Deborah Swackhamer was, until this earlier week, the chairwoman of a key science advisory board for the Environmental Protection Agency, bringing to bear her considerable experience as a water chemist and a former professor at the University of Minnesota.
That was until her cell phone rang while she was at an airport in Zagreb, Croatia, and she found out EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt had, well, dumped her.
A friend had forwarded to Swackhamer, the chairwoman of EPA's Board of Scientific Counselors, who was returning from vacation in Europe, a news article saying Administrator Scott Pruitt had launched a sweeping directive to reshape the agency's science panels. Pruitt had also named new chairmen for some of those boards, including Paul Gilman to lead BOSC, which Swackhamer currently heads up.
"I was getting hints from inside EPA from its Office of Research and Development asking me if I wanted to stay, tiptoeing around it," Swackhamer told E&E News. "I officially found out yesterday when I saw Paul Gilman's name in the paper."
Was Swackhamer replaced because she has failed to get onboard the Trump train and embrace the rollback of regulations meant to protect the public from harm? That certainly wasn’t Pruitt’s explanation, but then again, consider this:
She gave congressional testimony earlier this year in which she questioned whether the administration could be politicizing science. That led to a dispute with EPA Chief of Staff Ryan Jackson, who Swackhamer says tried to sway her testimony (E&E Daily, June 28).
Swackhamer said she doesn't know the "official reason" for losing the BOSC chairmanship but suspects it involves the controversy over her testimony, which sparked a letter from Capitol Hill Democrats asking for an EPA inspector general investigation.
"I didn't tangle with Ryan Jackson. Ryan Jackson tangled with me, and it ended up in the press and with letters from Congress and to the IG," Swackhamer said. "I think that was a black mark against me. ... I suspect that's the reason."
Seems to be a reasonable explanation, although she could just be another in the growing list of casualties in this administration’s war on science. It’s been working overtime to rollback everything the Obama administration did to enact policies backed up by fact-based science. As Swackhamer said:
"It is not normal to remove a chair. None of this is normal. None of this is regular."
An understatement.