Since the day he moved into the White House, Donald Trump has done everything possible to reduce the effectiveness of the EPA. That not only included turning the whole agency over to lobbyists, and removing regulations, but dismissing scientists by the score. However, there is still a Scientific Advisory Board which was established along with the agency in 1978. That board is now dominated by members, several of them non-scientists, who were appointed to their positions by Trump. Last week that board posted a set of draft reports about how EPA’s recent actions align with scientific data.
Spoiler alert: They don’t.
What the drafts show is that the actions taken the Trump EPA—and in particular the reclassification of waterways that rolls back the “Waters of the United States” definition made under Barack Obama—don’t just weaken regulations in a way that represents a threat to the public and environment. Perhaps even more importantly, the board loaded with Trump appointees repeatedly made it clear that the regulations weren’t just bad, but they were directly counter to the best scientific information.
<snip>
With the lack of internal review and the deliberate exclusion of studies on how pollution affects human health, the agency is set up to “undercut the integrity of environmental laws” and to introduce “systematic bias” in favor of polluters.