This story was originally published at ProPublica.org.

Perchlorate, a hazardous chemical in rocket fuel, has been found at potentially dangerous levels in powdered infant formula, according to a study [PDF] by a group of Centers for Disease Control scientists. The study, published last month by The Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology, has intensified the years-long debate about whether or how the federal government should regulate perchlorate in the nation’s drinking water.

According to the CDC, perchlorate exposure can damage the thyroid, which can hinder brain development among infants. For nearly a decade, Democratic members of Congress, the Department of Defense, the White House and the Environmental Protection Agency have been fighting about how much perchlorate in water is too much.

In the new study, CDC scientists tested 15 brands of infant formula and found perchlorate in all of them.  The names of the brands weren’t revealed because the CDC says the study “was not designed to compare brands.” But the study does say that the formulas with the highest perchlorate levels are the most popular. The most contaminated brands were lactose-based as opposed to soy-based and accounted for 87% of the infant formulas on the market in 2000, the latest data available from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The study points out that when perchlorate-contaminated powdered formula is mixed with water that also contains traces of the chemical, as many drinking water sources around the country do, the final concoction can become particularly harmful to babies.

“As this unprecedented study demonstrates, infants fed cow’s milk- based powdered formula could be exposed to perchlorate from two sources – tap water and formula. That suggests that millions of American babies are potentially at risk,” said Anila Jacob, a physician and a senior scientist with Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that posted the study on its Web site.

In December the EPA released an interim health advisory [PDF] suggesting that water with a level of perchlorate limited to 15 parts per billion (ppb) is safe to drink.The level is not an enforceable standard, but is meant to provide guidance to states and local governments seeking to develop their own regulations.

Keeping perchlorate beneath that level would ensure that the amount of daily oral exposure would remain beneath a threshold called a reference dose, the EPA said. That is the amount of perchlorate humans could consistently consume over the course of a lifetime without increasing their risk of harm. Environmentalists argue that the EPA reference dose is too high.

The CDC study found that, hypothetically, 54% of infants consuming the perchlorate-contaminated formula would exceed EPA’s reference dose, if the formula were mixed with water containing perchlorate at 4 ppb.

Perchlorate has been found at that level in drinking water sources of at least 26 states and two territories, according to a study the CDC referenced in the report.

Perchlorate’s effect on individual infants will vary, the CDC scientists said, according to their weight and the amount of iodine in their diet.Iodine can counteract the harmful effects of perchlorate and is an ingredient in many brands of baby formula, the scientists said.

In a statement sent to reporters last night, Sen. Barbara Boxer, chair of the Environment and Public Works committee, said the study prompted her to ask the Food and Drug Administration to inform the public “how best to protect children from perchlorate.” As she has done in the past, Boxer called on the EPA to “overrule the Bush Administration’s policy which was to walk away from setting a safe drinking water standard for perchlorate in our water supply.”

In 2002 the EPA suggested limiting the amount of perchlorate in water to 1 ppb, but in December [PDF] it changed that level to 15 ppb to the dismay of environmental advocates.

A March 2008 Government Accountability Office report criticized the Bush White House [PDF] for injecting politics into the EPA’s chemical risk assessment of perchlorate and other toxins.The report suggested that the White House Office of Management and Budget was stalling the completion of risk assessments by forcing scientists to respond to comments from other federal agencies, including the Department of Defense. The report notes that tight restrictions on perchlorate and other toxins would greatly increase safety and cleanup costs incurred by the Defense Department and its contractors.The Perchlorate Information Bureau, an industry trade group supported by Lockheed Martin, Aerojet and other defense contractors, said the cost of an overly restrictive perchlorate standard would be “potentially staggering.”

Perchlorate has been found leaching into public water wells from military bases and bomb-building facilities, especially in California.

Less than two weeks before the Bush administration left office, the EPA announced that it would delay its long-awaited decision on whether to set a drinking water standard for perchlorate until the National Academy of Sciences weighed in on the issue.That announcement effectively punted the decision to current EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, who promised to regulate perchlorate at her confirmation hearing.

As we reported previously, when Jackson headed the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, state scientists urged her to regulate perchlorate, which was found at 4 ppb in six of 123 public water wells [PDF] (p. 41) in New Jersey in a 2005 survey.New Jersey still does not have a perchlorate standard.

Other states however, have stepped in to fill the regulatory void.California has set a perchlorate standard at 6 ppb and Massachusetts at 2 ppb.

As pressure to regulate perchlorate has mounted, so too has lobbying from the chemical manufacturing and defense industries. In February David Corn reported for Mother Jones that these industries have hired a former Democratic senator from Nevada to stymie efforts to regulate the chemical.

An EPA spokesperson said in an email to ProPublica today that the agency is reviewing the Bush administration’s work and “hopes to announce our direction soon.”

“Perchlorate exposure is a serious issue,” the email said, “and it’s a top priority for Administrator Jackson, who is concerned about its health effects on children.”

But Jackson’s critics, including a senior scientist who quit her department in frustration, say she has been too close to industry, withheld information from the public and fallen well short of the pledge she made when taking office in February 2006 to fix the state’s beleaguered toxic waste program.

“The most important thing we are doing is developing a new ranking system to prioritize sites so that we focus our resources on the worst cases, those that present the greatest risk to public health and the environment,” said Jackson in state senate testimony [PDF] in October 2006.

But two years into Jackson’s tenure, the new system for cleaning up New Jersey’s 16,000 abandoned toxic waste sites, known as Superfund sites, still hasn’t been deployed.

“She identified this as her highest priority, but she never followed through,” says Jeff Ruch, executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER. “This failure to perform risk-based ranking for determining cleanup priorities has contributed to the belated discovery of contaminated schools and day care centers.”

A NJDEP spokesperson said the system is now being tested and should be in place by Autumn of 2009. Jackson herself did not respond to ProPublica’s repeated requests for an interview.

In a report released this summer, the EPA’s inspector general slammed New Jersey’s failure to clean up several toxic waste sites in a timely manner, and accused the state’s environmental agency of going easy on polluters and failing to seek necessary support from the EPA. The report said the department bore at least partial responsibility for “not implement[ing] agreements on cleanup milestones, Agency responsibilities, and enforcement actions.”

The report even recommended that the EPA take over as the lead cleanup agency at seven sites — a surprising recommendation, since the inspector general has consistently bashed the Bush administration’s handling of Superfund sites.

“If the EPA is saying that New Jersey’s enforcement is bad, you know there is a serious problem,” says Robert Spiegel, executive director of the Edison Wetlands Association, a New Jersey based non-profit that closely monitors several Superfund sites throughout the state. Spiegel says he had urged Jackson to take more immediate action on some sites, and that Jackson’s field staff had done the same, but their pleas had been ignored.

New Jersey, long a center for the chemical manufacturing industry, has gained notoriety in the environmental community for its widespread pollution.

A 2007 report by the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit investigative journalism organization in Washington, D.C., found that New Jersey has 115 Superfund sites — more than any other state. Since the Superfund program was established in 1980, only 22 of New Jersey’s sites have been cleaned up to the point where they can be removed from the EPA’s National Priorities List, the EPA’s list of the most hazardous waste sites in the country.

Jackson has long talked about repairing the state’s cleanup effort. In a formal response to the inspector general report, the state’s director of hazardous waste said that “New Jersey’s new proposed reforms may be a model for other states when looking to improve their cleanup programs.”

Jackson has also supported a controversial Corzine-backed proposal to outsource the department’s cleanup efforts to consultants, which would potentially mean cleanups conducted by groups that also work for the companies responsible for the contaminated sites.

Many, including some of Jackson’s supporters in the environmental community, have lambasted that policy for the conflict of interest it would create.

As part of its 2007 investigation, the Center for Public Integrity found that this practice, which already occurs with federal contracts doled out by the EPA, allows polluters to profit from their own pollution by obtaining contracts to clean up Superfund sites they may have helped create years before. Opponents of Corzine’s proposal charge that it would allow the same to happen with New Jersey contracts. This reporter contributed to that project while working until early this year at CPI.

Critics of Jackson’s approach have also focused on what they see as her weak response to two contaminated New Jersey sites: One is a multi-million-dollar condominium community built on top of land where high levels of chromium, a carcinogenic chemical, have been found. The other involves Kiddie Kollege, a day care center developed inside an abandoned thermometer factory, where more than 30 children were exposed to mercury, a neurotoxin that slows brain development in children.

In September, a division of the Centers for Disease Control released a study [PDF] concluding that people who live near the chromium contaminated sites in Hudson County have higher rates of lung cancer.

A New Jersey department scientist, Zoe Kelman, quit out of frustration over the chromium issue. She told ProPublica that she has concerns about Jackson taking the helm of the EPA because of what she sees as Jackson’s lax response to pleas to strengthen chromium standards at planned condo communities in Hudson County, N.J.

“I had high hopes when Jackson took over,” said Kelman, who had been a chemical engineer for the state. Kelman says that Jackson “ignored” a 50-page letter she wrote about how a protective cap made out of synthetic materials and soil would not sufficiently control chromium-laden waste in Jersey City. “I was perplexed that someone with her background would not be able to understand the issue, and recognize that we should be erring on the side of caution,” Kelman said.

The department did respond [PDF] to Kelman’s letter, saying that she was criticizing processes that many scientific agencies use to determine risk, and therefore there was little the department could do to address her concerns. (The response, Kelman argues, was essentially lip-service and didn’t result in any changes.)

A 2004 investigation by the Newark Star-Ledger found that Honeywell Inc., PPG Industries and Maxus Energy Corporation, the companies responsible for the chromium pollution, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbying and millions of dollars on their own scientific studies to convince the state of New Jersey that its chromium standard was too stringent.

According to the investigation, when the lobbying effort began, New Jersey considered chromium levels in soil at 10 parts per million to be safe; by the end of the companies’ lobbying campaign the chromium standard was raised to 6,100 parts per million: one of the loosest standards in the country, allowing the companies to save millions on cleanup costs.

Not long after the Star-Ledger`s investigation, Jackson’s predecessor, former department commissioner, Bradley Campbell issued a moratorium on development of the chromium-contaminated land and assigned a panel of department scientists to investigate New Jersey’s chromium standard. Kelman was one of the members on that panel.

About a year into Jackson’s tenure the panel’s assessment of New Jersey’s standards came out and Jackson thought it provided reason to lift the moratorium [PDF] on development, while also tightening the chromium standard to 20 parts per million. Kelman believes that move failed to sufficiently protect public health and was premature because a more comprehensive study on chromium was due to be completed by the National Toxicology Program later that year.

In August 2006, Jackson asserted in a press release about the Kiddie Kollege day care center that “inspectors moved in, took samples and shut it down” as soon as they discovered mercury.

But the New York Times reported shortly after that an internal memo showed the department had known of contamination at the site since 1994. New Jersey environment department inspectors found out that the building was being used as a day care center in April 2006, but didn’t shut it down until that July.

Jeff Tittel, who heads the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club, says Jackson isn’t to blame for the Kiddie Kollege incident, and instead points a finger at New Jersey’s former environmental commissioner for removing the site from the state’s list of contaminated sites.

“Under Jackson, an inspector went out there on his own time, and found out that there was a day care center there,” says Tittel. “Did it take longer than it should have? Maybe, but the government doesn’t always move as quickly as we would like it to.”

Many prominent New Jersey environmental advocates say that Jackson inherited most of the department’s problems from previous commissioners, and from staff cuts made by former New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman, who went on to become EPA administrator herself under President Bush.

“The department in charge of hazardous waste used to have 270 people, now they are down to 150,” says Tittel.

Jackson’s staffing decisions have also been criticized by PEER. The watchdog group points to her 2006 appointment [PDF] of Nancy Wittenberg, a former New Jersey Builders Association lobbyist, as the Assistant Commissioner for Environmental Regulation as an example of Jackson’s ties to industry.

“Her extreme positions and statements as a lobbyist raise legitimate questions about her judgment and capacity to fairly and objectively administer environmental laws,” said then-PEER employee Bill Wolfe in a media announcement made at the time of Wittenberg’s appointment.

In an effort to determine just how much leverage industry lobbyists have in Jackson’s department, PEER filed a petition to get the department to give the public information on its meetings with lobbyists, but the department immediately rejected the petition.

Jackson’s supporters ardently defend her record and place much of New Jersey’s environmental problems on Gov. Corzine. They say that while Corzine has offered lofty rhetoric about environmental goals, he has not helped Jackson accomplish them. Jackson left the department to take a job as Corzine’s chief of staff at the beginning of this month.

“Lisa Jackson has been forced to work without the resources or the leadership at the top to let her do what she wanted to do,” says Amy Goldsmith, the state policy director for the New Jersey Environmental Federation. “Corzine just has different priorities, and if the leader isn’t willing to lead, it is hard for somebody that’s been appointed to take the reins.”

Both Goldsmith and Tittel point to Jackson’s work on climate change as an example of why she would make a great EPA chief.

Last year, Corzine signed the Global Warming Response Act, which aims to cut greenhouse gases in New Jersey 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.

“Lisa worked closely with the governor to champion this bill, and helped lobby the legislature to approve it,” says Dena Mottola, executive director of Environment New Jersey.

But Ruch argues that the New Jersey environment department under Jackson’s tenure failed to meet crucial deadlines for drafting procedures to actually implement the law.

“As a result, despite much ballyhoo, New Jersey does not have a coherent game-plan for achieving its climate change goals,” Ruch wrote in a letter to President-elect Obama [PDF], opposing Jackson’s nomination.

Again, New Jersey environmentalists come to Jackson’s defense.

“No one worked more on this issue than my group, and if we thought missing that deadline was a huge concern we would have criticized it, and we didn’t,” says Mottola.

Eric Stiles, vice president for conservation at the New Jersey Audubon Society, said that while Jackson’s record isn’t perfect, she has always been receptive to his group’s arguments and straightforward about her positions and the competing interests she was considering.

“She really took on some big issues and big battles and moved it forward in New Jersey,” says Stiles. “Did she do everything I would have hoped for? No. But probably everything I would’ve hoped for was unreasonable.”