[Editor’s note: Henry Miller is a physician and molecular biologist, and was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology.]
Scott Pruitt…has promised to end the pernicious practice known as “sue and settle” that occurs when a federal agency invites a lawsuit from an ideologically sympathetic activist group — sometimes one to which it has given grants — and then quickly settles on terms that both the agency and activists like.
Sue and settle is a strategy that circumvents both congressional intent and the rulemaking process. The EPA has used it repeatedly.
There’s another category of regulatory reform that needs attention — regulations in the works driven by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are not based on science.
A case in point is the EPA’s proposed ban of chlorpyrifos, a popular insecticide that farmers have been using for decades. An EPA ban would fly in the face of the judgments of more than 100 countries — including Canada, the U.K., Japan and Australia.
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So why is the EPA an outlier? …The Natural Resources Defense Council, Pesticide Action Network and other anti-pesticide groups have waged war on chlorpyrifos for 20 years. Finally, they persuaded the notoriously NGO-friendly, San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to order EPA to move forward on consideration of a ban.
The Trump administration should block this unwarranted ban and thereby send a message to all the entrenched regulators in Washington that the days of policies based on NGO-driven, bad science are over.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: NGO-driven EPA regulations based on bad science need reform
