The Trump administration is restricting the type of science that the Environmental Protection Agency can use to set policy in a move environmentalists and public health experts say could keep the Biden team from setting stricter pollution standards.
The rulemaking, which EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler unveiled Tuesday during a virtual event with the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, would require the agency to give more consideration to scientific studies for which the underlying data is publicly available. The rule will take effect immediately when it is published Wednesday.
Wheeler has said the action is critical to ensuring the agency’s rulemakings are transparent and better supported by the public and regulated industries. Environmentalists and public health experts, however, have said that the rule will constrict the EPA’s ability to use scientific studies focused on how pollution affects human health, as that research often uses epidemiological data that can’t be made public.
“Increasing polarization around scientific questions stems in part from too many public policy debates setting science in a category apart from normal discussion or standards,” Wheeler wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal late Monday, previewing the announcement. “By shining light on the science we use in decisions, we are helping to restore trust in government.”
The rulemaking is the latest in a series of efforts that the Trump EPA has been rushing across the finish line in its last couple of months before President-elect Joe Biden takes office. In the last few weeks, the EPA has also finished up rulemakings altering the way the agency tallies the costs and benefits of its air pollution rules and declining to tighten air quality limits for soot and smog.
The science rule, however, has drawn perhaps the most criticism out of the actions the EPA is racing to finish. Dozens of prominent scientific groups, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, raised alarm that the rule would “cut off foundational research” by excluding studies for which the data isn’t public.
That could include scientific studies examining the harms toxic chemicals or air pollutants can have on human health, often used to set drinking water standards, air pollution controls, and other environmental protections.
People often agree to participate in those types of studies on the condition their personal health data is kept private, said Vijay Limaye, a climate and health scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Even if it is kept anonymous, when that data is unmasked, especially in the age of the internet, people can pinpoint those who are suffering from particular health issues, added Limaye, who previously worked as an epidemiologist in the EPA’s air office.
Limaye added that even the EPA, in its rulemaking, acknowledges that the public availability of raw data “is not the be-all, end-all of study quality,” suggesting that the requirements are arbitrary.
“In short, it is forcing EPA to do its work with one hand tied behind its back,” Gretchen Goldman, who directs the Union of Concerned Scientists’s Center for Science and Democracy, said of the EPA’s final rule.
Eliminating the EPA’s ability to use such studies leaves the agency with “a much smaller pool of evidence” when it’s determining whether to tighten pollution limits, Goldman said. “That would give political cover to an administration that didn’t want to set a science-based health standard,” she added.
Environmentalists say the Biden administration will have to eliminate the Trump EPA’s action. To do so, the Biden EPA would likely have to undergo a rulemaking process that could take years.
In the meantime, the Biden administration could make use of a provision in the rule allowing the EPA administrator to issue case-by-case exemptions from the restrictions to specific scientific studies, but it isn’t clear how often that could be used. People can also weigh in on any exemptions the administrator would grant, which could further complicate and delay the agency’s ability to issue stricter pollution standards, Limaye said.
Wheeler, however, said the rule isn’t designed to limit the scope of scientific work that the EPA relies on when it sets pollution standards, and he downplayed claims the rule would tie a future administration’s hands.
“Our rule won’t allow administrators to cherry pick research to derive politically helpful results,” Wheeler wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “It won’t categorically exclude any scientific work from EPA use.”
Wheeler also touted a provision in the rule that would require the EPA to note which “pivotal” scientific studies it is using to set pollution limits, a step he said will help lead to more “acceptance” of the agency’s actions. He recalled his work as a Republican Senate staffer during the 1990s when he was criticizing some of the decisions the EPA made in setting air pollution limits for soot and smog.
“If the agency had upfront stated which were the pivotal studies that they used and made the information available in those studies, I think a lot of that controversy would have gone away,” Wheeler said.
Critics, though, said the EPA’s action is solving a problem the agency doesn’t have. The science that the EPA uses “already undergoes a long-established, transparent review process” that includes peer review and assessments by the EPA’s scientific advisers, said Chris Zarba, a former director of the agency’s Science Advisory Board.
Zarba added that the rule “doesn’t ensure transparency in science, but rather is detrimental to high-quality impartial decision-making on behalf of the health and safety of the public.”
The Science Advisory Board had been critical of the EPA’s science transparency rule, saying in a draft comment to Wheeler last year that its ambiguity “could be viewed as a license to politicize” scientific evaluation. Though that language was removed from the board’s final commentary this year, its members still cast doubt on whether the EPA could implement such restrictions “in a standardized and consistent manner.”
