US rule would strip science from environmental policies and increase premature deaths, warn scientists

Decades of landmark public health studies on matters such as air pollution and water quality could be eliminated from consideration in future decision from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), health experts have warned.

Scientists told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that the Trump administration is demanding access to the underlying data behind health studies used in decision making, including confidential patient information. They appeared before a Congressional hearing on a rule change—which has been billed as a means of improving transparency—proposed by the Trump appointed EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler.

Since allowing access to such data would breach confidentiality agreements between researchers and study participants, many studies would be excluded from consideration when drawing up new rules on problems like lead contamination or vehicle emissions, said the scientists. Included among these would be many landmark studies underpinning knowledge of the harms these pollutants cause.

“It will practically lead to the elimination of science from decision making,” Linda Birnbaum, who retired last month as director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, told the hearing, titled “Strengthening Transparency or Silencing Science?”

The proposed rule change, long sought by the coal industry and its political backers, was initially floated by Trump’s first EPA administrator Scott Pruitt last year.1 Pruitt later resigned under an ethics cloud, and since then the agency has received over 600 000 mostly negative comments on the proposed change, many from scientists and physicians.

Pruitt’s successor, Wheeler, suggested last year that the proposal was on hold while these concerns were weighed, but this week he sent a new draft of the proposal to the White House for approval, which goes further than the plan he inherited.2

For example, the 2018 proposal was limited to dose response studies of toxicity in animals or humans, but the new draft covers almost any study of health effects that might be considered by the EPA.

The new draft also allows the agency to retroactively rule out studies. After Pruitt’s proposal ignited a storm of protest from scientists last year, Wheeler suggested that decades old foundational studies— such as those showing the link between lead in paint and childhood developmental delay—might be exempted from the new data demands. But that is not to be the case, the new draft shows.

Among the studies that could be eliminated under the new rule is the 1993 Harvard Six Cities study, in which 22 000 participants gave their health and occupational histories under a confidentiality agreement, then allowed their homes to be monitored for air quality.

That study is the basis of knowledge about the link between coal burning pollution and premature death, and has long been targeted by the coal industry. Wheeler was a professional lobbyist for the coal industry until Trump appointed him EPA director.

Steven J Milloy, who was a member of Trump’s EPA transition team and who now runs a website denying climate change or any risk to health from particulate pollution, told the New York Times that targeting the Six Cities study, and a 1995 American Cancer Society analysis that made similar findings, was the “original goal” of the rule change.

Paul Billings, a vice president at the American Lung Association, told the New York Times that the rule change “means the EPA can justify rolling back rules or failing to update rules based on the best information to protect public health and the environment, which means more dirty air and more premature deaths.”

If the new rule is approved by the White House—a near certainty—then a public comment period will open, and the administration will look to implement it in 2020.

At the congressional hearing, science and medical associations lined up against the rule change while industry groups supported it. The proposal “contradicts our core values,” said a statement from the Medical Library Association and the Association of Academic Health Science Libraries.

“Transparency, reproducibility, and application of current scientific knowledge are paramount to providing the foundation required for sound regulations,” said a statement from the American Chemistry Council, which is the principal industry group of the US chemical industry, whose members include companies such as Dow, DuPont, and Eli Lilly.

But the senior Republican member on the committee seemed unconvinced by the claimed rationale behind the change. “This is about attacking the EPA under the current administration, not about improving transparency and scientific integrity,” said Frank Lucas of Oklahoma.