Ugly:

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration determined that a particular chemical in plastic was not harmful, they used scientific studies to prove it. But they relied on just two studies that were funded by the Society of the Plastics Industry, a subsidiary of the American Chemistry Council. On the other hand, they ignored “hundreds of government and academic studies showing a chemical commonly found in plastic can be harmful to lab animals at low doses.” Of those two industry-funded studies, one “has never been published, and therefore never subjected to peer review; the second has been heavily criticized by researchers who say the results are inconclusive because of flawed experimental methods.” This only came to light when Michigan Democrats Rep. John Dingell, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Rep. Bart Stupak, who leads a subcommittee, launched an investigation into the use of bisphenol A in containers used by infants and toddlers. “Anila Jacob, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group … said she was surprised that the FDA so openly admitted to relying on those two studies, particularly when one of them has never been published or released to the scientific world for review. ‘There’s a lack of transparency here,’ she said, adding that the agency’s reliance on these studies ‘doesn’t serve the public.’”
Source: Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, March 21, 2008

This is typical of the problems that result when government regulatory agencies fall into the hands of strongly pro-business political parties, such as the GOP: independence goes by the board. Another example:

U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair Deborah Platt Majoras will leave her government post to work for Procter & Gamble (P&G), the largest U.S. consumer products company. Even though Majoras has excused herself from FTC matters that may impact P&G and will need to follow a year-long “cooling off” period, Multinational Monitor’s Robert Weissman is concerned. “P&G is the leading company involved in ‘buzz marketing,’” he writes. When Commercial Alert petitioned the FTC to investigate buzz marketing as “fundamentally fraudulent and misleading,” the watchdog group cited P&G’s teen buzz marketing division, “Tremor.” Majoras’s FTC agreed that the “assumed independence” of a buzz marketer might mislead consumers, but decided against further investigation or action. “The P&G case — involving a quarter of a million teens who are not instructed to disclose their relationship with the company — apparently was not noteworthy enough,” Weissman concludes. An FTC ethics staffer said of Majoras’s new job, “It is how things work. The nature of the business is the revolving door.”
Source: Multinational Monitor editor’s blog, March 26, 2008