EPA Replaced Its Top Science Advisers Without Telling Them
The Environmental Protection Agency dismissed its top science counselors without telling them in advance, two of them told HuffPost on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced a new rule barring scientists who receive EPA research funding from serving on the agency’s three main advisory panels: the Science Advisory Board, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) and the Board of Scientific Counselors. The move cleared the way for Pruitt to name industry-backed researchers to take control of the boards, which are meant to serve as a check on policies at the agency.
The head of the Science Advisory Board, Peter Thorne, and the head of the Board of Scientific Counselors, Deborah Swackhamer, said they learned from news reporters that they had been replaced.
“This is really a destruction of the scientific integrity at EPA,” said Thorne, a University of Iowa professor of occupational and environmental health who has served as the head of the Science Advisory Board since 2015. “It’s disheartening to see.”
Thorne is is still listed as the Science Advisory Board chair on the EPA’s website, and said he had not heard anything about changes to the board until a reporter called after Pruitt’s press conference on Tuesday afternoon. Thorne said he had hoped to serve another two years as chair, even as other members of the advisory board have been fired or have quit to protest Pruitt’s antagonistic approach to scientists, but now his term is over.
Ana Diez Roux, the head of CASAC, was also dismissed as chair. She did not return an email and call from HuffPost.
“Administrator Pruitt issued a directive yesterday to ensure independence, geographic diversity and integrity in EPA science committees,” an EPA spokesman said in a statement to HuffPost. “Membership on these three boards consists of qualified scientists who will help strengthen public confidence in EPA science.”
Pruitt announced on Tuesday that he was replacing Thorne with Michael Honeycutt, the head of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s toxicology division, to serve as the head of the Science Advisory Board.
Honeycutt, accused in 2010 by the Texas Observer of “abusing science” and serving as a “crony” to then-Gov. Rick Perry (R), leaned heavily on research funded by the chemical, fossil fuel and tobacco industries. He once suggested the health risks linked to smog were overstated, said that ozone standards made “no biological sense” because “most people are indoors for 90 percent of the time,” and blasted the EPA for relying on epidemiological studies that he considered “not scientifically rigorous.”
Pruitt said the new rules would ensure “there’s integrity in the process and that the scientists that are advising us are doing so without any kind of appearance of conflict.”
Thorne dismissed those remarks as doublespeak, saying he did not get funding from the EPA for any research, but that the boards had rigorous procedures in place to recuse scientists from advising on subjects they had received grants to study.
“That’s the intent of it, to erode the tried-and-true practice of using rigorous peer-reviewed science to formulate policy and instead bring into the fold those who seek to profit from rewriting the rules on environmental protection,” Thorne said.
Swackhamer, who has been head of the Board of Scientific Counselors since 2015, was awaiting a flight home to the U.S. at an airport in Zagreb, Croatia, when she received an email from a friend with a link to a news report on the EPA’s press conference. The professor emerita of environmental health sciences at the University of Minnesota said she is retired, and does not receive any grant money from the EPA.
“I verified it with EPA today,” she wrote in an email to HuffPost. “I have not been told why I was removed as chair.”
Pruitt named Paul Gilman as Swackhamer’s replacement as chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors. Gilman, who served as an assistant administrator to the EPA from 2002 to 2004, currently works as the chief sustainability officer at the waste management and incinerator company Covanta. His advocacy for using burning trash as a source of fuel raises questions about his role at the EPA, particularly after the incinerator industry attempted to sabotage the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ effort to push for 100 percent renewable energy in June.
Unlike Thorne, Swackhamer has time left in her term on the board, and she told E&E News she intended to continue on as an adviser ― something the EPA said it “fully expects.” Swackhamer said at least one person on her board may be affected by the new rule, but declined to give that person’s name until she confirmed the researcher had been notified.
Swackhamer went public five months ago with accusations that Pruitt’s chief of staff pressured her to alter her congressional testimony to play down the EPA’s dismissal of scientific advisers.
“I was stunned that he was pushing me to ‘correct’ something in my testimony,” Swackhamer told The New York Times in June. “I was factual, and he was not. I felt bullied.”
The unceremonious and hotly-politicized dismissals of top officials has become a hallmark of the Trump administration. When President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May, Comey found out from TV news reports while speaking to employees in Los Angeles. The Department of Justice fired Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, after Trump suddenly demanded his resignation months after asking him to stay on. Earlier this year, the EPA axed 38 science advisers in what many described at the time as a purge.
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He has threatened to undermine protections for air and water.
Since taking office as Oklahoma’s attorney general in 2011, Pruitt has sued the Environmental Protection Agency on multiple occasions in an effort to overturn rules limiting air pollution from power plants -- including the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, which curbs power plant emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, and the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which place limits on the amount of mercury, arsenic and other toxic pollution.
As Elliott Negin, a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, explained in January, those are both life-saving regulations: “Taken together, they are projected to prevent 18,000 to 46,000 premature deaths across the country and save $150 billion to $380 billion in health care costs annually. In Pruitt’s home state, the two regulations would avert as many as 720 premature deaths and save as much as $5.9 billion per year.”
Pruitt sued the EPA in 2015 over the Waters of the United States rule -- which, in a piece co-written with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), he called the “greatest blow to private property rights the modern era has seen.” The rule, which is currently tied up in the courts, extends EPA protection to tens of millions of acres of wetlands and millions of miles of streams, including those that 1 in 3 Americans rely on for drinking water.
Pruitt also sued the EPA over its 2015 regulation strengthening the national health standards for ground-level ozone or smog pollution.
Several of these lawsuits are still ongoing, and environmental advocates have called on Pruitt to recuse himself from decisions related to the regulations he’s challenged in court. Legal experts told Bloomberg, however, that they knew of no rules in place that would compel such an action on Pruitt’s part.
“Every American should be appalled that President-elect Trump just picked someone who has made a career of being a vocal defender for polluters to head our Environmental Protection Agency,” Trip Van Noppen, president of Earthjustice, said in a December 2016 statement. “He has fought Environmental Protection Agency pollution limits on toxic substances like soot and mercury that put us all at risk for increased cancer, childhood asthma and other health problems. He falsely claims that fracking doesn’t contaminate drinking water supplies.”
He doesn’t think the EPA is the “nation’s foremost environmental regulator.”
“The states,” he said, “were to have regulatory primacy.”
As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt created a “federalism unit” with the specific aim of opposing federal protections and safeguards, including the Affordable Care Act and environmental regulations.
Under Pruitt, the EPA will likely witness “an increasing effort to delegate environmental regulations away from the federal government and towards the states,” Ronald Keith Gaddie, a professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma, told The New York Times.
Though states may be best equipped to regulate certain industries, some experts have stressed that environmental protection is one area that needs more federal oversight.
“Pollution doesn’t respect state boundaries,” Patrick A. Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law School, told the Times. “States have limited ability to regulate pollution from outside the state, and almost every state is downstream or downwind from other pollution.”
He doesn’t believe in climate change.
“Climate change is happening,” the agency said on its website, adding that the EPA is “taking a number of common-sense steps to address the challenge” of warming, such as developing emissions reduction initiatives and contributing to “world-class climate research.”
Pruitt, like most of Trump’s Cabinet picks, is a climate change denier. Ignoring the overwhelming scientific consensus on the matter, Pruitt wrote last year that the debate on climate change is “far from settled.”
Gina McCarthy, the previous EPA chief, warned in November that denying the facts about climate change would undermine the United States' success both domestically and internationally. Other countries “are wondering if the U.S. will turn its back on science and be left behind,” she said.
“The train to a global clean-energy future has already left the station,” McCarthy added. “We can choose to get on board — to lead — or we can choose to be left behind, to stand stubbornly still. If we stubbornly deny the science and change around us, we will fall victim to our own paralysis.”
He’s a close ally of the fossil fuel industry ...
![… and their relationship has observers deeply concerned.<br /><br />Since 2002, Pruitt has received <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/08/scott-pruitt-trump-administration-epa-oil-gas-environment" target="_blank">more than $300,000</a> in contributions from the fossil fuel industry, including from political action committees connected to Exxon Mobil, Spectra Energy and Koch Industries. The New York Times reported in 2014 that he and other Republican attorneys general had formed an “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/us/politics/energy-firms-in-secretive-alliance-with-attorneys-general.html" target="_blank">unprecedented, secretive alliance</a>” with major oil and gas companies to undermine environmental regulations. One of the firms, Oklahoma’s Devon Energy,<strong> </strong>drafted a letter for Pruitt to send to the EPA in 2011. Pruitt <a href="http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/green-life/meet-scott-pruitt-man-picked-lead-epa" target="_blank">printed the document on state letterhead</a> and sent it off, almost verbatim, to Washington.<br /><br />As attorney general, Pruitt also filed several lawsuits with industry players, including Oklahoma Gas and Electric and the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, a nonprofit group backed by major oil and gas executives. In May 2016, Pruitt joined then-Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange in writing an opinion piece defending Exxon Mobil and other energy groups, after the oil giant <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-30/oklahoma-alabama-support-exxon-mobil-in-ny-led-climate-probe" target="_blank">came under scrutiny</a> for allegedly failing to disclose its internal research on climate change.<br /><br />The Times asked Pruitt in 2014 whether he’d been wrong to send letters to the federal government written by industry lobbyists, or to side with them in litigation. Pruitt was unapologetic. <br /><br />“The A.G.’s office seeks input from the energy industry to determine real-life harm stemming from proposed federal regulations or actions,” his office said in a statement. “It is the content of the request not the source of the request that is relevant.”<br /><br />Opponents, however, say Pruitt is a <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/donald-trump-administration/2016/12/oklahoma-ag-pruitt-epa-chief-232319" target="_blank">Big Oil ally</a> — someone who, as EPA administrator, could <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/01/13/mapping-epa-nominee-scott-pruitt-many-fossil-fuel-ties" target="_blank">prioritize industry interests</a> over the health of the environment and the American people.<br /><br />“This is a frightening moment,” Harvard University professor Naomi Oreskes said at a rally <a href="https://eos.org/articles/fearful-of-trump-hundreds-in-san-francisco-rally-for-science">in December</a>, referring to Trump's Cabinet picks. “We have seen in the last few weeks how the reins of the federal government are being handed over to the fossil fuel industry.”<br /><br />“From denying settled climate science to leading the opposition of EPA’s Clean Power Plan, Pruitt has sent a loud and clear message to Big Oil and its well-funded mouthpieces that <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/01/climate-deniers-coming-next-epa-chief-rescue" target="_blank">he’s their guy</a>,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who is one of the senators calling for Pruitt to disclose more details on his connection to some oil-funded groups, according to Mother Jones. “To put a climate denier at the helm of an agency working to keep our environment safe is as dangerous as it gets.” <br /><br />Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, echoed similar concerns: “The American people must demand leaders who are willing to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels. I will <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/pruitt-epa-confirmation-fight-preview-400e8a68ffc2#.ca0qfw6f4" target="_blank">vigorously oppose this nomination</a>.”<br /><br />It’s not just Pruitt’s fossil fuel connections that have raised eyebrows. A recent <a href="http://www.ewg.org/research/ewg-investigates-scott-pruitt-and-poultry-pollution" target="_blank" data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":1,"plid":"http://www.ewg.org/research/ewg-investigates-scott-pruitt-and-poultry-pollution"}}">Environmental Working Group investigation</a> found that Pruitt gave a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/scott-pruitt-poultry-contributions-lawsuit_us_587960bae4b0e58057fee7bd">regulatory pass to polluters from the poultry industry</a> after receiving $40,000 in campaign donations from executives and lawyers representing poultry companies. <br /><br />“Very clearly, this is someone coming in [to lead the EPA] with an ideology to deregulate at whatever government level he finds himself,” Cook, the EWG head, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/scott-pruitt-poultry-contributions-lawsuit_us_587960bae4b0e58057fee7bd">told The Huffington Post</a>. “There’s no saying that ‘we just have a different philosophy’ about who should enforce environmental law. The philosophy, if it exists, is that environmental policy shouldn’t be enforced at a state or federal level. It is industry unrestrained.”](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/QHwf0rgUeS5o401raGlSXA--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MA--/https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/587dc4731700002e00fdf034.jpg)
Since 2002, Pruitt has received more than $300,000 in contributions from the fossil fuel industry, including from political action committees connected to Exxon Mobil, Spectra Energy and Koch Industries. The New York Times reported in 2014 that he and other Republican attorneys general had formed an “unprecedented, secretive alliance” with major oil and gas companies to undermine environmental regulations. One of the firms, Oklahoma’s Devon Energy, drafted a letter for Pruitt to send to the EPA in 2011. Pruitt printed the document on state letterhead and sent it off, almost verbatim, to Washington.
As attorney general, Pruitt also filed several lawsuits with industry players, including Oklahoma Gas and Electric and the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, a nonprofit group backed by major oil and gas executives. In May 2016, Pruitt joined then-Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange in writing an opinion piece defending Exxon Mobil and other energy groups, after the oil giant came under scrutiny for allegedly failing to disclose its internal research on climate change.
The Times asked Pruitt in 2014 whether he’d been wrong to send letters to the federal government written by industry lobbyists, or to side with them in litigation. Pruitt was unapologetic.
“The A.G.’s office seeks input from the energy industry to determine real-life harm stemming from proposed federal regulations or actions,” his office said in a statement. “It is the content of the request not the source of the request that is relevant.”
Opponents, however, say Pruitt is a Big Oil ally — someone who, as EPA administrator, could prioritize industry interests over the health of the environment and the American people.
“This is a frightening moment,” Harvard University professor Naomi Oreskes said at a rally in December, referring to Trump's Cabinet picks. “We have seen in the last few weeks how the reins of the federal government are being handed over to the fossil fuel industry.”
“From denying settled climate science to leading the opposition of EPA’s Clean Power Plan, Pruitt has sent a loud and clear message to Big Oil and its well-funded mouthpieces that he’s their guy,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who is one of the senators calling for Pruitt to disclose more details on his connection to some oil-funded groups, according to Mother Jones. “To put a climate denier at the helm of an agency working to keep our environment safe is as dangerous as it gets.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, echoed similar concerns: “The American people must demand leaders who are willing to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels. I will vigorously oppose this nomination.”
It’s not just Pruitt’s fossil fuel connections that have raised eyebrows. A recent Environmental Working Group investigation found that Pruitt gave a regulatory pass to polluters from the poultry industry after receiving $40,000 in campaign donations from executives and lawyers representing poultry companies.
“Very clearly, this is someone coming in [to lead the EPA] with an ideology to deregulate at whatever government level he finds himself,” Cook, the EWG head, told The Huffington Post. “There’s no saying that ‘we just have a different philosophy’ about who should enforce environmental law. The philosophy, if it exists, is that environmental policy shouldn’t be enforced at a state or federal level. It is industry unrestrained.”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
