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Pruitt installs dozens of new EPA advisers

66 new experts hold more conservative views than old guard

By Juliet Eilperin, The Washington Post
Published: November 4, 2017, 9:10pm

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt appointed more than five dozen new scientific advisers to the agency Friday, a move that is likely to shift the EPA’s research objectives as well as the recommendations that form the basis for key regulations over the next few years.

Pruitt has placed 66 new experts on three different EPA scientific committees, many of whom hail from industry or state government, and espouse more conservative views than their predecessors. Two of the new chairs — Texas’ top toxicologist Michael Honeycutt, who will helm the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), and consultant Louis Anthony “Tony” Cox, who will chair the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) — have harshly criticized the way the EPA has conducted science in the past.

Honeycutt has accused the EPA of “overstating” the risks associated with mercury, a neurotoxin, and of disregarding “good science which demonstrates a chemical is not as toxic as it thinks it is.” Cox wrote that the EPA’s methods for calculating the public health benefits of stricter national smog standards are “unreliable, logically unsound, and inappropriate for drawing causal inferences.”

Under a new policy Pruitt instituted this week, scientists receiving EPA funding cannot serve as the agency’s advisers. Seven advisers stepped down rather than relinquish their grants, agency officials said, while two opted to forego the federal money in order to continue serving.

Clark University economics professor Robert Johnson, who had one year left to serve on the Scientific Advisory Board, said in a phone interview he did not want to give up his portion of a nearly $800,000 grant he and his colleagues share with researchers at Virginia Tech and the University of New Hampshire. The project, which has been underway for more than two years, seeks to evaluate how water quality is understood and valued by the public through a case study of river quality in New England.

“The research is too important,” Johnson said, adding that he is concerned that the litmus test now in place will bar some qualified scientists from helping advise the EPA. “Until recently people serving on the board were the top scientists in their field, and often these are often the people who were funded by federal agencies. So by systematically excluding those scientists, you have effectively knocked out the top scientists, most of them, in many fields.”

Johnson added that these panels are different from policymaking bodies, where a diversity of policy perspectives is critical.

“It’s supposed to be guiding on the science. Not providing policy advice, not offering our own opinions,” he said. “If the board becomes about something else, about people’s particular opinions about how they think policy should be made, that would really change what the board is about.”

Pruitt said the appointments to the Scientific Advisory Board and its clean air panel, along with the even-larger Board of Scientific Counselors (BOSC), would bring new perspectives to the agency. He told reporters Tuesday that he was seeking to diversify the groups’ geographic representation, to include more experts from the Midwest and West.

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