Washington - At the Bush administration's direction, the Environmental Protection Agency is working on a new rule that would weaken pollution regulations for power plants, allowing them to increase emissions without adding controls.

    EPA officials have been working on a fast track to meet a Saturday deadline, but many of them are arguing against changing the rule, said former EPA attorney John Walke and an EPA career official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the official wasn't authorized to make statements.

    They said that the EPA was expected to decide in November on another eleventh-hour rule that would allow more power plants to be built near national parks and wilderness areas.

    Power companies have sought the rule about power plant emissions for many years, and it was part of Vice President Dick Cheney's 2001 energy plan. Rules finalized more than 60 days before the administration leaves office are harder for the next administration to undo.

    The Clean Air Act requires older plants that have their lives extended with new equipment to install pollution-control technology if their emissions increase. The rule change would allow plants to measure emissions on an hourly basis, rather than their total yearly output. This way, plants could run for more hours and increase overall emissions without exceeding the threshold that would require additional pollution controls.

    He's accused of misleading Congress.

    Washington - Four Senate Democrats called on EPA chief Stephen Johnson to resign Tuesday, alleging that he gave misleading testimony to Congress and repeatedly bowed to pressure from the White House to avoid regulating greenhouse gases.

    California Sen. Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and three other Democrats on the panel - Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey - also announced they are urging Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate whether Johnson made false statements to Congress. Mukasey's office said it was still reviewing the request late Tuesday.

    The pressure on Johnson is part of an escalating battle between Democrats in Congress and the White House over climate change policy. Democrats are seizing on new evidence that Johnson overrode the opinions of Environmental Protection Agency scientists and reversed two of his own decisions at the request of the White House.

    EPA spokesman Jonathan Shradar fired back at Boxer for what he called a political attack. "Administrator Johnson's record is one of aggressive, health protective environmental standards. Sen. Boxer's record is one of press conferences and political tirades," Shradar said.

    Democrats insist that Johnson misled Congress when he testified before Boxer's committee Jan. 24 about his decision to reject California's effort to set the nation's toughest limits on emissions from vehicles. The EPA chief testified that he listened to all sides before deciding that California had failed to make its case.

    "I made the decision. It was my decision. It was the right decision," Johnson said at the time.

    Ex-administrator says official from vice president's office edited out six pages.

    Members of Vice President's Dick Cheney's staff censored congressional testimony by a top federal official on the health threats posed by global warming, a former Environmental Protection Agency official said today.

    In a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, former EPA deputy associate administrator Jason K. Burnett said an official from Cheney's office edited out six pages from the testimony of Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last October.

    Several media outlets, including The Washington Post, reported at the time that Gerberding had planned to say that "CDC considers climate change a serious public health concern," among other passages.

    Boxer said the administration feared that Gerberding's testimony would force it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. The White House has opposed mandatory limits and insisted that voluntary measures and increased research are the best way to address the problem.

    "The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Office of the Vice President (OVP) were seeking deletions to the CDC testimony," Burnett, a 31-year old Stanford-trained economist and a Democrat, wrote in response to an inquiry from Boxer's committee. "CEQ requested that I work with CDC to remove from the testimony any discussion of the human health consequences of climate change."

Appointees in NASA press office blamed.

    An investigation by the NASA inspector general found that political appointees in the space agency's public affairs office worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers' findings about climate change for at least two years, the inspector general's office said yesterday.

    The probe came at the request of 14 senators after The Washington Post and other news outlets reported in 2006 that Bush administration officials had monitored and impeded communications between NASA climate scientists and reporters.

    James E. Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and has campaigned publicly for more stringent limits on greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, told The Post and the New York Times in September 2006 that he had been censored by NASA press officers, and several other agency climate scientists reported similar experiences. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are two of the government's lead agencies on climate change issues.

    From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said, NASA's public affairs office "managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public." It noted elsewhere that "news releases in the areas of climate change suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency, and scientific dilution."

    Officials of the Office of Public Affairs told investigators that they regulated communication by NASA scientists for technical rather than political reasons, but the report found "by a preponderance of the evidence, that the claims of inappropriate political interference made by the climate change scientists and career public affairs officers were more persuasive than the arguments of the senior public affairs officials that their actions were due to the volume and poor quality of the draft news releases."