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The EPA’s past administrators were not being bilked, however — they were buying the research results they wanted. When President Obama assumed office eight years ago, he cleaned house at the EPA of those who might question the environmental orthodoxy. Staff and board positions were stocked with true believers or those who feigned true belief, to secure their positions. The sweetener of lucrative grants to compromised advisers helped assuage any guilt the members might have felt in skewing their research to provide the Obama administration with the “science-based evidence” it needed to justify its global warming agenda.

Hardly a week goes by without Donald Trump finding new ways to drain the swamp

The cronyism at the EPA may have deepened under Obama, but by no means did he begin it. “For decades, EPA’s assorted advisory boards have been packed with people who could be relied upon to rubber-stamp EPA’s regulatory actions,” states the National Center for Public Policy Research. That view was echoed by an EPA reformer in The Wall Street Journal in July: “In effect, EPA-funded researchers are empowered to review and approve their own work in order to rubber-stamp the EPA’s regulatory agenda. This is all done under the guise of ‘independence.’”

The Trump administration has ended this corrupt system through several reforms. First, it’s banning any self-dealing — in future, no sitting member of any EPA advisory board can be awarded a contract for EPA work. “You have to choose either grant or serve on the board. You can’t do both,” declared Pruitt, thus eliminating a financial incentive that researchers in future would have to pander to ideologues — of the left or the right — at his agency.