two-way microwave radios, and children are much more vulnerable to the health risks of this radiation,” the group said in a news release. “The scientific evidence is now clear and compelling. We need to give our children toys and tools to grow and learn, not toys and tools which could harm them.”