About Us: Accomplishments

What we do every day at PEER:

  • Expose political manipulation of science. Public agency scientists are under tremendous pressure not to report results that argue for resource protection, and when they do that work it’s often suppressed or re-written. PEER is working now in Congress to enact the very first laws protecting the integrity of public agency scientists. Follow our progress.
  • Enforce the law. PEER works with rangers, inspectors, attorneys and other specialists to make sure that our environmental laws are actually enforced – and that political obstructions are removed. Learn more>>
  • Defend whistleblowers. While we work mightily to avoid putting employees in the position of having to be whistleblowers, if that is not possible, we defend them ferociously. See how one case unfolded.
  • Protect public lands from the ravages of off-road vehicles. ORVs have become the number one threat to our public lands. Look at what PEER is doing to stem the tide of thrill-craft.
  • Fight to save wetlands. PEER is operating a national effort to end the central fraud – a practice called mitigation – which is powering the continued destruction of America’s natural wetlands. Follow our progress
  • Resist attempts to commercialize our parks and public lands. See how PEER blocked a plan to sell park naming rights and have park employees solicit corporate donations.
  • Make the Pentagon obey environmental laws. PEER pursues Defense agency violations of anti-pollution and wildlife protection laws. The best safeguards are the Pentagon’s own environmental professionals. Learn more>>
  • End giveaways of your public lands and resources. Disclosures through PEER have reformed the land exchange process. Learn more>>
  • Throw a “Lifeline” to every environmental employee. PEER wants to reach out to cubicles, field stations and laboratories across the country. Every employee who faces political pressures to ignore laws or put development above conservation should know how to call PEER.

What Else Would You Like to Know About PEER? Look around this site and find out!

What We Are Proud Of

Many of the best things we do at PEER, we cannot talk about. Working behind the scenes, we have saved the careers of hundreds of conscientious public servants, often by talking them out of publicly blowing the whistle and convincing them to work through PEER instead to expose a problem.

Working on behalf of these employee activists, here are ten things we have accomplished in the past few months:

  1. Attacked the scourge of lead poisoning afflicting millions of American kids. PEER forced EPA to close the major pathway to exposure from lead-based paint in our inner cities. Learn more>>
  2. Re-opened EPA’s closed libraries. Information is power, and PEER led the effort to convince Congress to reverse EPA’s campaign of denying information to the public and its own specialists. Learn more>>
  3. Saved the Endangered Species Act from stealth attack. By exposing a draft of the Bush administration plan to administratively gut the nation’s strongest law, PEER stopped the ambush dead in its track. Learn more>>
  4. Kept the Fish Passage Center operating and saved the jobs of its scientists. PEER blocked an effort by Sen. Larry Craig to purge science from river management decisions in the Pacific Northwest. Learn more>>
  5. Blew the lid off prison industry computer recycling operations that are poisoning inmates and staff. The national investigation sparked by PEER is going prison-by-prison. Learn more>>
  6. Stopped outsourcing of federal natural resource jobs. Working with employee unions, PEER exposed mounting problems with schemes to contract out thousands of Forest Service and park Service jobs. Learn more>>
  7. Exposed scientific fraud caused by political manipulation of environmental programs. PEER represents concerned scientists who have seen their work altered by political appointees. Learn more>>
  8. Bared Army chemical weapons program perils. PEER started federal criminal and state civil probes into the Army’s troubled Blue Grass Chemical Weapons Depot. Learn more>>
  9. Ended secret plans to shut laboratories at both FDA and EPA. In both cases, PEER exposés forced the agencies to publicly recant their behind-the-scenes schemes.
  10. Forced a re-examination of the federal program that slaughters wildlife. The drumbeat by PEER has triggered a national safety review, grounded some aerial hunts and sparked an effort to take chemical warfare agents off the range.

There is a lot more going on at PEER. Check out our ongoing campaigns.

You can follow our work by signing up for PEERmail, and you can support PEER by giving generously.