The best suggestion to cross our desk of late has been that by Andrew Wolf of the Riverdale Review, with respect to the hearings the City Council is about to undertake on lead poisoning. In a column published yesterday on this page he advances the novel idea that the City Council might try to get to the bottom of whether the lead poisoning standards in place in the city — standards that have triggered untold angst among parents and hundreds of millions of dollars in claims for damages — are based on accurate data. It’s a terrific idea, and, as it happens, there’s a terrific tool coming into effect that could be of use, the federal data quality guidelines. They were established quietly in the waning days of the Clinton administration and signed by President Clinton. We first read about them in the “Heartland” column by the inestimable Tom Bray on OpinionJournal.com. The guidelines require not only that data generated by government agencies meet quality standards but also, Mr. Bray reports, that anybody affected by the subsequent relations or activities of the agency have the right to inspect the data. Left wing interest groups are only now waking up to the implications of the new guidelines, which go into effect in October. If ever there were a situation tailor-made for the kind of quality control anticipated in the law it is the lead paint scare, which at bottom has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the health of children and everything to do with the economic interests of the trial lawyers who have been the big gainers of the campaign for tighter regulation of so-called lead poisoning.