Following is a letter by Steve Milloy to Biden EPA administrator Michael Regan about his stacking of the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee panel with EPA grant-recipient cronies.

June 29, 2021

Dear Administrator Regan,

I am writing to request that you reconsider your choices for the members of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC).

The law requires that CASAC be constituted as a fair and balanced independent panel. The CASAC you selected is not.

Five of the seven new CASAC members are current and/or past research grant recipients, which creates the appearance and potential for conflict of interest. For example:

  • New CASAC chairman Lianne Sheppard is associated with $65 million in EPA research grants.
  • New CASAC member Michelle Bell is associated with $29 million in EPA research grants.
  • New CASAC member Mark Frampton is associated with $36 million in EPA research grants.

In addition to these glaring conflicts:

  • New CASAC chairman Sheppard participated in a lawsuit against the previous EPA when she lost her CASAC appointment due to adoption of conflict-of-interest rules.
  • New CASAC member Frampton participated in now-halted EPA-funded human experimentation that was unethical, if not illegal.

Although well-qualified individuals with different and balanced views of air quality science were nominated, including past chairman Tony Cox, none were selected for the CASAC panel.

All the facts were made known to EPA via public comment. But they were disregarded without explanation.

You have announced your intention to rollback and overturn Trump EPA air quality decisions. So your deliberate stacking of CASAC with EPA cronies needs no explanation.

Whatever regulatory actions EPA takes involving this particular CASAC could very well tainted by stacking for the purpose of rubberstamping pre-determined EPA policy.

The stacking of CASAC is not only contrary to law, bad policy and bad optics, it could very well make regulatory decisions vulnerable to legal challenge.

I urge you to reconsider the membership of CASAC immediately and before any irreparable damage to the regulatory process is done.

If you need more information, please contact me.

Sincerely,

/s/

Steve Milloy

Publisher, JunkScience.com