Andrew Wheeler, the nation’s top environment official, said broad changes he’s implementing to decades-old Environmental Protection Agency methods for setting policy and considering science aren’t meant to keep future administrations from issuing strict pollution limits.
“I fundamentally believe the more information we put out to the public, the better our regulations will be,” Wheeler told the Washington Examiner during an interview in his office Wednesday.
“It’s not to restrain” a future administration, Wheeler said, adding a future EPA could “certainly change” the policies he is working to put in place related to science and cost-benefit analysis.
“I would be shocked if a future administration said, ‘I want to make the science at EPA more secret,’” Wheeler said. “We are not about secrecy. We are trying to put everything out there for the public.”
Wheeler was referring to separate efforts by the Trump EPA to restrict what types of science the agency uses in policymaking and to change the way the EPA conducts analysis outlining the costs and benefits of its regulations. Critics say both efforts, which could overhaul the way the EPA has made policy for decades, would hamstring the agency’s ability to set stringent protections limiting air, water, chemical, and other toxic pollution.
The EPA in April 2018, under Wheeler’s predecessor Scott Pruitt, proposed barring the use of certain science in its policymaking when the underlying data isn’t made public.
Wheeler, instead of walking back the roundly criticized proposal, has sought to strengthen it. The EPA sent a supplemental proposal to the White House for review last month that could extend the restrictions to all science the agency uses.
Scientists and environmentalists say the EPA’s proposal would cut out epidemiology studies, or scientific research that is based on the study of human health because such research relies on confidential personal data. Those studies have formed the basis of some of the EPA’s most significant regulations, including limits on air pollution from power plant smokestacks and restrictions on toxic chemicals.
“Foundational science from years past — research on air quality and asthma, for example, or water quality and human health — could be deemed by the EPA to be insufficient for informing our most significant public health issues,” the publishers of six major scientific journals wrote in a statement last month. “That would be a catastrophe.”
Wheeler, though, pushed back, telling the Washington Examiner he doesn’t think the science transparency proposal limits epidemiology studies “at all.”
He said other agencies use epidemiology studies and make the data available to the public, adding there are ways to “mask” individual information about human subjects, though he didn’t offer specifics.
Wheeler also emphasized the EPA doesn’t intend to “go back and stop using studies from the past.”
More broadly, Wheeler said he hoped to better secure the EPA’s policies with the changes to how the agency considers science and how it conducts cost-benefit reviews.
The EPA hasn’t proposed anything specific yet on cost-benefit reviews, though it took comment on several issues, including how it should weigh secondary environmental benefits of regulations. Those benefits, accrued by reducing pollutants that aren’t directly regulated, can be significant and help to justify stricter environmental protections.
“We’ve had a lot of lawsuits in the last decades of the agency. We’ve had a lot of criticism from the public on our regulations,” Wheeler said, adding that he hopes the changes he is leading will allow the EPA’s regulations to be “more sound” and “better accepted by the public.”
