Back in October, Environmental Protection Agency-hating EPA chief Scott Pruitt announced a directive about who could advise the agency on its research and regulatory priorities. Scientists who had received EPA grants for their research would no longer be permitted to serve on any of the agency’s 23 advisory committees. That, of course, applies to just about any scientist of note who has investigated anything having to do with the environment.
The EPA claimed that this approach would ensure advisers are "independent and free from any real, apparent or potential interference with their ability to objectively serve as a committee member." But—surprise!!—advisers who have received grants or funding from industries notorious for the environmental wreckage they have created are not excluded by the directive.
Now, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and an individual scientist represented by Protect Democracy have sued the EPA in the matter.
They say the agency’s directive “is arbitrary, without any factual or legal grounding, and violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires advisory committees to be fairly balanced and protected from inappropriate influence by the appointing authority.” In a press release, the plaintiffs argue that the EPA move is an attack on science itself.
Not exactly unexpected in an EPA run by a climate science denier who is one the most aggressively bad administrators in Trump’s regime brimful of such deniers.
Among other things, the plaintiffs say:
Independent facts and institutions, and the open exchange of accurate scientific information, are touchstones of a functioning democracy. Anti-democratic regimes often seek to delegitimize and suppress authoritative voices that offer accurate information, especially if it can be used to criticize the government. President Trump and his administration have shown authoritarian tendencies in many ways, including a demonstrated hostility to science and to developing policy based on impartial and balanced scientific evidence. Recent particularly harrowing examples include subjecting traditionally independent EPA grant funding to political review, and EPA scientists being pulled from public events addressing critical national challenges, apparently because of their scientific views. [...]
A policy that excludes the nation’s most eminent scientists not only silences key, unbiased voices in EPA policy development, but signals government disapproval of the former committee members’ work—including, for example, critical climate change research. Government suppression and delegitimization of scientists and scientific research is anti-democratic and impedes the American public’s ability to knowledgeably engage with pressing national issues.
Josh Goldman, a senior policy analyst at UCS, rips Pruitt over the October directive at the union’s blog:
The scientists that Pruitt has removed from EPA advisory boards also happen to be some of our country’s best. Those already dismissed include a Fulbright Scholar and a member of the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine, for example. Pruitt has replaced these leaders with scientists who work for the fossil fuel, tobacco, and chemical industries and have a history of downplaying the health risks of secondary smoke, air pollution, and other public health hazards.
The real reasoning behind this directive is to make it easier for Pruitt to delay, roll back, or dismantle the EPA regulations that are designed to protect clean air, water, and public health.
In backing up the directive, Pruitt chose an argument based in that noted science textbook, the Bible:
“In the Book of Joshua, there’s a story about Joshua leading the people into the promised land after Moses passed away. This is sort of the Joshua principle. As it relates to the grants and to this agency, you can choose to serve on the council or choose the grant but you can’t choose both.”
As Brian Kahn asked rhetorically in October: “So who will lead us to the scientific promised land now that those EPA-funded scientists have been excluded?”
Exactly who you would expect: At the head of the Science Advisory Committee is Michael Honeycutt, a toxicologist with a history of attacks on the EPA’s evaluation of risks from mercury and ozone who testified in 2012 against the preponderance of evidence that “some studies even suggest PM (particulate matter) makes you live longer.”
Also on the board: Larry Monroe, previously an executive at Southern Company, a gas and electric firm; Merl Lindstrom of Phillips 66; Robert Merritt, a retired executive from the French petrochemical firm Total; and Kimberly White of the American Chemistry Council, an industry trade group. Heading up the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee is Tony Cox, who has argued ad nauseam that smog isn’t harmful to our health.
Objective and independent? Sure. In the same way company scientists at Philip Morris were independent and objective about the health risks of tobacco and Monsanto was about dioxin.