The EPA researchers are allowed to attend the event, so they're not completely excluded. However, they're explicitly forbidden from attending the opening news conference or making any presentations. And when Pruitt hopes to cancel the National Estuary Program supporting the talk as part of his 2018 budget, agency scientists might not have anything to attend next year.

The cancellation isn't coming out of the blue, of course. The EPA started scrubbing climate change references within weeks of Pruitt taking charge. However, it does validate suspicions that have been floating around for months: that the EPA would prevent scientists from doing their work if it clashed with the agency's current agenda of climate change denial. Like it or not, you probably won't hear much public discussion of climate science from EPA-backed scientists for a while.



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