Two new bills could undermine safety and other regulations by giving politicians license to ignore evidence that runs counter to their ideas

Republicans presently control both chambers of Congress Jim Watson/Getty

The US Congress is back in session, and it seems they have had enough of experts, too. The new Republican-led House of Representatives votes this week on two bills that would effectively toss out evidence-based reasoning from the process of deciding which regulations to enforce. If passed, the bills could undermine everything from rules about clean water to the Endangered Species Act.

“It’s replacing a science-based process with a political process,” says Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts. …