by Kenneth Artz
Heartland Institute

The Environmental Protection Agency repealed a proposed regulatory reform to limit the agency’s use of studies for which the underlying data is not available for “independent validation to craft major new regulations.

The U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) withdrew a regulatory reform it proposed in April 2018 to limit the agency’s ability to craft major new regulations with studies for which the underlying data is not available for “independent validation,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced at a September congressional hearing…

The science EPA used to develop many of its most costly air quality regulations could not be verified because its data was kept secret, despite being funded by taxpayers, says Steve Milloy, founder of JunkScience.com and a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute, which publishes Environment & Climate News.

“The underlying data from the scientific studies of air quality has been kept secret for 25 years, not only by EPA, but by researchers EPA paid to produce them, so it amounts to taxpayer-funded studies using secret data,” Milloy said. “Scott Pruitt proposed this rule in 2018 to keep the EPA from regulating based on secret science, and of course during the comment period opponents of the Trump EPA went nuts, making all sorts of false claims about the rule.

“This is very disappointing,” Milloy said. “The idea that next year EPA will issue a supplementary rule is simply dodging the issue for now, the coward’s way out, since Wheeler knows what the problem is and he knows how it needs to be fixed but he didn’t want to do it.”

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