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 for 1.4 million American children from lead-based paint each year 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. Revealed flaws in the Bush offshore Arctic oil drive that stopped it in its tracks. Armed with agency files, PEER released a torrent of internal e-mails and documents from current and former Interior scientists showing how badly environmental assessments of Arctic offshore oil development were skewed and fueling lawsuits that stymied new lease sales. Learn more>>
  4. Muffled the Navy’s open water demolitions in Puget Sound. A PEER lawsuit has forced the Navy to dramatically scale back its hundreds of open-water explosive training exercises and finally employ mitigation measures and monitoring to curb further needless harm to aquatic life in one of America’s most sensitive estuaries. Learn more>>
  5. Exposed and curbed abuses in human subject experiments for pesticides and other chemicals. Working with EPA scientists, PEER has agitated for much stronger ethics rules governing use of human guinea pigs for corporate regulatory purposes. Our pressure has led to suspension of some proposed testing on infants and schoolchildren but much more remains to be done. Learn more>>
  6. Won speed limits and course corrections to protect the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale. Fatal collisions with ships are a major threat to whale survival and the leading cause of mortality for the right whale. Following a two-year PEER campaign, NOAA finally adopted needed safeguards but they were weakened by former VP Dick Cheney – whose handiwork PEER will seek to repeal in 2009. Learn more>>
  7. Bared mishandling of pollution prosecutions, including the largest oil spill on the North Slope. Not only was BP allowed to settle for pennies on the dollar and without criminal liability but PEER also revealed that EPA enforcement staff was ordered not to talk to investigators – a gag rule that we expect to rescind.
  8. Ended commercial tie-ins and endorsements on the labels of pesticide and other commercial poisons. PEER advocacy forced EPA to back off a plan to allow corporate marketing to crowd out safety information on labels of dangerous products. Learn more>>
  9. Made the Park Service surrender at Little Bighorn. A PEER suit stopped a plan to build a 200-seat theater at the base of Custer’s Last Stand Hill on the Little Bighorn Battlefield. This suit was part of our effort to induce the NPS to better protect the battlefields and other historical legacies in its custody. Learn more>>
  10. Protected whistleblowers from environmental agencies across the country. From a BLM toxic manger in Nevada to an Interior Deputy Solicitor in DC and even a kayaking Corps biologist in California, PEER has mobilized to defend conscientious public servants. At the same time, PEER led the drive to remove a corrupt Special Counsel who was supposed to protect whistleblowers but instead victimized his own staff. Learn more>>

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 this work by giving generously.