Industry experts to serve on EPA board
Advisory group to be void of scientists who receive agency funding
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is poised to make wholesale changes to the agency’s key advisory group, jettisoning scientists who have received grants from the EPA and replacing them with industry experts and state government officials.
The move represents a fundamental shift, one that could change the scientific and technical advice that historically has guided the EPA as the agency crafts environmental regulations. The decision to bar any researcher who receives EPA grant money from serving as an adviser to the agency appears to be unprecedented.
A list of expected appointees for the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, obtained by The Washington Post from multiple individuals familiar with the appointments, include several categories of experts — voices from regulated industry, academics and environmental regulators from conservative states and researchers who have a history of critiquing the science and economics underpinning tighter environmental regulations.
They would replace a number of scientists who currently receive grants from the agency, or whose terms are not being renewed.
Terry Yosie, who served as director of the advisory board during the Reagan administration, said the changes “represent a major purge of independent scientists and a decision to sideline the SAB from major EPA decisionmaking in the future.”
Pruitt suggested in a speech this month at the Heritage Foundation that he planned to rid the agency’s scientific advisory boards of researchers who receive EPA grants. He argued that the current structure raises questions about their independence, though he did not voice similar objections to industryfunded scientists.
“What’s most important at the agency is to have scientific advisers that are objective, independent-minded, providing transparent recommendations,” Pruitt said at the time. “If we have individuals who are on those boards, sometimes receiving money from the agency … that to me causes questions on the independence and the veracity and the transparency of those recommendations that are coming our way.”
Among the likely appointees are sharp proponents of deregulation, who have argued both in academic circles and while serving in government that federal regulators need to raise the bar before imposing new burdens on the private sector.
John Graham, who now serves as dean of the University of Indiana’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, launched a major deregulatory push while head of the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under George W. Bush.
He repeatedly informed agencies that they had not sufficiently justified the rules they wanted to enact, and established a petition process under the Data Quality act that allowed petitioners to ask agencies to withdraw information that did not meet OMB standards for “quality, objectivity, utility and integrity.”
In an interview with The Post in 2004, Graham said regulations are “a form of unfunded mandate that the federal government imposes on the private sector or on state or local governments.”
At least three of the new appointees have a background working for large corporations whose activities are or could potentially be regulated by the EPA, including the French oil giant Total, Phillips 66 and the large utility the Southern Co.
One of the members, Larry Monroe, was previously chief environmental officer at the Southern Co., one of the U.S.’s largest utilities, with millions of customers in the U.S. Southeast.
In addition, the group of new appointees include those who have, like Pruitt, battled the EPA in the past.
The move to prohibit anyone receiving EPA grant money from serving on the board has prompted questions and criticism from independent researchers, as well as some of the agency’s current advisers, who noted that they follow strict ethics procedures to avoid such conflicts of interest.