Democratic lawmakers and scientists denounced proposal to allow administrators to reject study results if research isn’t public

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Democratic lawmakers joined scientists, health and environmental officials and activists on Tuesday in denouncing a proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), backed by industry, that could limit dramatically what kind of science the agency considers when making regulations.

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One lawmaker called the Trump administration proposal a “thinly veiled campaign to limit research” that “supports critical regulatory action”.

The rule was introduced by the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt, before his resignation this month amid ethics scandals. Tuesday’s public hearing drew opponents and a much smaller number of industry and trade groups backing it.

If adopted, the rule would allow an EPA administrator to reject study results in making decisions about pollutants and other health risks if the underlying research data is not made public because of patient privacy concerns.

Joseph Stanko, a representative of a coalition of groups and companies ranged against what it says are increasingly stringent air-pollution regulations, said the Pruitt rule “enables the public to more meaningfully comment on the science”.

Opponents said the move would throw out the kind of public health studies that underlie enforcement of the Clean Air Act and other landmark controls, because such studies drew on confidential health data from thousands of individuals.

“This has nothing to do with transparency,” the Democratic representative Paul Tonko of New York said at the hearing in EPA headquarters. “It’s a thinly veiled campaign to limit research … that supports critical regulatory action.”

The “proposal and its false claims about transparency … guarantees that political interests will always matter more than science” in forming environmental regulations, Tonko said.

Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat, said the EPA proposal was similar to years of “transparency” legislation Congress had repeatedly rejected, and called it “an administrative attempt to circumvent the legislative process”.

New York state officials and representatives of public and private universities also spoke against the proposal. Critics including former EPA administrators and scientists said the policy shift was designed to restrict the agency from citing peer-reviewed public health studies that use patient medical records that must be kept confidential under patient privacy laws.

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Such studies include the Harvard School of Public Health’s landmark Six Cities study of 1993, which established links between death rates and dirty air. That study was used by EPA to justify tighter air quality rules opposed by industrial polluters.

The EPA is continuing the steps toward the formal adoption of the proposal under its new acting administrator, former deputy Andrew Wheeler. In an email, spokesman James Hewitt said Wheeler “believes the more information you put out to the public the better the regulatory outcome. He also believes the agency should prioritize ways to safeguard sensitive information.”

The proposal is open for public comment until mid-August, before any final EPA and White House review.