Dear reader: If you enjoy the work that Charlie does every day—sometimes six or seven times a day—we will soon ask you to chip in to support it. We hope you’ll join us for a few more rounds in the shebeen. More details on what the membership program will include can be found here.

There is going to be a lot for a potential Democratic House of Representatives to do if and when it's installed in office next January. Let a thousand investigations bloom. Even leaving aside the apparently limitless shenanigans in which the inmates of Camp Runamuck are involved (Hi, Ryan Zinke! Welcome to the weekly perp walk), there are also dozens of situations that are worth looking into around the country.

The San Francisco Chronicle hips us to one of them. Out at the old Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, the Navy contracted out the cleanup of radioactive waste to a private company, which proceeded to corrupt the process to the point that two people already have been convicted of things like faking documents and fudging soil samples. Now comes the news that the corrupt subcontractor wasn't even very good at its job.

But fraud may be the least of the problems with the cleanup, according to a new report by academic researchers that reaches a startling conclusion: The Navy, which is supposed to be removing radioactive contamination from the shipyard, is relying on decades-old, obsolete safety standards in order to avoid cleaning up dangerous substances — a strategy that lowers the Navy’s costs, but increases the risk that people living or working on the site will get cancer.

Lovely.

Andrew Holt Getty Images

What’s more, the researchers say, state and federal regulators either failed to catch the archaic standards or approved of them, despite the fact that federal law requires current standards to be used. In some cases, the strategies put forward by the Navy appear to have been authored by Tetra Tech, the same contractor now accused of widespread fraud, according to public documents reviewed by the researchers.

Double lovely.

According to the calculations in the report, if 380 people were exposed to this soil, one of them on average would get cancer from that exposure alone. For the buildings, the researchers say, the Navy allows a risk of 1 cancer in 37 people.“That number just knocks my socks off,” said Dan Hirsch, retired director of the environmental and nuclear policy program at UC Santa Cruz and president of the nonprofit Committee to Bridge the Gap, which released the report Tuesday. “I’ve never seen somebody claiming that levels that high are acceptable.”

Welcome to the deregulated, business-friendly land of plenty.

AP

And, of course, given the state of the EPA and the Department of the Interior under this administration*, the buck-passing is reaching Aaron-Rodgers levels.

An EPA spokeswoman said the agency could not comment on the report because it had not had time to review it. A Tetra Tech spokesman said the report is best addressed by the Navy, “the property owner and entity that set the contract standards for Hunters Point Shipyard.” Tetra Tech has previously denied any wrongdoing in its cleanup work, saying the company performed to Navy specifications. Derek Robinson, environmental cleanup coordinator for the Navy at the shipyard, disputed the report’s findings. “The Navy's first priority in its Base Realignment and Closure cleanup work at Hunters Point is human health and safety,” Robinson said. “We stand by our existing cleanup goals at Hunters Point.”

I "stand by my goal" of driving to the Stop 'n Shop on Friday night in a Turbo S Cabriolet. It doesn't mean I know how to get one.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io