Attempt to Neuter the EPA Under Guise of Scientific Transparency

We have until Thursday, Aug 16, to provide comments on a proposed EPA rule that is intended to neuter the EPA’s ability to regulate air pollution, water contaminants, and toxic chemicals. It’s a parting gift from recently-resigned-in-disgrace EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, whose aim in running the Environmental Protection Agency was essentially to stop protecting the environment. The rule is actually a bit of evil genius. It cloaks itself in lofty aims of scientific transparency, requiring the EPA to consider only scientific studies whose data sets are publicly available for replication. It sounds quite reasonable on the surface, until you realize that medical studies inevitably involve confidential medical information about actual people, and that making their data sets public would mean publishing the private medical info of all those people who participated in the study. That’s obviously a non-starter, and the effect would be that in trying to decide whether certain chemicals and pollutants are harmful to human health, the EPA would be prohibited from consulting any scientific studies involving humans. And if the EPA’s own rules keep it from looking at medical studies to see whether chemicals cause any harm, then they can’t make any regulations enforcing safety measures. This is the dream of those like Pruitt who believe that science itself is just a liberal conspiracy to thwart business growth by making pesky regulations against dumping toxic waste into our rivers and harmful particulates into our air. If you care about clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment, you will want to comment on this proposed rule.

If you want to read more about it, there’s a great article in The Atlantic here: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/scott-pruitts-secret-science-rule-could-still-become-law/565325/

You can read the actual proposed rule and comment on it here: https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OA-2018-0259-0001

Here is the comment that I submitted:

I am deeply concerned about the effect this proposed rule would have on the ability of the EPA to protect human health, as is its charter. As should be well known to the EPA, most large-scale medical studies inherently involve data sets bound up in patient privacy, with specific medical details such that anonymization or redaction of the data would be impossible without compromising either privacy or replicability. The upshot of this rule is that when evaluating policies on air pollution, water contaminants, and toxic chemicals, and their effect on human health, the EPA would be prohibited from consulting any scientific research on actual humans. Even though this rule is written to affect only prospective rulemaking, its effect should be studied by looking at how past rules might have come out differently had this rule been in effect. A good example is the 1993 Harvard “Six Cities” study that was pivotal in establishing EPA policies regulating particulate matter, but which is often cited as so-called “secret science”. This study, which is a model for responsible science, having established protocols to support replication without violating patient confidentiality, has been replicated both in independent reviews of its own data set, and in similar studies of other data sets. Yet, because it cannot make its data public without violating patient confidentiality, it would be excluded by this rule, and if the rule were given retrospective effect, we could well lose well-founded health protections against the harms of particulate matter. I submit that any rule that would exclude studies such as this one violates the EPA’s fundamental charter to protect human health, and must be revised. And it would not be sufficient to rely on discretionary exceptions to allow studies such as this. These type of studies are the norm, and not the exception, and must be accommodated by any EPA rule fundamentally and not just on an exceptional basis.