Marianne L. Horinko, EPA’s acting administrator, said the White House’s role was mainly to help the EPA sift through an enormous amount of information.
“We put out the best information we had, based on just the best data that we had available at the time,” said Horinko, who headed the agency’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, which oversaw the World Trade Center environmental monitoring and cleanup.
“And it was using our best professional judgment; it was not as a result of pressure from the White House,” she said. “The White House’s role was basically to say, ‘Look, we’ve got data coming in from everywhere. What benchmarks are we going to use, how are we going to communicate this data? We can’t have this Tower of Babel on the data.”’