Any hope that Donald Trump might preserve the environmental legacy of his predecessor quickly dissipated when he tapped climate- change skeptic and longtime oil-industry ally Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, an agency he has sued more than a dozen times. And Pruitt, whose official bio boasts that he was the “leading advocate against the E.P.A.’s activist agenda,” has wasted little time fulfilling the administration’s goal of “remaking” the agency in his image.

On Friday, the E.P.A. dismissed at least five and as many as half of the members of a major 18-person scientific review board, with plans to replace them with members of the industries the agency is supposed to regulate. “This is completely part of a multifaceted effort to get science out of the way of a deregulation agenda,” Ken Kimmell, the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, told The New York Times. Ponisseril Somasundaran, a chemist at Columbia University who was dismissed from the board, explained that most members of the council are academics. “I think they want to bring in business and industry people,” he added.

Robert Richardson, an environmental economist at Michigan State University, who also said his appointment was “terminated,” was less diplomatic. “Today, I was Trumped,” he wrote on Twitter.

A spokesperson for the E.P.A. told The Washington Post that “no one has been fired or terminated” from the Board of Scientific Counselors, but rather the individuals’ contracts had simply not been renewed. “We’re not going to rubber-stamp the last administration’s appointees. Instead, they should participate in the same open competitive process as the rest of the applicant pool,” he said. “This approach is what was always intended for the Board, and we’re making a clean break with the last administration’s approach.”

Still, the Pruitt camp has not denied that replacing scientists with business and industry insiders is a motivating factor behind the decision not to renew their appointments. “The administrator believes we should have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community,” the E.P.A. spokesperson said in the statement to the Times, adding that the agency is adopting “as inclusive an approach to regulation as possible” and plans to expand the applicant pool to include “universities that aren’t typically represented and issues that aren’t typically represented.”

Conservatives have long criticized the makeup of the Board of Scientific Counselors and the larger 47-member Scientific Advisory Board, which are tasked with reviewing and evaluating E.P.A. research and guiding policy. “The E.P.A. routinely stacks this board with friendly scientists who receive millions of dollars in grants from the federal government,” Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican and the anti-climate science chairman of the House Science Committee, said during a hearing in February, the Post reports. “The conflict of interest here is clear.”