A court ruling requiring that the EPA make a decision on banning pesticides that cause brain damage in children ended this week in the worst possible way, as EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler overrode the recommendation of the—now gutted—EPA scientific advisory board and announced that the EPA will not move to ban chlorpyrifos. The decision represents a big win for the chemical industry, and a major demonstration of how, in the Trump White House, lobbyists beat scientists every time.
As The New York Times reports, this action follows the agency’s recent refusal to ban asbestos, despite the recommendation of the agency’s experts, and despite knowing that the fibrous mineral is the leading cause of mesothelioma. That action led to multiple, still-ongoing lawsuits in an attempt to force the EPA to act.
But the chlorpyrifos decision on Thursday was actually the end result of a series of lawsuits that were kicked off in 2017. The Obama administration had announced a ban on chlorpyrifos in 2015 after initial reports showed that it causes brain damage in children. But the ban had not gone into effect when Trump took office. Scott Pruitt immediately reversed the announcement when he took control of the EPA in 2017 and decided the agency would simply … not decide. It would allow the pesticides to stay on the market by simply not making a decision.
That generated a series of lawsuits, which eventually resulted in a ruling that the EPA had to make a decision on the child-threatening pesticide. And then, after stretching it out to the last moment, Wheeler did decide—to allow the pesticide to remain on the market. Taken together, the pesticide and asbestos nonactions show that, under Donald Trump and coal lobbyist Wheeler, even the most blatantly obvious cases of public harm aren’t enough to generate any restrictions that might cause some industry to lose a dollar.
And the means by which Wheeler made his “decision” show that, from the very beginning, officials under Trump have planted the seeds to destroy any effective regulation and provide free rein to every industry. Or, at least, to every industry that can pay for it.
Wheeler issued a statement that the data used in evaluating chlorpyrifos was “not sufficiently valid, complete or reliable.” He did so because most of the data originally used in reaching the 2015 decision is not-so-mysteriously now absent from the report.
It’s gone because one of the first acts of previous EPA administrator Scott Pruitt was to make it nearly impossible for most health data to be considered in EPA studies by factoring out any that didn’t include full public disclosure on the individuals whose health data was being used. That set up a conflict between the use of scientific data and the privacy guarantees attached to healthcare information, and meant that the great majority of public health studies had to be thrown away outright. This action, put forward under claims that data had to be “verified” and “transparent,” was done with the absolute knowledge that it would wreck the ability to discuss public health in almost every area. And it powered decisions like those of Wheeler by allowing officials to ignore most of the scientific data.
There are still outstanding lawsuits related to chlorpyrifos, and many experts predict that—at some future date—the chemicals may be banned by the courts. How many children will suffer lifelong damage before that happens is not known.