The team had first contacted the EPA in early June. By July, they had concluded that the EPA’s failure to screen endocrine disruptors as required by law might be the strongest angle for the story they were going to write. To write it, however, they needed to ask a host of questions more pointed and better informed than those they were able to formulate in June. Why had EPA not started to screen endocrine disruptors? How much had they spent on those efforts? What about the lawsuits and the settlement? Why had the 2003 deadline to start screening come and gone? As Spivak puts it:

Now when you call the EPA you’re not just saying, "Oh, gee, Congress passed this law in 1996, you were supposed to screen and you haven’t, tell us why." Now it’s, "not only did Congress pass this law, but the EPA administrator set out a timeline saying that it should be done by such and such a point."

But when they returned to the EPA, they ran into the same problem they were experiencing with the ACC: a blank wall.

To the reporters, it seemed that the EPA tried several tactics to discourage the team. One was to simply ignore the Journal Sentinel as a second-tier, regional newspaper. “They just did not take us seriously, so they would blow us off for weeks on end,” remembers Rust. “They wouldn’t send us stuff. They kept changing their story on us. It was really frustrating. It felt like we weren’t getting any respect.” Spivak confirms that “I had an EPA official say we’ve given you everything that we’re going to give and, as far as we’re concerned, the subject is closed.”

But the team was not accepting that. It had been dealing with reluctance from the Chemistry Council; now it was up against the same thing from the EPA. But there was a difference—the EPA was a federal agency, funded by taxpayer dollars and covered under sunshine laws that guaranteed public scrutiny of public bodies. Spivak was fired up: “The response [to EPA] was no, the subject is closed when we say it’s closed. You don’t get to make that decision. That’s our call, not yours.”

So the team kept calling EPA officials. They also sent emails to the EPA administrator, Stephen L Johnson. The emails complained that the agency was unresponsive. “I know the administrator of the EPA is not going to read my emails,” says Spivak. But the point was to go as high up the chain of authority as possible in order to generate a response from a higher-level official who could compel cooperation from his subordinates. Again, after about a month of frustrating back-and-forth, the tactic paid off. “ They came back,” Spivak says. “And it was all nice, as if nothing happened.”

In early August, the national program director of the EPA’s EDRP was on the line. “Clearly, we would like to have been a lot further along [in screening],” Elaine Francis told them. “But science tends to move at its own pace.” She confirmed that the agency had spent $80 million on the project so far. She also confirmed that EPA had so far not tested a single endocrine disruptor.

Francis would not say when the EPA planned to start screening, but did inform the reporters that it intended to start with a batch of 73 chemicals—all pesticides. This seemed odd to the reporters (and to scientists they later called) because pesticides had already been thoroughly tested. Besides, pesticides were not the most worrisome group of disruptors as people did not ingest them. The agency planned to complete the first round of tests by 2010, confirmed spokeswoman Jones.

EPA Administrator Johnson steadfastly refused requests for an interview. But the team did succeed in talking to Johnson’s predecessor, Browner. It took months to schedule an interview, as she was traveling globally. But on October 9, they spoke to her. “It doesn’t taken nine years” to set up a screening program, she told them. “You adjust as you go. You don’t have to build a Cadillac when a Model T will do.”

Covering the waterfront . Meanwhile, the team had not sat idle while it waited for the EPA and ACC to relent. Instead, says Spivak, “we’re calling every expert you can find.” Columbia University Professors David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, for example, gave them a useful way to think about endocrine disruptors and BPA. Rosner and Markowitz were not scientists, but they taught a seminar on plastics at the Mailman School of Public Health. They had also co-authored a 2002 book, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution , which focused on environmental health. [1] Notes Spivak:

They compared bisphenol A to tobacco, which seemed really apt because that [substance] also faces a lot of industry pressure and there are similar accusations that the government has been slow to act. And so that proved to be quite a handy little framework for us to kind of emulate… [They also] gave a good perspective on how the government gets to the bottom of whether or not something is dangerous.

The reporters talked to Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and chair of the department of community and preventive medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. They interviewed Michael E. Mitchell, chief of pediatric urology at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, as well as Shanna Swan, director of the Center for Reproductive Epidemiology at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. And dozens more—over 100 scientists, physicians, industry representatives, and government officials. “A lot of the interviews are wasted,” concedes Spivak, “in that nothing that they said is ever going to see the light of day. But it’s not wasted because they’re giving you good background.”

The team learned anew the value of checking facts. For example Lamb, the Weinberg Group vice president, had assured the team that there was no need to change the industry’s approach to toxicology studies (some scientists argued government and industry methods were outmoded), and he cited a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report in support. Yet when Spivak and Rust read the NAS study, they discovered that “this is saying the opposite of what he told us,” says Spivak. “The moral is, if a guy sends you somewhere, you should look at it. Because they’re assuming you’ll never look at it.”

By late August, the reporters felt they had great material, far more than they needed, and that the time had come to write. They headed for a newsroom side office they nicknamed “the Garret.”