Earth last: environment and Public Works Committee chairman James Inhofe is waging a war on science so extreme that even the Bush administration seems moderate by comparison.

AT A RECENT HEARING OF THE SENATE COMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT and Public Works, the Republican chairman, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, confronted Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Mike Leavitt with a serious complaint. Leavitt had come to the Hill to defend President Bush's 2005 budget, which proposes to slash the EPA's various science programs by nearly $100 million.

A staunch conservative, Inhofe once famously dubbed the EPA a "Gestapo bureaucracy"--but in this case, he stood up for the agency's research-and-development funding. "I'm an advocate of sound ...

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