“This is really evil,” Professor Stan Glantz said after I sent him an article about the Environmental Protection Agency’s new science policy. Unveiled by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt on Tuesday, the policy is a purported effort to improve transparency, but has the effect of radically restricting what science the agency can use to create public health regulations. The rule prohibits the EPA from using scientific research that includes confidential data about its human subjects, effectively rejecting much of the research showing how pollutants damage public health.

The EPA’s new policy reminds Glantz of the years he spent fighting the tobacco industry, which waged a decades-long campaign to suppress scientific evidence on the dangers of secondhand smoke. “This thing that Pruitt did is what tobacco and energy industries have been pushing for along time,” he said. “It’s not new. Pruitt is just the first one willing to go this far.”

Glantz, now a professor of tobacco control at the University of California San Francisco, was among the first scientists in America to publicly warn about those dangers. In the 1980s, he was met with some skepticism from the public and the tobacco industry, which denied the validity of his research. In the 2014 documentary Merchants of Doubt, a relatively young-looking Glantz is shown arguing with a TV host who refuses to believe his four-pack-a-day habit is bad for his or others’ health. “I smoke at my job every night, I’m not hurting anyone,” the host says. “That’s bullshit,” Glantz calmly replies, sparking outrage from the studio audience.

Belief that second-hand smoke harms health has skyrocketed since the 1980s. Social Science Research Network

As years passed and more studies were published, public opinion began to shift. From 1994 to 1997, the percentage of people who believed secondhand smoke was “very harmful” jumped by nearly 20 percent. But tobacco companies continued to deny the evidence. Then, in 1995, Glantz and other researchers unearthed documents showing that the tobacco industry had known for 30 years that nicotine was addictive and smoking caused cancer. That revelation helped secure criminal convictions against several tobacco companies for misleading the public, as well as billions of dollars in settlement payments for victims.

Merchants of Doubt also features Steve Milloy, a paid advocate for the tobacco giant Phillip Morris and coal company Murray Energy. “Dioxin, pesticides, chemicals in general—there’s no evidence that these are harming us,” he says in one scene. When Pruitt announced the EPA’s new science policy on Tuesday, Milloy was one of the few people invited to the event—reporters were not—because he has been a longtime proponent of the “secret science” rule. He was also quoted in nearly every major news outlet’s story about it, sometimes referring to himself in the third person.