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Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has chosen to replace half of the members on one of its key scientific review boards, the first step in a broader effort by Republicans to change the way the agency evaluates the scientific basis for its regulations.
The move could significantly change the makeup of the 18-member Board of Scientific Counselors, which advises EPA's key scientific arm on whether the research it does has sufficient rigor and integrity. All of the members being dismissed were at the end of serving at least one three-year term, although these terms are often renewed instead of terminated.
EPA spokesman J.P. Freire said in an email that "no one has been fired or terminated," and that Pruitt had simply decided to bring in fresh advisers. The agency informed the outside academics on Friday that their terms would not be renewed.
[...] These moves came as a surprise to the agencies' outside advisers, with several of them taking to Twitter to announce their suspensions.
Members of EPA's Board of Scientific Counselors had been informed twice — in January, before Barack Obama left office, and then more recently by EPA career staff members — that they would be kept on for another term, adding to their confusion.
We cannot allow Beijing's air quality to beat ours.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday May 09 2017, @03:34PM
Should we be forcing them to do research for free?
I think the actual proposal by the Republicans is that anyone who is on these boards should be banned from accepting federal grants not only for the duration of their service on the board but for 3 years afterward.
And since the federal government is one of the few places with the kind of resources and interest necessary to fund research on stuff like climate change (which isn't really lucrative research), that effectively means that any academic agreeing to be on this board will likely have to stop their research for at least 6 years. Given that most high-profile academic scientists depend on ongoing lab funding etc. (which funds lab facilities, graduate students, etc., and which isn't easy to arbitrarily abandon for several years), as well as obviously depending on publishing research to fund their careers, that would effectively mean that the best experts would likely not be able to serve on these boards. Obviously, that's the Republican plan.
Where did this theory come from that grants somehow create some motivation to produce false results?
To be fair, there IS a potential conflict of interest here. On the other hand, the Republican proposal to replace such researchers with industry supporters who actually come from the businesses being regulated is a much BIGGER conflict of interest.
Also, this isn't frequently mentioned by Republicans -- but it's important to note that members of these boards are forced to recuse themselves in evaluation of their own research, so the direct conflict of interest Republicans claim is there actually isn't.