Trump's Interference With Science Is Unprecedented

I do not know how this is allowed to happen!!-yes, I do. but...........



https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/experts-warn-trump-epa-meddling-scientific-method/575377/


Trump’s Interference With Science Is Unprecedented

Experts say that key EPA proposals would meddle with the research process and endanger decades of protective health rules.
Robinson Meyer

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Updated at 5:16 p.m. ET on November 9, 2018.

The Trump administration is breaking with 75 years of precedent by attempting to interfere in how science is practiced by the U.S. government, according to three experts who issued a dire warning to their profession in the journal Science on Thursday. The administration is empowering political staff to meddle with the scientific process by pushing through reforms disguised to look as though they boost transparency and integrity, the experts say.



“It is tempting to conclude that recent proposals for reforming regulatory science are similar to what has occurred in the past,” they write. “They are not.”

“People who are not scientists are telling us how scientific synthesis and analysis should be done,” says Wendy Wagner, a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the authors of the paper. “We’re not even getting scientists’ best work. We’re tying scientists’ hands behind their back and not even giving them a shot.”

“It’s a very dangerous place for science and public policy,” she told me. “Politics has gone to a place that should be off limits, and no one is noticing and calling them on that fact.”

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The experts are most critical of a so-called scientific-transparency rule first proposed by Scott Pruitt, the former administrator of the EPA. As I wrote in July, the rule would effectively bar the agency from using public-health research—or any other research that relies on private medical records—when issuing rules to limit water pollution, air pollution, or the use of toxic chemicals. Though Pruitt has resigned, the proposal remains on track to become official EPA policy.

The Pruitt proposal “applies retroactively,” Wagner told me, meaning it would force the EPA to revise—and possibly weaken—nearly every rule protecting human health from air, water, or chemical pollution issued in the agency’s 48-year history.........................................