I mean, how long have you covered the EPA?

So I never, it's funny, people keep saying I cover the EPA, and it's never something I've ever

sought to do, and I've never thought of myself as somebody who covers the EPA.

What Suzanne Rust sought to do years ago was become a scientist.

She worked as a biologist at a fishery.

But now she's a reporter at the LA Times, where, yeah, she covers the Environmental Protection Agency. What I've covered is the way I like to think about it is industry's role on science and environmental policy.

And that happens to end up a lot in the EPA.

The scientific method still governs Suzanne's work.

She thinks about cause and effect.

There are all of these influences around us.

Toxins or climate or air pollution that affect all of us at a very fundamental level.

It wasn't until I became a reporter that I began to see that there were these connections

between not just the science of all of these things, but the way we understand that science.

And that really, really became interesting to me.

I moved from just the pure science and the interest in the science to what's controlling the way we're exposed to this stuff and who's deciding how much of this can we have.

Suzanne was one of the first journalists to report about the danger of BPA in plastics.

Even now, she keeps a close eye on how the government figures out which chemicals are risky.

Last year, when the EPA proposed a new rule for how they do that, she looked it up.

And I see this little paragraph in this proposal, which says that they're

going to throw away the way they've done this for 40 or 50 years, which is we're going to assume

there's some harm and we're going to control around that. And instead, we're going to look into

the idea that maybe this is these chemicals and these exposures and radiation are actually good for you.

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