House Bill Seeks to Tear Down Curtain of Secrecy at EPA

11/19/2014

“By refusing to disclose the scientific data used to justify some of the most expensive and economically impactful rules in US history, the EPA is not only entitling themselves to their own facts, but also their own definition of ‘fact’ itself… If Americans are to be subject to the burden of EPA regulations, then the EPA ought to be equally subject to the burden of truth.” –Patrick Hedger, Policy Director –American Encore

Today the House of Representatives passed HR 4012, the Secret Science Reform Act of 2014. The bill, introduced by Congressman David Schweikert (R-AZ), prevents the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from enacting a new regulation without first disclosing all pertinent scientific and technical information on which the EPA is justifying their actions. The objective is to make the scientific studies behind onerous EPA regulations available for independent analysis and scrutiny.

The necessity of this legislation stems from the fact that the scientific data that the EPA has used to justify the costs of nearly all of their increasingly stringent and expensive Clean Air Act regulations over the past decade-plus have been kept tightly under wraps. Without access to this information, independent analysis and reproduction of the data in experimental settings outside of the EPA’s purview is completely impossible.

The specific data the EPA is refusing to disclose relates to the health effects of emitted particulate matter from combustion reactions (such as in vehicles and power plants). The EPA has used this data to justify imposing regulations like the recent Clean Power Plan (CPP) regulation on the emission of carbon, which is notably not a particulate matter pollutant. The CPP, like so many other recent EPA regulations, is estimated to cost the US economy several hundred billion dollars over the next several years.

American Encore Policy Director Patrick Hedger has offered the following thoughts on both the matter of the EPA’s secrecy and Congressman Schweikert’s Secret Science Reform Act:

“One of the first lessons in the course of even an elementary science education is that experimental processes and results should be documented in detail so that they can be reproduced by others. Scientific theory doesn’t become fact until the results of a hypothesis test are replicated repeatedly in identical and independent experiments. Thus, either the folks that run the EPA missed the first day of every science class they’ve every taken or they’re hiding something.

By refusing to disclose the scientific data used to justify some of the most expensive and economically impactful rules in US history, the EPA is not only entitling themselves to their own facts, but also to their own definition of ‘fact’ itself.

Here’s one thing that the EPA cannot hide: Over the past several years, by nearly every account, the environment is getting cleaner; yet for some reason the EPA has been getting larger, more powerful, and more expensive. Shouldn’t this relationship be just the opposite?

What’s clear despite the EPA’s obfuscation is that we have an agency that is becoming more and more unnecessary as each day goes by. Yet, through the use of their voodoo data, the bureaucrats at the EPA have found a way to regulate themselves into relevance.

Congressman Schweikert’s Secret Science Reform Act is a fair and pragmatic way to keep one of the most powerful federal agencies honest and put the brakes on future job-killing regulations that are, beyond a doubt, unnecessary. If Americans are to be subject to the burden of EPA regulations, then the EPA ought to be equally subject to the burden of truth.”