claimant favorable because the law doesn't allow it -- I hear attacks
about the very basis for this Board, which is to question NIOSH's
application of science, NIOSH's application of its discretion and
how it exercises its discretion. And when I see the Labor Department
and the NIOSH teaming up to attack whether or not the audit can
even evaluate whether things are sufficiently claimant friendly or
not, I have to puzzle to myself what's wrong here. What's wrong
that the Labor Department and NIOSH are teamed up attacking
the very cornerstone of this program, which is that it's supposed
to give the benefit of the doubt and supposed to be claimant
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friendly in the face of uncertainty, and in this sea of the absence
of data one has to make a lot of value judgments. And what was
so troubling to me was to read the written attack on the audit
report from both agencies saying you have no legal right to even
examine whether or not one can make claimant favorable decisions.
That's not what the law says. What's wrong here? I mean something
from the outside looks funny, because I don't know whether you've
done it or not, but I did a keyword search for the hundreds of times
I've heard the word claimant friendly used by Dr. (sic) Elliott and
by Dr. Neton and the rest of the staff, claimant friendly, claimant
friendly, claimant friendly, and all of a sudden we can't evaluate
that question. That's challenging the judgment, the discretion
that's being exercised here. It's not a calculational error. We're
not talking about that. We're talking about the exercise of
discretion in the sea of uncertainty with so little data and so many
hard questions to answer. I think one of the things that troubled
me was
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that the process seems to be, as Wanda so I think adeptly pointed
out, the forest – you know, the murk and the primeval ooze of
trying to formulate a policy coming out of all these questions was
you have a subcommittee that you conceived. You put the charter
out. It had a task to review the dose reconstructions. That
subcommittee we were told would meet between every Board
meeting. The last time that subcommittee met to review dose
reconstructions was in August. Here we are in December and none
was scheduled in between. Why is it that NIOSH and the Chair
have not scheduled meetings for this subcommittee to begin to
vet and prevet this process? I mean I don't understand what the
process is if you've got a subcommittee set up and you're not
using it for the purposes -- the eight purposes for which it was
delineated. I'd like to just make a comment about the cost of the
audit. Today we heard a great deal of discussion and yesterday in
