With a title like "Making EPA Great Again," there should be little surprise that a lot of Tuesday's House Science Committee hearing was focused on criticism of the US Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has been a favorite target of the committee's chairman, Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Texas). But the EPA ended up sharing the spotlight with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). A recent news story combined with Smith's lingering displeasure over a 2015 NOAA climate study meant that it became two hearings for the price of one.

NOAA in the crosshairs

In an ongoing saga, Smith accused a group of NOAA climate scientists of fudging data in a 2015 study published in Science on the global temperature record. Smith provided no evidence for this claim other than his own rejection of the observed warming trend affirmed by the study. He then attempted to subpoena the researchers’ e-mails—a move that NOAA has (so far) resisted. Last weekend, a story in the UK Mail on Sunday quoted a former NOAA scientist who criticized the 2015 study, primarily alleging that NOAA data archiving procedures were not followed and the study was rushed—claims the researchers reject.

In addition to a series of tweets promoting the story, the House Science Committee promptly put out a press release repeating accusations that NOAA has manipulated its data—even though the results have been duplicated in a recent study and also with every other major dataset available. In his opening statement for Tuesday’s hearing, Rep. Smith said that NOAA “deceived the American people by falsifying data to justify a partisan agenda,” called on Science to retract the peer-reviewed 2015 study, and promised to continue pressuring NOAA to turn over scientists’ e-mails.

Awkwardly, Smith did not seem aware that the “whistleblower” from the Mail on Sunday article, John Bates, gave an interview to E&E News in which he disavowed those allegations. “The issue here is not an issue of tampering with data, but rather really of timing of a release of a paper that had not properly disclosed everything it was," Bates said. (In a later Associated Press story, Bates clarified that he believed there was “no data tampering, no data changing, nothing malicious.”)

That is, while the Mail on Sunday article centered on the idea that the researchers had deliberately fudged data to exaggerate global warming, its primary source (Bates) now claims nothing of the sort. In a news article on the Science website Wednesday, Bates explains that he wouldn’t have a problem with the 2015 study if it had simply noted that it was using research data rather than official “operational” NOAA data for land temperatures.

Rush Holt, a former congressman and the current CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes the journal Science), was invited to testify at the hearing by Democrats on the committee. When Rep. Smith asked Holt if Science would investigate the 2015 study led by NOAA’s Tom Karl, Holt brought up the new E&E News interview, explaining, “There’s nothing in the Karl paper that, at our current analysis, suggests retraction.”

Smith stuck to his guns, saying, “Everything that I have read about what [Bates] has said about the Karl report suggests to me that NOAA cheated and got caught, and they did falsify data to exaggerate global warming.”

Remember the EPA?

Two themes related to the EPA dominated much of the rest of the hearing. The first was the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, an independent body meant to review the science underlying agency regulations; the second was the way the agency assesses the health risks of chemicals in order to set pollution standards.

The other witnesses at the hearing included a representative of the American Chemical Council (an industry trade group) and a pair of former federal agency staffers testifying as experts on regulatory process.

Echoing comments made during EPA Administrator appointee Scott Pruitt’s confirmation hearing, there were many complaints that the EPA’s Science Advisory Board lacks “balance.” The board is intended to be composed of relevant experts, but critics argue that it hasn’t been critical enough—accusations aired at the hearing included that the board has been “stacked” and is “an echo chamber.” Remedies suggested at the hearing included adding more board members from industry, as well as from state and local governments. It was also suggested that anyone receiving EPA funding for research be disqualified from serving on the grounds that this constitutes a conflict of interest.

When asked his opinion, Rush Holt responded, “That is a science advisory board—it will not function better by having fewer scientists on it. It is supposed to look at science. But in the name of balance and diversity, there’s an effort to make it, well… less scientific.”

Witnesses and committee members also said the EPA’s process of assessing health risks from chemicals frequently exaggerates those risks, and that cost-benefit analyses of regulations exaggerated the benefits of reducing pollutants.

This all comes back to building support for a bill Rep. Smith has proposed, dubbed the “Secret Science Reform Act.” It would restrict the scientific evidence the EPA would be allowed to consider by requiring the agency to make all the underlying data publicly available. It would also be limited to studies that can be directly replicated.

Opponents of the bill point out that this would prevent the EPA from using any research based on personal medical information, which cannot be released publicly. The replication requirement could also rule out broad swaths of research—how do you replicate a long-term epidemiological study of a cohort of people or a study of the impacts of a one-time event? The requirement treats all research as laboratory experiments that can simply be re-run.

“The Secret Science Act, as it has previously been introduced,” Rush Holt testified, “has been based on a misunderstanding of how science works. The gold standard is to find other approaches to come up with the same conclusions. Rarely can you repeat an experiment in exactly the same way.”

Some committee members are focused on less abstract concerns, however. Congressman Gary Palmer (R-Ala.), for example, used his turn at the microphone to question the link between asthma and air pollution. “I really do think, where we’re trying to go with this committee, to be able to validate the science, to get the politics out of it, is the place we need to be,” he concluded.