EPA wants scientists to share their data: Will it promote government transparency or threaten public health?

epa
Image: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post, via Getty Images

“The Trump administration is preparing to significantly limit the scientific and medical research that the government can use to determine public health regulations, overriding protests from scientists and physicians who say the new rule would undermine the scientific underpinnings of government policymaking,” The New York Times reported [Nov. 12]. The article, based on a leaked preliminary draft supplemental notice of proposed rule-making, provoked a spate of denunciations.

The …. regulation is aimed at “ensur[ing] data and models underlying science that is pivotal to EPA’s significant regulatory decisions are publicly available in a manner sufficient for independent validation and analysis.”

House of Representatives Science, Space, and Technology Committee Chairwoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (D–Texas) declared, “The requirement for data to be publicly available is nothing more than an attempt to undercut EPA’s mandate to use the best available science ….”

“We are increasingly aware that researchers are not immune from selecting certain results which appear to support their hypothesis, and this may be especially true when the research has important policy implications,” notes Albert Einstein College of Medicine epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat in an email. “…. [T]he data from studies that are the basis for formulating regulations should be available to the research community for independent re-analysis ….”

Read full, original article: Is Trump’s EPA Seeking To Gut Good Science?

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