It takes so much energy to keep up with the untruths, half-truths, and crackpot tweets coming out of the White House these days that it can be hard to find the time to monitor the falsehoods emanating from Capitol Hill. But it’s worth checking in on Congress because, it turns out, many of its most powerful members are no less delusional than President Trump. A case in point is Representative Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Smith is the kind of Science Committee chairman who openly displays his contempt for science. He recently advised Americans to get their news “directly from the President. In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth.” (According to the Texas Tribune, Smith was “the first member of Congress to donate to Trump in last year’s presidential campaign.”)

On Tuesday, Smith held a hearing titled “Making the E.P.A. Great Again.” From the list of witnesses, it was clear that Smith was not, however, interested in improving the E.P.A.—in fact, just the reverse. One of the witnesses was a lobbyist for the coal industry, another a lobbyist for the chemical industry. In a display of hypocrisy so blatant it could have been hilarious, but wasn’t, Smith used his opening statement to rail against “conflicts of interest” at the E.P.A. The agency, he complained, depended on the expertise of scientists to whom it sometimes also awards research grants. His proposed solution to this problem? To stack the E.P.A.’s science advisory board with scientists who work for regulated industries.

“Science hearing on Making EPA Great Again now,” one of the committee’s Democratic members, Representative Zoe Lofgren, of California, tweeted. “I’d settle for making the committee adhere to basic scientific concepts again.”

Smith then moved on to the latest tempest in a data set—a controversy over a paper on climate change authored by a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The controversy centers not on the data but on whether proper procedures were followed—and, in any event, the figures in question have been confirmed in many different ways. The problem, apparently, is that the paper refuted Smith’s favorite denialist talking point, which was the claim that there was a fourteen-year “pause” in global warming, starting in 1998.

The controversy represents yet another attempt by Smith to create some sort of scandal that would, to his mind at least, undermine the credibility of an entire branch of science. Smith has been using this faux-troversy to try to subpoena every single e-mail sent by a NOAA scientist that contains words like “climate” and “temperature.” So far, the agency has refused to comply, but Smith does not seem to be giving up. On Tuesday, he accused NOAA of trying “to deceive the American people” to “justify a partisan agenda.” Smith’s tactics against NOAA have been so heavy-handed that even his home-town newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News, which had always supported him for reëlection, declined to endorse him last fall. “His bullying on the issue of climate change” should “concern all Americans,” the newspaper’s editorial board wrote under the headline “Lamar Smith’s bully tactics cross the line.”

Similarly, “Lamar Smith Wants to 'Make the EPA Great Again' . . . With Baseless Accusations” was the headline on the coverage of Tuesday’s hearing on the Web site of the San Antonio Current.

The sad—and scary—thing is that, even as the Trump Administration grabs all the headlines, Smith and his ilk are busy upending decades of work on issues ranging from air pollution to gun safety. Last week, the House approved a bill overturning a rule designed to prevent people deemed by the Social Security Administration to be mentally impaired from owning a firearm. It also repealed a rule that would prevent coal-mining companies from dumping their waste into nearby waterways, and another rule that would require oil and gas companies to reduce methane leaks from operations on federal lands.

Why shouldn’t mentally unstable people be allowed to own guns? Why shouldn’t coal companies be able to destroy rivers and streams? You might think these are questions that answer themselves, but that way of thinking is so 2016. In 2017, it’s the scientists who have conflicts of interest, not the industry lobbyists. Up is down, Lamar Smith is trying to make the “E.P.A. great again,” and anything is possible, just not in a good way.