Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility

Founded in 1996, PEER operates primarily by investigating claims from public employees about government environmental misconduct. Because whistleblowers often face direct retaliation from the offending agencies, PEER encourages employees to act through the organization to reveal government environmental misdeeds. Once a claim is made, PEER investigates it, often using Freedom of Information Act requests. The organization then can choose to take a number of actions, including press releases or lawsuits. PEER also serves to provide legal services to whistleblowers who find themselves the target of agency retaliation. PEER was formerly affiliated with the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, a not-for-profit organization established in 2011 to protect scientific research and researchers of climate science from think tanks and legal foundations that have taken legal action against scientific institutions and individual scientists.

Campaigns

PEER maintains campaigns in leading environmental and public health issues. Some of their work includes:

Protecting Public Lands

PEER is pushing back against efforts to undermine our public lands for the benefit of special interests by: challenging government agencies to protect and restore wildlife and ecosystems from the effects of overgrazing; working to minimize the impacts of the fossil fuel industry on public lands; and supporting increased staff levels in land management agencies.

North Atlantic Right Whale

PEER is pressing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to adopt safeguards to prevent needless deaths of highly endangered North Atlantic right whales by underlining true mortality caused by entanglements with fishing lines while continuing to push for adoption of our comprehensive strategy for averting whale ship strikes.

PFAS

PEER works with current and former local, state and federal employees who want government agencies to do more to protect people and wildlife from toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or "forever chemicals". PEER advocates for the regulation of PFAS as a family of chemicals, banning all non-essential uses of PFAS, and setting comprehensive standards for PFAS.

Teresa Chambers

Former chief of the United States Park Police Teresa Chambers served for nearly two years before she was fired after revealing in an interview the potential dangers of their low staffing levels. PEER has provided Teresa legal defense and publicity for her appeal for reinstatement and for her wrongful firing lawsuit.

Suppression of Wolf Research

PEER has been involved in challenging the suppression of research by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and Washington State University concerning the ineffectiveness of lethal control in preventing future depredation of livestock. They have also been critical of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources' lax regulation of recreational hunting and its impact on the federally endangered Great Lakes gray wolf.