Another day, another move to upend the Environmental Protection Agency. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt made statements this week that suggest he’s on the verge of removing researchers from the agency’s scientific advisory boards if they’ve received EPA grants. Apparently, scientists who receive such grants are incapable of giving unbiased advice.
“What’s most important at the agency is to have scientific advisers that are objective, independent-minded, providing transparent recommendations,” Pruitt told an audience at the conservative Heritage Foundation on Tuesday. “If we have individuals who are on those boards, sometimes receiving money from the agency … that to me causes questions on the independence and the veracity and the transparency of those recommendations that are coming our way.”
In order to “fix” the problem, Pruitt plans to issue a directive sometime next week, although it’s unclear just what that directive might contain. Not surprisingly, environmental groups aren’t happy:
“Pruitt’s purge has a single goal: get rid of scientists who tell us the facts about threats to our environment and health,” Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “There’s a reason he won’t apply the same limits to scientists funded by corporate polluters. Now the only scientists on Pruitt’s good list will be those with funding from polluters supporting Trump’s agenda to make America toxic again.”
And scientists say Pruitt’s plan is deeply flawed, too.
Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote in a blog post that if Pruitt issues the kind of directive he promised, he “would be willfully setting himself up to fail at the job of protecting public health and the environment.”
Halpern went further, calling Pruitt’s stance a double standard.
“So let’s recap: According to some, scientists who receive money from oil and chemical companies are perfectly qualified to provide the EPA with independent science advice, while those who receive federal grants are not,” he wrote. “It’s a fundamental misrepresentation of how conflicts of interest work.”
Pruitt’s speech to the Heritage Foundation is just the latest in a long list of actions that have taken aim at fact-based science. And this week, it’s an assault that’s been taking place on multiple fronts.