Once upon a time, some tobacco lawyers turned climate deniers convinced Republicans in Congress and Trump’s administration to flip the idea of “conflict of interest” on its head. They alleged that scientific advisors funded by public institutions like the EPA were biased, and those funded by polluters facing regulation were not.
As a result, Trump’s former EPA administrator and mattress-coveter Scott Pruitt kicked a bunch of experts off of the EPA’s Scientific Advisory Boards and replaced them with people polluters told him to install. Pruitt used the rhetoric that advisors should be “objective, independent-minded,” and otherwise not ethically compromised by grants (from the EPA).
Fast forward to yesterday: Trump’s EPA defended itself in front of a panel of judges in a DC Circuit appeal court by claiming that it didn’t need to explain why it changed the policy (see above) but also that this is an “internal housekeeping” matter –so ethics rules don’t apply.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs (Physicians for Social Responsibility, joined by the National Hispanic Medical Association, the International Society of Children’s Health and the Environment, and three additional scientists from the boards) pointed out that Trump’s EPA contradicted the guidance of the Office of Government Ethics Regulations, which says explicitly that grants from the government do not constitute a conflict of interest for advisory board members.
That guidance also requires the EPA to explain and justify why it made the changes. But for it to explain why it made the change, it’d have to explain why working in the public interest to advise the EPA on the science that informs public health protections is in conflict with working in the public interest, with public money, to do public health research.
After all, EPA grants are some of the most coveted out there –meaning they attract top talent. Who better to advise the EPA than those who have proven to be worthy of its funding?
We know exactly why the EPA made this move: to push out the most qualified experts who say pollution is bad, and bring in those whose views are useful to industry.
What we don’t know is why the EPA thinks it can get away with saying the ethics rules deciding that these grants aren’t a conflict of interest don’t apply to its rule based on the idea that grants are a conflict of interest.
Or it doesn’t, which is why it didn’t, and wouldn’t.
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