Good morning.

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The Salinas Valley is known as the “Salad Bowl of the World,” so it’s no surprise that there are a lot of pesticides used in California farm country. We recently paid a visit to the Chamacos project, run by the University of California, Berkeley, which for nearly two decades has been studying the effects of pesticides on the children of Salinas-area farm workers. (Chamacos is Spanish for “children.”)

This was the backdrop we chose for a story on the Trump administration’s war on what it calls “secret science” at the Environmental Protection Agency. At the urging of agrochemical companies, the administration has proposed forcing studies like the Chamacos project to make public information about its study participants in order to continue to be considered by regulators.

Former E.P.A. officials and academics view the move as a breach of privacy safeguards and said the proposal echoed what the tobacco industry once tried to do in thwarting science that highlighted the dangers of smoking. The industry, which keeps much of its own research secret, says it is a legitimate effort to improve transparency.

Studies like Chamacos — part of a field known as epidemiology — examine disease trends in people. They are often complex, because they require adjusting for the many different chemicals and pollutants people are exposed to. It was only under the Obama administration that the E.P.A. began to more seriously incorporate epidemiology alongside lab tests of how pesticides impact rats and other animals.