High stakes at the EPA

When Trump put his hand on the Bible to take the oath of office on 20 January 2017, many EPA scientists kept their heads down. They wondered who might be fired first, and they warned each other to censor their e-mails, for fear that the new administration would monitor communications for any comments criticizing it.

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Since assuming power, this administration has launched more assaults on the EPA than on any other science agency. The president has sought to slash its budget by nearly one-third, and Pruitt’s team has tried to weaken the part that science plays in setting environmental regulations. He barred some top researchers from participating in EPA advisory panels, and replaced them with scientists who are more friendly to industry. All of this has elevated the power of corporations to influence the rules that govern chemicals and pollutants.

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What most troubles many EPA scientists is the Trump administration’s systematic and unprecedented effort to undermine the way in which science is used by the agency. Scientists there say they and their work have been largely ignored by senior EPA leadership. And despite Pruitt’s resignation, few expect the administration’s overarching EPA strategy to change once Trump appoints a new administrator. For now, the leadership reins fall to Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist. In a pair of tweets announcing Pruitt’s resignation, Trump said that Wheeler would “continue on with our great and lasting EPA agenda”.

Many researchers say that this strategy could subvert the scientific process altogether and put tens of thousands of lives at risk each year, as a result of weakened regulations on pollutants and potentially hazardous chemicals.

The turmoil has affected everyone. Most have kept their heads down, hoping that science will somehow prevail.

  Nature

Hope was Obama's slogan. Abandon hope is Trump's.

Many have censored their own language, shunning words such as ‘climate’ or ‘global warming’ to avoid attention. Some have delayed retirement to keep the agency functioning. Others have quit.

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[Dan] Costa has watched the situation deteriorate. As he tried to carry on his own work, his mood grew darker and more philosophical. Eventually, he realized he had to leave. “They are acting with such impunity, and with no accountability,” he says of the administration. “It’s just unfortunate, and scary.”

And dangerous for the entire world.

A toxicologist by training, [Costa] joined the EPA in 1985 under president Ronald Reagan, looking at the physiological effects of pollutants. He arrived shortly after the tenure of Anne Gorsuch, a staunchly conservative administrator — much like Pruitt — who had slashed budgets and weakened environmental protections during her time heading the EPA from 1981 to 1983. Yet Costa watched the agency slowly bounce back.

And then Trump came along.

The Trump administration soon made its intentions clear. On 16 March 2017, it released a proposal to slash the EPA’s US$8.2-billion budget by 31% and eliminate some 3,200 of the agency’s 15,000 positions.

Among the hardest hit in the budget proposal was the division where Costa and some 1,100 other scientists worked: the Office of Research and Development (ORD). As the main science arm of the agency, the ORD has helped to lay the technical foundation for modern environmental regulation in the United States. The Trump administration had proposed nearly halving its budget, from $483 million to $250 million, which left scientists there stunned.

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Ignoring the administration’s calls for sharp cuts to EPA, on 30 April the Republican-controlled Congress approved a relatively mild reduction of 1% for the remainder of the 2017 fiscal year. It felt like a triumph for many scientists, but Costa was already beginning to change his tone.

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He knew of managers who had told younger scientists to take the word ‘climate’ out of document headlines. “That sends all sorts of ripples through the organization,” he said in May 2017.

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Costa described the proposed shift in scientific focus as a positive change that would define a useful agenda for his programme without limiting the science that it could pursue, in part because climate change, air quality and public health are all interrelated.

“I don’t want to sit back and wait” for any restrictions to be imposed by political leaders at the agency, Costa said. “I want to occupy the space before they do, because they are essentially clueless.”

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On 28 March, Trump authorized Pruitt to repeal landmark regulations intended to curb greenhouse-gas emissions from existing power plants. The next day, Pruitt declined to ban a powerful pesticide called chlorpyrifos, overruling agency scientists who had previously determined that the chemical had negative impacts on brain development in children.

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Pruitt and his senior political appointees — often dubbed the “politicals” — rarely consult[ed] with career scientists. In many cases, scientists were left dumbfounded, in part because the complete lack of consultation with agency experts could end up hurting Pruitt’s own agenda. By bypassing EPA scientists and ignoring their findings, his team ran the risk of weakening the EPA’s defence in the many lawsuits that states and environmental groups were filing against the agency.

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Although they carry on with their work, many scientists feel as if their efforts don’t matter to the top of the agency.

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“They just do what they want, and then they inform us,” says the senior researcher.

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As a result [of changes made in late 2017], 18 of the 44 members of the science advisory board are now Pruitt appointees.

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Perhaps most significantly, Pruitt selected Michael Honeycutt to chair the SAB. Honeycutt is a toxicologist with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality in Austin, Texas, who has long opposed stricter air-quality standards. (Honeycutt told Nature that he hopes he will be judged on the basis of the job he does as the chair of the board.) And Pruitt appointed Tony Cox, an industry-friendly consultant who has challenged scientific studies linking air pollution and human mortality, to lead the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee (CASAC). By statute, that group must review the science before the agency updates its core air-quality standards.

They seem to be worried about the board, which they should be. However, I had to do some research on the EPA for a college paper back in the mid-90s, and at that time, I found that the board was made up almost entirely of corporate leaders. It could be that changed in the interim, but I don't think this is really all that different from anything presidents in the US have been doing since at least Reagan's term. Look at the insurance people Obama consulted when designing the health care act. And the bankers when creating the financial bailout after the 2008 crash. This is corporate America. It's the way we do business. Trump may be more open about it, and sometimes more extreme, but it's been going on for a very long time.

On 24 April, Pruitt announced a proposal that would prevent the EPA from using any research in its regulatory decisions unless the underlying data and methods are publicly available. He did so in the name of transparency, but scientists and other experts immediately fought back.

The problem, they said, is that privacy restrictions — such as ones governing medical records — often limit the data that can be released from epidemiological studies, to protect patients’ identities. Pruitt’s proposal could therefore eliminate much of the core epidemiological research that the EPA has used to help justify air-quality regulations. It was, in their view, just another effort to prevent the agency from developing meaningful health and environmental regulations.

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When the news broke, Costa was so incensed that he reached out to Nature from retirement. “Keep your eyes on this: it’s an IED [improvised explosive device] designed and set to destroy the agency’s ability to do its job,” Costa wrote in a text message. Pruitt, he continued, “is a slick bastard”.

Not too slick. Jesus, he went hog wild doing bizarre things that only benefited him personally. So much so that he finally had to be pushed out.

And after a few recent conversations with former staff members, Costa seems newly encouraged that they will keep the embers burning until the political winds shift again and sweep away Trump’s team. “In some senses, I think of it like the locusts,” he says. “They come, they wipe out the crops and then they leave.”

And you lose your farm because you have no crops to sell. Even a research scientist should know that.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.