Today, we are publishing a new report, entitled “Protecting Government Science from Political Interference: A Blueprint for Defending Scientific Integrity and Safeguarding the Public.” It provides a series of strong recommendations that the next presidential administration can and should adopt to strengthen the state of scientific integrity at federal agencies.

In the report, I also analyzed how scientific integrity policies are currently being implemented at agencies. Overall, the results suggest that there are some serious gaps in the protection of science at agencies. While the current administration has racked up some impressive wins in strengthening scientific integrity policies and procedures at federal agencies, this report provides evidence that many agencies are woefully ill-prepared to implement some of the most basic and fundamental aspects of these scientific integrity policies.

Violations of scientific integrity are an ongoing problem

Science is at the heart of how our government functions. Federal agencies use robust research every single day to protect the health and safety of millions of people. For instance, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) maps out the path of hurricanes and issues evacuation warnings for those living in the areas predicted to be hit; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) uses data from hospitals to monitor infectious diseases and will raise the alarm to stop the spread of dangerous pathogens; and even the Department of State (DOS) uses science to help inform foreign policies that help the United States remain competitive in a globalized world.

Since at least the 1950s, some political leaders from both Democratic and Republican administrations have chosen to politically interfere with science-based processes at federal agencies. Importantly, these violations of scientific integrity can have disproportionate effects on Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) communities, low-income communities, and other historically marginalized populations, resulting in even greater inequalities and inequities.

We’ve witnessed hundreds of examples of politics undermining government science in ways that are deeply distressing. For instance, political leaders have buried reports or edited out the scientific content on topics as varied as endangered species, mercury emissions from power plants, fuel efficiency, voter fraud, coal mining, the socioeconomic benefits of accepting refugees, tipping for waiters, PFAS chemicals, formaldehyde, sex trafficking in Indigenous communities, pesticide effects on endangered species, climate change, flooding risks in New York and New Jersey, COVID-19, Russian security threats in US elections, renewable energy, and fatal truck collisions with pedestrians and cyclists.

And this is just a truncated list. CSD’s attacks on science database has 326 examples across the last four presidential administrations.

Many agencies are failing to implement basic scientific integrity protections

In the full report, I tried to determine how easy it would be for a federal scientist who witnessed a possible attack on science in their agency to access information on scientific integrity. Would they be able to find the policy, connect with their scientific integrity official, or learn how investigations into potential violations occurred in the past? It may sound simple, but establishing a strong culture of defending science fundamentally depends on having these types of transparent practices.

I examined 38 federal agencies to examine how well they were doing on three simple metrics: 1) the publication of a recently updated scientific integrity policy, 2) the designation of a scientific integrity official, including a straightforward way to contact them, and 3) the annual reporting of the number of and outcomes of investigations into potential scientific integrity violations. All agencies are required to carry out these actions in a public and timely manner, as stipulated under President Biden’s 2021 memorandum and the White House’s 2023 framework on scientific integrity.

These 38 federal agencies were chosen for one simple reason: each agency was associated with at least one public example of an attack on science in the past 20 years. These are the agencies that know from experience the cost that attacks on science can have, including the public losing trust in their governmental institutions. One study from February 2022 found that the public’s reported trust in federal, state, and local public health agencies during the COVID-19 pandemic was largely dependent on whether people felt that agencies made clear, science-based recommendations that were not influenced by politics.

Overall, the vast majority of the agencies examined (27 out of 38; 71 percent) obtained final scores that showed low, or in some cases non-existent, compliance with the requirements of the 2021 memorandum.

Agencies were graded more positively if they solicited public comments on a draft version of their scientific integrity policy. As I’ve written before, public comments are a crucial mechanism through which members of the public can have a direct say in the decisions our government is making. Shockingly, among the hundreds of agencies in the federal government, only five agencies decided to carry out this important step.

The worst-performing agencies also included some large agencies that regularly engage in scientific activities as part of their fundamental duties, such as Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), US Army Corps of Engineering, and the Department of the Treasury.

The top-scoring agencies in our analysis were NOAA, Department of the Interior (DOI), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Department of Agriculture (USDA), and US Geological Survey (USGS).

Two interesting examples of low-performing agencies: the CDC and the White House both scored low and have some of the highest number of attacks on science in our database.

For more information on the methodology and the findings, please see the full report.

The next presidential administration needs to do better

In our highly political climate, it is important to understand that a commitment to protect scientific integrity across the federal government is not a partisan issue. The goal of basing our nation’s policy decisions on the best, most up-to-date, and reliable scientific information, derived independently and unfettered by political interference, deserves overwhelming bipartisan support.

Since science is an important part of how our government fulfills its duty to its people, strong scientific integrity protections at federal agencies are necessary for good governance. Our full report, “Protecting Government Science from Political Interference,” lays out a list of important recommendations that will help protect scientific integrity. These include:

• increasing training opportunities on scientific integrity
• establishing scientific clearance procedures that are clear, consistent, transparent and predictable
• protecting employees against retaliation when they report or investigate scientific integrity violations or whistleblower accounts
• ensuring that each agency publishes an annual report on the state of scientific integrity
• monitoring the implementation and enforcement of scientific integrity policies

The public’s ability to weigh in on new rules and regulations proposed by agencies lies at the heart of a strong democracy. It offers a critical mechanism through which members of the public can have a direct say in the decisions our government is making. And it affords federal agencies the chance to consider the perspectives of people with diverse knowledge, backgrounds, and skillsets.

We at CSD recently sent the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) a public comment outlining our top recommendations for how federal agencies can improve their processes for engaging the public in rulemaking processes, and how they might more effectively reach out to underserved communities.

As we noted, government officials have too often failed to include underserved communities at the policymaking table or to meaningfully incorporate lived experience or tribal ecological knowledge into policymaking. To improve stakeholder engagement with underserved communities and to make agency rulemaking more equitable and just, agencies need to remove barriers that prevent community voices from being heard.

We also noted that, for those living in historically marginalized communities to be able to effectively contribute their input, they need to be able to easily access information about federal policy actions on issues as disparate as air pollution standards, student loan debt, and climate change impacts. As my colleague Darya Minovi has previously stated, environmental justice leaders have long advocated for such public participation and community engagement.

Four key steps

Several studies suggest that trust in government is strongly associated with whether the public feels that government is responsive to their feedback. A major pathway through which federal agencies obtain feedback from the public is the public comment process.

Public comments offer an opportunity for anyone—including individuals and organizations—to submit feedback on proposed rules. Federal agencies are required by law to read and consider these comments. This process can raise the profile of a particular issue. It can help amplify the voices of underserved communities. And it can show policymakers whether a proposal has broad support or is wildly unpopular.

Public comments are also an issue of civic virtue. Aside from voting, they represent one of the best tools the public has to directly contribute to and participate in our democracy. Below are our top four suggestions for how agencies can improve public participation in rulemaking:

• Federal agencies’ webpages should offer a one-stop shop for all proposed policy actions. On most federal webpages today, it is far too difficult for the public to find out about new proposed rules. Even for us at UCS, we tend to learn about new rules through a myriad of sources such as news articles, social media, partner meetings, and agency newsletters. In our comment to OMB, we emphasize that people should be able to go to an agency’s website and easily find all proposed rules and policy actions about which the agency is seeking public input.

• Public comment notices should be transparent in documenting all changes that went into the decisionmaking processes for a proposed rule. OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)—the main White House office that reviews agency rules, regulations and certain other policy documents—has a long history of using their authority to carry out anti-science actions against the wishes of agency scientists and the public. Specifically, we’ve documented 19 cases in which OIRA took the digital equivalent of a red pen to inappropriately strike out major scientific information or science-based policy actions from an agency rule. This practice can invalidate years, sometimes decades, of careful work carried out by federal scientists to collect data, conduct research, and write reports that include the best-available science and how best to use that information in policymaking. If government agencies are serious about their commitment to transparency, they should release red-line edits made by OIRA officials (and others), along with other types of research, sources, or correspondence agency officials used to draft the rule.
• Increase the use of plain-language summaries. If you’ve ever tried to submit a public comment to the Federal Register or regulations.gov, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that the whole thing is written in a very technical manner and that it uses a confusing format. Studies have suggested that plain-language summaries can help members of the public navigate these difficulties, making the information far more accessible. Plain-language summaries are becoming a staple of the academic scientific community in peer-reviewed papers and scientific conferences for this exact reason. Federal scientists are starting to more frequently employ them, such as at the Office of Science in the Department of Energy, to better communicate with the public about their work. Government agencies should follow the example set by academic and federal scientists and increase the use of plain-language summaries in public comment notices.
• Ensure that translation services are offered when engaging with communities where multiple languages are spoken. Public comment notices, public hearings, and other forms of community engagement need to be issued in the languages most widely spoken in the communities most affected by the polices under consideration. The issue of language justice is of major importance for underserved communities. For example, the community group Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (t.e.j.a.s.), in conjunction with Earthjustice and Sierra Club, successfully pressed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to adopt a strong rule in 2021 requiring that translation and interpretation services be offered during public engagement sessions on environmental permitting decisions.

A strong democracy needs participation in rulemaking

At its core, democracy is a system of government beholden to its people. This vision of self-governance, central to the US federal government and the tenants of the US Constitution, requires accountability, equity, and public participation.

At UCS, we applaud OMB’s efforts to gather input from the public about this critical issue. In turn, we urge OMB to use this feedback to help build a framework to guide how all agencies can best engage with the public on policymaking.  It’s a wonky issue, but one that will have huge consequences on how the public can participate in agency rulemaking.

We at UCS will continue to monitor and press OMB to adopt commonsense, evidence-based practices that give all people–including underserved community members–a real voice in how our government works.

The EPA previously released their updated scientific integrity policy for public comment, and many groups, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, weighed in to assess the strengths and weaknesses of a policy designed to protect scientists and their work from political interference. Similarly, industry groups submitted a series of public comments expressing their viewpoints.

Industry groups made clear in their public comments that they are concerned about two things in particular: 1) that EPA’s political appointees and senior leadership are being unfairly treated in the policy (the reasoning is wonky, see the next section) and 2) that industry needs to step into a process called a “differing scientific opinion,” an internal agency process conducted by federal scientists (more on this in a minute).

While these strategies are new, they are built upon the old foundations of the corporate disinformation playbook. The ultimate purpose of these proposals by industry is to try and undermine the EPA’s scientific activities and science-based decisionmaking processes.

Industry frets that EPA leadership “is being marginalized”

The American Chemistry Council emphasized in their comment that they are concerned that the EPA’s scientific integrity policy is somehow “minimizing or marginalizing the role of political leadership.” The CropLife America and Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment wrote that the policy “broadly discourages the participation of political leadership in scientific decisions, even if they are technically competent.”

I need a moment to scream. The entire reason that scientific integrity became a pressing matter at federal agencies is because we’ve repeatedly been appalled by examples of political leadership overstepping the boundaries of their jobs to dismantle science-based processes at federal agencies for political gain.

At UCS, we have a database of hundreds of attacks on science collected throughout the last four presidential administrations (from George W Bush to Joe Biden). These are short articles, developed using a set of systematic criteria, that describe egregious (and sometimes illegal) instances in which science was sidelined at federal agencies for political reasons. Using a Google Site Search operator (it’s a type of query to search within webpages), I determined that 10 of our articles feature the keyword “high-ranking” in the text, 22 of our articles feature the keyword “political appointee,” 47 of our articles feature both the keywords “senior” and “official,” and 50 of our articles feature the keyword “leadership.” In other words, we have documented dozens of examples where political leadership were involved in attacks on science.

Political leadership has never been marginalized at agencies. Political appointees and others in senior leadership positions are people in power with widespread authority who play a pivotal role in shaping the direction of their agency’s science-based activities. Just like any federal employee, they need to be held to account when they decide to violate their agency’s scientific integrity policy. The problem is that when high-ranking officials and senior leadership decide to attack science, it is especially difficult for their agencies to hold them accountable for their actions.

The White House’s Office and Science Technology Policy’s (OSTP) 2022 Scientific Integrity Task Force report found that “violations [of scientific integrity] involving high-level officials are the most problematic and difficult to address.” A 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that “the number of political appointees in an agency may make the agency more vulnerable to political pressure.”

To claim, as industry comments are trying to do, that political leadership is somehow marginalized by a scientific integrity policy is like claiming that a restaurant owner is somehow marginalized when their restaurant undergoes a health and safety inspection. Every staff member at a restaurant, including the owner, has a role to play in adhering to health and safety protocols. In the same way, every federal employee, including those in leadership positions, has a role to play in ensuring that they are adhering to their agency’s scientific integrity policy.

Industry wants to manipulate “differing scientific opinions”

In an equally devious tactic, industry groups are going after a new target—an important process used by the EPA and other science-based agencies called “differing scientific opinions.”

Differing scientific opinions are a strong tool that agencies can use when assessing the scientific literature. As any scientist can attest, it is extremely difficult to come to a definite conclusion about what the scientific literature is telling you. Determining the scientific consensus based on the literature often depends on the weight of evidence, which requires assessing the strengths and weakness of individual study designs and working through potentially conflicting findings between various studies. As a result, scientists who are expert in their fields and who view the same literature may reach different conclusions about the scientific consensus. If this happens at federal agencies, government scientists who disagree with the scientific opinions reached by their scientific colleagues may choose to file a differing scientific opinion.

My colleagues and I have praised the use of differing scientific opinions in previous blog posts, and UCS has long advocated for strong processes for addressing differing scientific opinions at federal agencies. For instance, when we’ve graded agency’s scientific integrity policies on how effective or not they are, we graded the policies higher if they contained strong measures related to the use of differing scientific opinions.

Here’s one example of a differing scientific opinion written in 2020 by Thomas Sinks, the EPA’s former Director of the Office of the Science Advisor, Human Subjects Research Review Official, and Acting Scientific Integrity Official. Sinks found fault with the EPA’s underlying scientific conclusions on a rule that would have restricted the use of science in agency decisionmaking.

In other words, differing scientific opinions are a purely in-house process written by federal scientists who are experts in their fields. When agency scientists and officials address the concerns raised in a differing scientific opinion, it helps ensure that the scientific consensus reached at agencies is more robust. And all of us who live in the US should readily support this type of measure, because we want the most robust science possible guiding policy decisions on things like food safety, toxic chemical regulation, and air pollution standards.

So, we were vexed and surprised to find that two industry groups told the EPA that they should be allowed to file differing scientific opinions. Union Carbide wrote that including differing scientific opinions “from all stakeholders, not just those employed by EPA, will foster the integrity of EPA’s scientific processes and scientific decision-making.” Dow Chemical wrote that “it is therefore inexplicable — and troubling — that EPA would as a matter of policy ignore DSOs [differing scientific opinions] of non-EPA scientists.” Dow Chemical even claimed that their exclusion from differing scientific opinions “would stifle the scientific process and erode the public’s trust in EPA’s decision-making.”

This is an insidious distortion of an EPA policy. Industry groups are claiming that their interpretation (or any outsider’s opinion) of the scientific literature is just as valid as agency scientists who are qualified experts in their fields. And this is certifiably not the case. Scientists who are paid by industry groups are more likely to be biased in favor of the industry’s position.

I recently wrote a blog post detailing the tobacco industry’s pioneering implementation of their infamous disinformation playbook, where they used tactics to disinform the public about the link between smoking and lung cancer. This was precisely one of the tactics that the tobacco companies used as part of their disinformation campaigns in 1950s: to claim that industry scientists paid to carry out industry-approved studies are as good as or even better than independent academic or government scientists in assessing the scientific evidence.

This is actually a pretty common tactic employed by groups like the American Chemistry Council. For years (probably decades), the American Chemistry Council has aggressively challenged the scientific conclusions reached by EPA scientists and scientific advisory committees, spuriously claiming that agency scientists and advisory committee members are simply wrong in their assessment of the scientific literature on issues related to chemical safety.

EPA: don’t fall for these industry tactics

EPA’s public comment period for its scientific integrity policy has revealed new industry tactics that offer some insight about how powerful chemical companies and their allies hope to undermine the agency’s scientific process.

Communities across the United States depend on federal agencies such as the EPA to use the best available science to protect us from public health and environmental hazards. This is particularly true for underserved communities who already face disproportionate exposures to these hazards. People’s health and safety—our very lives—depend on the EPA maintaining robust scientific processes that are impervious to industry distortions.

That’s why we at UCS will continue to press the EPA and other agencies to ensure that their processes are as robust as possible, based on science and evidence, and resistant to powerful industry pressure that seeks to weaken, sideline, or undermine them.

In this current age, a meme on Facebook, a video on TikTok, or a comment thread on Reddit can have substantial influence over people’s views and perspectives. For instance, half of adults in the United States obtain their news at least sometimes from social media.

While social media can be a great source of information, misinformation – the accidental spread of incorrect information – also runs rampant through our online spaces. Disinformation – misinformation’s more nefarious cousin – is when bad actors are intentional in their attempts to disinform the public.

Science unfortunately is an appealing target for people looking to disinform the public. For instance, oil and gas companies have long denied or undermined climate change science. And anti-vaxxers are eager to persuade you that vaccines (one of history’s greatest public health achievements) is somehow suspect.

My colleagues and I have previously published research on the “disinformation playbook,” a series of tactics used by these groups to ensure that you are disinformed about the best available science. Such tactics include harassing scientists and inappropriately influencing policymakers away from science-based decisionmaking.

In this article, I’m going to breakdown how disinformation affects the public’s knowledge and perception of science. To get a handle on the disinformation playbook, we’ll look at the original “granddaddy” who developed these tactics in the early- and mid-20^th century – tobacco companies. Specifically, we’ll look at how tobacco companies fought to sideline the science that linked the smoking of cigarettes with an increased risk of lung cancer.

Science from the early 20^th century was clear: smoking was linked to lung cancer

Before the widespread availability of cigarettes, lung cancer was once a very rare condition. In the early 20^th century, when medical professionals encountered cases of lung cancer, they used to tell their students to pay attention because they may never see another case during their professional career.

One study from 1912 looked at autopsy reports from hospitals in the United States and Western Europe. The researchers only found a few hundred cases of lung cancer, a rate that at the time represented 0.5% of cancer cases. In comparison, in the United States in 2023, lung and bronchus cancer cases represented 12-13% of all new cancer cases and 21% of all cancer deaths.

In the 1920s, scientists and medical professionals became increasingly puzzled by the sharp rise of lung cancer cases. While they had several theories, the scientific evidence linking lung cancer with tobacco products started to especially build from the 1930s to 1950s.

I highly recommend reading Proctor (2012) for further information, but in general the scientific evidence from the 1930s to the 1950s was accumulating in four areas of research:

• Population studies – people who smoked had higher rates of lung cancer
• Animal studies – tobacco caused tumors in model organisms
• Cellular pathology – cigarette smoke was shown to deaden the hairlike cilia in the lung’s upper airway
• Cancer-causing chemicals in cigarettes – cigarette smoke contained polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which had been previously shown to cause cancer in people exposed to coal tar   

Multiple lines of evidence converging like this, linking a health effect with a specific factor, is one of the important ways that epidemiologists assess whether an exposure – like smoking a cigarette – can cause a detrimental health outcome.

For the science geeks in the room, I’m referring to the “consistency” item from the famous Bradford Hill criteria. And as an aside, Bradford Hill was also one of the pivotal scientists that helped build evidence of a link between smoking and lung cancer. See in particular Doll and Hill’s famous 1954 paper on the British Doctors’ Study, a long-term prospective cohort study that lasted from 1951 to 2001.

But the tobacco companies worked to sideline this science

The 1920s corresponded to when cigarettes began to be widely sold in the United States. Shockingly, images of doctors and medical professionals were used in advertisements to sell cigarettes from the 1920s to the 1950s, similar to the advertisements you may hear today where “4 out of 5 dentists recommend this toothpaste brand.”

The tobacco companies were well aware of the science that showed the linkage between lung cancer and smoking. In 1998, the US government won a famous lawsuit against the tobacco companies. This lawsuit resulted in the public disclosure of 30 million pages of industry internal documents on how, for decades, these companies hid scientific evidence showing that their products can result in conditions like cancer, heart disease, and addiction. These documents suggest that by the 1950s, tobacco executives knew without a shadow of a doubt that their products increased the risk of lung cancer.

The tobacco companies decided to target this science. On December 14, 1953, the President of the American Tobacco Company, Paul Hahn, invited the heads of the leading tobacco manufacturers to a meeting at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. At this meeting, it was decided that a public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton, would be employed and jointly paid by the tobacco companies to develop a response to the smoking and health allegations.

This meeting in turn led to a 1954 advertisement campaign called “A Frank Statement,” an ad that ran in over 400 newspapers and was believed to have reached around 43 million readers. This ad can be viewed as one of the tobacco company’s first attempts to develop their disinformation playbook and to use it to mislead the public.

Here’s a quote from the ad: “For more than 300 years tobacco has given solace, relaxation, and enjoyment to mankind. At one time or another during these years critics have held it responsible for practically every disease of the human body. One by one these charges have been abandoned for lack of evidence.”

The “Frank Statement” ad laid out the tactics that companies and other bad actors use to this day to disinform the public about scientific research. For instance, the ad falsely claimed that the science that found harms associated with smoking is questionable, that “many aspects of modern life” are just as bad as smoking, and that scientists paid by industry will do a better job investigating the problem.

But these tactics are not simply issues of the past, tobacco companies continue to peddle their mistruths to this day. The Truth Initiative has a great report showing how tobacco companies currently undermine scientific research, such as by sponsoring entire issues of prestigious research journals and participating in tobacco control research conferences.

In recent years, the tobacco company Juul targeted teenagers and young people through their flavored e-cigarette products and worked to stop the FDA from enacting science-based safeguards. Specifically, Juul watered down and delayed FDA regulations on their products, disregarded research showing that their product’s formulation was especially addictive and was linked to an epidemic of teenage nicotine use and paid massive amounts of money to think tanks to produce more favorable research and to influence congressional leaders. In 2022, the FDA finally banned Juul products and required the company to remove its products from the marketplace.

How to spot and stop the spread of disinformation

While science is vulnerable to attacks by people trying to spread disinformation, all hope is not lost. Government agencies, scientific journals, the media, and members of the public have a vital role to play in safeguarding scientific integrity and stopping the spread of disinformation.

There are evidenced-based methods that you, dear reader, can use to combat disinformation. Perhaps the most important one is to not share the disinformation with others (even as a joke), as you further the goals of these bad actors when you share them.

Another good technique is to learn how to spot disinformation pieces. In general, online posts or articles that are designed to appeal to your emotions, that fail to cite reputable sources, and that are linked to shady funding sources are more likely trying to spread disinformation.

So, the next you are scrolling through your social media accounts, take a moment to reflect on what types of information you are consuming. Just by asking some thoughtful questions about the intentions of the people posting and what evidence they have to back up their claims, you can go a long way in helping stop the spread of disinformation.

When scientific integrity is violated or science sidelined at agencies such as the EPA, it can have enormous consequences for the public such as diminishing or undermining safeguards against environmental hazards such as air pollution, toxic chemicals, and hazardous waste. Prior research has shown this can have disproportionate negative effects on underserved communities – Black, Indigenous, low-income communities, and communities of color – all of whom have long been burdened by pollution exposure and other stressors.

When evaluating the EPA’s draft scientific integrity policy, we certainly found sections to celebrate but also parts that raise concerns. The EPA has some strong and unique sections related to building a culture of scientific integrity at the agency, but its policy also has gaps in its accountability section, a lack of language on the intersection between equity and scientific integrity, and several clauses that, in certain circumstances, could end up restricting the voices of scientists.

The Good

EPA’s scientific integrity policy makes a number of positive updates, including several items for which my colleagues and I have advocated for years. There are full sections about the importance of the free flow of scientific information to the public, about using science in decisionmaking and how to make this process more transparent, and about promoting a culture of scientific integrity at the agency.

The EPA has extended scientific integrity protections to professional development opportunities, explicitly allowing federal scientists to publish papers and speak at conferences on their work, and to aid scientific advisory committees, which are vital in providing the EPA with independent expert advice to help ensure that the agency follows the best available science.

Also laudable, the EPA scientific integrity policy states that the policy will “ensure that comments received on draft scientific documents during any interagency review are made in writing and made public” and that “career EPA employees make the final determination concerning changes or suggested changes to scientific documents or other scientific products in response to external (including interagency) comments.”

Interagency comments—particularly the required review from the Office of Information Regulatory Affairs (part of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget)—are some of the least transparent processes in policymaking and can have a major effect on final rules. We’ve documented a number of attacks on science on major rules in which scientific information was stripped out during interagency review, such as for the regulation of PFAS chemicals, coal ash, particulate matter air pollution, and formaldehyde.

Also interesting, the EPA’s draft policy calls for the formation of a scientific integrity committee made up of career EPA employees, chaired by the EPA’s scientific integrity officer, and responsible for producing an annual report on the state of scientific integrity at the agency. The committee will “expeditiously draft and prominently post on EPA’s website necessary procedures including those on addressing scientific integrity concerns, addressing DSOs [differing scientific opinions] and others such as clearance of scientific products, scientific communications, authorship and attribution, and other topics as needed.”

This effort goes well beyond that of other federal agencies which have usually designated only a single person (a scientific integrity officer or chief scientist) or no person (relying on their parent agency’s scientific integrity officer) to manage the agency’s scientific integrity efforts. Hopefully this committee will prove flexible in helping address the myriad scientific integrity issues that pop up at the EPA and push the agency to devote more attention and resources toward protecting scientists and their work from political interference.

The Bad

Unfortunately, in a number of spots, the EPA’s scientific integrity policy is either too vague to be effective or could prove to have unintended negative consequences.

We were disappointed that the EPA did not include more specific details about how to better integrate equity into the agency’s scientific integrity policy. The EPA included a few statements in the document about the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility as it relates to scientific integrity, but these were generalized statements that failed to include any details about how this will be monitored or evaluated. The EPA could have followed the example set by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy’s scientific integrity policy which, while still generalized, included more language spelling out how scientific integrity violations can have disproportionate effects on underrepresented groups.

The accountability section of the EPA’s scientific integrity policy is a mixed bag. On the one hand, the agency laid out several good specifics on how an investigation of a potential scientific integrity violation would go, and how scientific integrity violations should be taken as seriously as government ethics violations, and the need to encourage and facilitate early communication with the scientific integrity officer on the issue. These are definite improvements when compared to prior versions of the EPA’s scientific integrity policy.

On the other hand, the EPA does not state exactly how scientific integrity violations can be formally raised (the agency states that they will issue guidance in the future), there is a lack of language laying how agency staff in higher positions of power – like political appointees – would be held accountable if they are found to have violated the scientific integrity policy, and there is no language on how scientific integrity violations spanning different agencies would be resolved (for instance, if a White House official substantially edited an EPA scientific report for political reasons, which has happened before).

The Ugly

Perhaps worst of all, the EPA’s draft scientific integrity policy dedicates a substantial amount of language  aimed at restricting EPA scientists from opining on their agency’s policy decisions.

UCS’s position on this has long been clear: We believe federal scientists should be able to speak freely to the public and media about their scientific work and share their scientific expertise to the greatest extent possible. But we also understand that a federal scientist is not necessarily the agency’s premiere expert when speaking about areas outside their work purview. We understand, too, that, while science should play an fundamental role in policymaking, other factors also often come into play—such as administration priorities, budgetary considerations, and logistics.

Here’s the problem: EPA’s scientific integrity policy includes so many prohibitions and restrictions on the ability of federal employees to speak on policymaking issues that bad actors could wield these restrictions to censor federal employees from speaking about their scientific work and activities. We’ve written about this type of concern before, for instance in section three of a public comment letter to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

During the Trump administration, agency officials censored federal scientists, prohibiting them from providing the public with needed scientific information when it clashed with the misinformation spoken by President Trump. For example, federal scientists faced reprimands from agency officials when they tried communicate accurate scientific information on the spread of COVID-19, on the path of Hurricane Dorian, or on the causes of gun violence in the aftermath of the El Paso and Dayton shootings. Under the EPA’s new scientific integrity policy, such censorship of federal scientists could return if the scientists’ efforts to correct the President were construed as opining about policy.

EPA scientists need strong protections against political interference

One surprise about the EPA’s draft scientific integrity policy is simply how late it is arriving. The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy’s scientific integrity framework had previously set out a series of deadlines for agencies to follow. The EPA’s solicitation of public input on its draft scientific integrity policy was supposed to have taken place six months after the framework was released—in July 2023.

The long six-month delay is disappointing since EPA scientists need and deserve to have the strongest scientific integrity protections in place in a timely manner.

There is no doubt that the EPA needs to urgently have a strong scientific integrity policy. At UCS, we documented some 207 attacks on science at 40 different federal agencies during the Trump administration; the EPA was by far and away the agency involved with the highest number of these attacks on science (59 out of 207 attacks). Should a future administration prove antagonistic to science-based policies, it is highly likely that the EPA would once again become a prime target for political interference.

If you agree that the EPA needs to have the strongest scientific integrity protections in place, you can tell them so by submitting a written comment to EPA before their deadline of February 23.

Minority-serving institutions represent one-fifth of the nation’s STEM undergraduates

Harkening back to the Higher Education Act of 1965, the MSI term refers to institutions of higher education that serve Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) populations. These are institutions that integrate considerations of equity and diversity into their mission statements and day-to-day operations. They offer access to higher education for students who may not otherwise have had it, and they set an example by employing more BIPOC faculty and university staff than are seen at predominantly white institutions.

MSIs remain some of nation’s leaders in producing BIPOC graduates with STEM degrees. For instance, 30 percent of Black Americans majoring in STEM fields graduate from a historically Black college or university (HBCU). A 2019 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine points out that nearly 700 MSIs provide pathways for a STEM education, that MSIs produce one-fifth of the nation’s STEM bachelor’s degrees, and that more undergraduate students are enrolled in STEM fields at four-year MSIs than at four-year institutions not classified as MSIs.

Agencies need to recruit more federal scientists with MSI degrees

This summer, Taylor Thomas, a talented graduate student, joined our efforts at CSD. Thomas was deeply interested in this subject and researched how many federal scientists had previously attended a MSI. As far as we are aware, this is the first time anyone conducted this type of analysis.

We had already compiled a list of the names and job titles of federal scientists for our federal scientist survey project. Thomas used this data to match 500 randomly selected federal scientists to their online LinkedIn profiles and then classified whether or not the highest degree they earned came from a MSI (as determined by the classification system developed by the Department of Education). For this analysis, we focused on three types of MSIs: historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-serving institutions, and tribal colleges and universities. None of the federal scientists we looked at attended tribal colleges and universities for their terminal degree.

The results are very stark, as you can see below (Figure 1). Out of the five federal agencies Thomas examined – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – the vast majority of scientists at each agency (89 to 96 percent) obtained their highest-level degree from a university that is not considered an MSI by the Department of Education. While we understand that this data analysis has its caveats – for instance, we could not identify whether the university information reported on LinkedIn profiles was accurate or up-to-date– it does provide a glimpse into federal agencies’ track record in employing MSI STEM graduates. The findings suggest that there is a lot more work agencies need to do to attract these brilliant and often diverse STEM professionals into the federal workforce.

Figure 1: Type of Institution from Which Federal Scientists Received their Highest Degree

Agencies need to go further with their MSI partnerships

After President Biden issued an executive order requiring that agencies increase their efforts to diversify the federal workforce, federal agencies have been active in strengthening prior partnerships or forging new partnerships with MSIs. For instance, the Department of Defense established a new research center at Howard University (an HBCU in Washington, DC); the EPA established an internal council to identity opportunities to partner with HBCUs; the National Nuclear Security Administration established a partnership program with MSIs; and several federal agencies announced funding opportunities for MSIs, including the Department of Energy, NASA, and NOAA.

Honestly, this is great news, and we at the Union of Concerned Scientists celebrate that these agencies are taking concrete steps to partner with MSIs. But our data shows that scientists who graduated from MSIs are woefully underrepresented in the federal workforce, and therefore federal agencies are currently missing the unique perspectives and insights this group of scientists can bring.

We urge federal agencies to think through evidence-based approaches for attracting the best and brightest minds from MSIs into the federal STEM workforce. Our report offers a veritable cornucopia of best practices for hiring and retaining a more diverse STEM workforce, including a set of recommendations written by five distinguished experts with backgrounds as current and former federal scientists, individuals from academic institutions, and nonprofit experts. Given the critical role that federal scientists play to inform government decisions that impact the health and safety of all residents’ lives, we will all benefit as our federal agencies step up their efforts further to build a stronger and more diverse STEM workforce.

As one of the experts who contributed to this report, I am heartened by the GAO’s efforts to press public health agencies to do better. We’ve seen how attacks on science can fracture what should have been a science-driven process during the pandemic, opening the door to a flurry of misinformation, much of which we are still navigating today. There is no better time than now to put guardrails in place to prevent current and future administrations from pushing political agendas during the next public health emergency.

One of the most troubling lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic is to recognize how effective political interference was in dissuading or blocking people from accessing vaccines, medicines, or other life-saving public health measures. During the pandemic, government science was specifically targeted and undermined for political purposes. As a result, the public was impeded from obtaining the latest scientific information about how best to protect themselves.

Public health agencies such as the CDC and FDA faced the brunt of these attacks during the pandemic. For instance, in the aftermath of President Trump’s praise, political officials pressured the FDA to issue emergency approval for the drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for treatment of COVID-19 without strong science to back up these actions. Additionally, political leaders tried to edit scientific reports in the CDC’s well-respected Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports to align with the political messaging coming from the White House at the time, thereby undermining the ability of the scientists to provide the public with the best available scientific information on COVID-19 (or in the words of one of those officials, to stop “ulterior deep state motives in the bowels of CDC”).

In light of these kinds of episodes, Congress requested that the GAO examine the issue. The agency’s report provides a strong set of recommendations about how public health agencies can better protect themselves from undue political interference.

The importance of scientific integrity policies

For this report, the GAO collaborated with the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and convened a two-day roundtable of 11 experts to discuss the issue and pinpoint what steps could be taken to safeguard the scientific process at public health agencies. I was one of these experts, and I found the discussions rich and substantial.

While the group disagreed at times, leading to some extremely fruitful conversations, I was most surprised by how much those in attendance agreed on the big-picture items. We all agreed on what did—and did not—constitute a scientific integrity violation in the pandemic-related examples presented to us. And we all reached a consensus about the types of safeguards that can be put in place to protect federal scientists and employees from undue political interference. Below is a graphic from the report summarizing those safeguards:

The report’s discussion of scientific integrity policies is particularly interesting. The expert panel highlights three specific ways that public health agencies can strengthen their scientific integrity policies. The key, the report says, is to ensure:

• a well-documented decisionmaking process for non-emergency and emergency situations,
• a clear delineation of roles and responsibilities for both internal and external stakeholders when making scientific decisions, and
• a transparent process through which officials can report and address allegations of political interference.

Additionally, the report highlights ways to improve science-based decisionmaking at agencies, including being transparent about the process, documenting the procedures used, and developing mechanisms that allow differing scientific opinions to be examined as part of the peer review process. Other safeguards identified in the report included providing training on scientific integrity processes, incorporating the expert opinions from scientific advisory committees, and designating an scientific integrity liaison or ombudsman at each public health agency.

UCS role remains pivotal

Political interference in science during public health crises inevitably means that people’s access to the latest scientific information will be diminished, thereby making them less able to take actions that protect their health and safety. How effective our government can be in tackling these public health threats will depend on whether federal agencies can put safeguards in place to prevent powerful folks from politicizing government science for their own benefit.

The safeguards identified in the GAO report align with the numerous reports, surveys, factsheets, and advocacy efforts about scientific integrity that my colleagues and I have worked on for nearly 20 years. The report even references one of our peer-reviewed publications, which documented that scientific integrity violations have occurred under both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations since the 1950s.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has had some notable success in pressing agencies to adopt strong scientific integrity policies as many of our scientific integrity recommendations have been adopted over the years by federal agencies. Recently, Dr. Richard Spinrad, the Director of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), specifically acknowledged UCS’s role in helping to develop NOAA’s scientific integrity policy, (you can see a video of the Q&A session here, starting at the 26:05 mark). And we are continuing to press agencies to strengthen their scientific integrity policies. It’s a process that you can get involved in too.

There is more work to be done at federal agencies to cultivate a culture that values and protects scientific integrity. I am encouraged by the fact that UCS continues to be in the vanguard of this fight, advocating for solutions that are being echoed in the latest GAO findings and in expert opinions from across the country.

Rather than aiming for consistency, the EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics is going for an approach that puts the cart before the horse by determining the scope of the rule before fully defining PFAS chemicals. The EPA’s plan essentially allows them to limit the definition of PFAS to cover only those chemicals they had already planned to regulate when they scoped out the rule. This is the equivalent of a child, after being told to clean their room and seeing what a big job it is, trying to redefine the definition of their room so as to only have to clean up a smaller part.

When some PFAS chemicals are allowed to be considered outside the agency’s definition, this means that these chemicals will not be covered by EPA actions, and can therefore continue to pose harm to the public’s health and safety. This is not how science-based policymaking is supposed to work. The definition of PFAS chemicals should be standardized, and based on the best available science. Such a standardized definition avoids confusion, is more efficient, offers a first step on the road toward regulating PFAS chemicals as a class, and helps ensure that science is at the forefront of the policymaking process protecting public health and the environment.

EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics has already been criticized for its previous approaches to defining PFAS chemicals (more on that in a minute), but it is especially problematic to shift to an approach that calls for redefining PFAS chemicals with every rulemaking action. As Dr. Linda Birnbaum, a former EPA scientist and head of the National Toxicology Program, put it, “This is not a new definition – it is a lack of definition, and it makes no sense. It is just going to lead to terrible confusion.”

Defining PFAS chemicals

PFAS chemicals (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are industrial chemicals that can repel water, oil and grease and are found in countless consumer products. The main thing that differentiates PFAS chemicals from other compounds are their chains of carbon-fluorine bonds, one of the strongest chemical bonds ever discovered. Because it takes a huge amount of energy to break down these bonds, PFAS chemicals mostly build up in the human body over time, which can lead to a variety of different health conditions, including altered immune and thyroid function, liver disease, lipid and insulin dysregulation, kidney disease, adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes, and cancer.

In the scientific literature, the definition of PFAS has been a subject of rich and sometimes confusing debate, but the most widely used and inclusive definition is one developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2021. The OECD defines PFAS as any chemical that has at least one fully fluorinated carbon atom, which mostly refers to that carbon-fluorine bond (see the report for more information). The OECD definition was based on a multi-stakeholder international effort that spent three years reviewing the science to develop this robust and practical definition.

In the past, the EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics had adopted a “working definition” that stood at odds with most of the scientific community. It was far narrower than the OECD’s definition and failed to include thousands of PFAS chemicals under their purview. The working definition excluded certain refrigerants and PFAS gases. Additionally, the working definition excluded some PFAS chemicals that, when metabolized by the human body or broken down in the environment, can turn into PFOA and PFOS, the two most-studied PFAS chemicals. PFOA and PFOS are so well known for their highly toxic properties that most of EPA’s PFAS actions, as guided by their PFAS Roadmap, are set up to target these two PFAS chemicals.

Playing into industry’s hands

By failing to codify a PFAS definition grounded in science, the EPA office is playing into industry’s hands. A lack of a PFAS definition gives industry the opportunity to more easily draw upon their disinformation playbook, particularly by using the tactic of manufacturing uncertainty to cast doubt on the science. Absent a science-based definition for PFAS, industry can gain an advantage by pressing the EPA to accept limited PFAS definitions that allow them to avoid regulation.

This is not just conjecture; this situation happened before with PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) in the 1970s and 1980s—highly toxic chemicals that were banned by the EPA in 1979. In one court case from 1980, the EPA argued that Dow Chemical Company was manufacturing PCBs in violation of its ban enacted under the Toxic Substances Control Act. Dow’s argument was that the ban did not apply because what they were manufacturing could not be defined as PCBs (even though they were). Attempts to re-define PCBs to benefit industry activities also occurred in two other court cases (see here and here).

In other words, there is ample evidence to show that industry knows it can take advantage of the situation when the EPA lacks a standardized science-based definition of a chemical.

Needed: a science-driven process

While the EPA office did laudably move away from its problematic working definition for PFAS, its new plan is unsustainable. Relying on a process that redefines PFAS for every action will open the door to industry influence and make it difficult, if not impossible, to compare EPA’s PFAS actions across the agency.

The EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics is an important office. It plays a fundamental role in evaluating and determining the risk of new and existing chemicals and finds ways to prevent or reduce pollution before it gets into the environment. The office is also responsible for managing programs under a variety of environmental laws, including the main law that governs how we regulate chemicals, the Toxic Substances Control Act.

Using a “case-by-case” approach for something as fundamental as the definition of PFAS makes it far easier to have unnecessary political intrusions into what should be science-based processes. Such an approach may also negatively impact efforts currently underway at the EPA to strengthen scientific integrity policies and foster a culture of scientific integrity at the agency.

This EPA office needs to do better. The office in question is housed under the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, where several whistleblower scientists in 2021 reported that numerous scientific integrity violations have occurred for years, including with PFAS risk assessments.

The EPA will soon open their new scientific integrity policy for public comment; you can act now to let the agency know that you value a strong culture of scientific integrity that includes putting science at the forefront of its decisionmaking processes for PFAS and other toxic substances.

Given the major role federal science plays in upholding public health and environmental safeguards—such as protecting the public from air pollution, toxic chemicals, climate change impacts, unsafe working conditions, foodborne illnesses, and infectious diseases—it is vitally important to prevent political or other special interests from sidelining or otherwise distorting federal science. And the best way to prevent such attacks on science is for Congress to enact strong scientific integrity protections.

Congress can make scientific integrity policies enforceable

Political appointees, senior officials, and other high-level personnel have a long history of violating scientific integrity at federal agencies, which makes the passage of a congressional bill to protect scientific integrity all the more pressing.

We at the Union of Concerned Scientists have so far documented 324 examples of attacks on science under the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, and have determined that violations of scientific integrity have occurred under every administration since at least the 1950s. These are egregious examples of senior officials placing politics above federal science by burying scientific reports, stopping the collection of data, or dismantling scientific advisory committees, among many other tactics. Worse yet, our research suggests that when federal science is sidelined, underserved communities—Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC), low-income, and rural communities—frequently face the brunt of the harms in the form of weak, ineffective, or undermined health, safety, and environmental protections.

To prevent attacks on science, the Biden administration has laudably taken a series of steps to try and strengthen scientific integrity policies at federal agencies, as governed by President Biden’s scientific integrity memorandum from January 2021. These efforts by the executive branch are welcome and complement the re-introduction of the Scientific Integrity Act. But, while the Biden administration’s efforts can put in place some of the executive branch’s best ideas to cultivate a culture of scientific integrity, only Congress can add “teeth” to these efforts to help enforce the policies and ensure that all agencies comply even in future federal administrations.

The re-introduced Scientific Integrity Act would require federal agencies that fund, conduct, or oversee scientific research to establish and maintain clear scientific integrity policies and mandate that they have safeguards in place to ensure the integrity of the scientific process. These scientific integrity policies would have the force of law behind them and would establish and clarify a series of protocols to ensure that these policies are properly implemented, periodically updated, and publicly available.

The bill would clarify that federal science should undergird the policymaking processes, free from inappropriate politics, ideology, or financial conflicts of interest. It would prohibit suppressing, altering, or interfering with the release or communication of scientific findings, or acts of retaliation against scientists releasing politically inconvenient results. Additionally, the bill requires each federal agency to appoint a scientific integrity officer, and to establish a process for dispute resolution consistent with the scientific integrity policy, and a training program for current and new employees. The bill previously received bipartisan support when it passed in the House Space, Science, and Technology Committee in 2019 and when it passed the House in 2020 under the HEROES Act.

Stop attacks on science and urge Congress to pass this bill

It is hard to overstate the importance of codifying scientific integrity protections into law. While we have reported on the encouraging steps that the Biden administration is currently undertaking to strengthen scientific integrity policies at agencies—including the historic release by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy’s (OSTP) of a framework, a new policy, and an opportunity for all agencies to strengthen their policies—the truth is that a future presidential administration could undermine, fail to enforce, or even roll back all these policies. We cannot rely on the commitments of a single presidential administration to create enduring and robust scientific integrity protections that will outlast its term and be strongly enforced in the future.

The only way to achieve such a lasting impact and ensure that federal scientists and their work are protected from political interference is for Congress to codify these protections into law. We at the Union of Concerned Scientists will be watching this process and pressing our congressional leaders to pass this bill and put scientific integrity protections into law.

The Scientific Integrity Act is important, commonsense legislation that transcends partisan politics. And, with the 2024 election coming up in just a little more than a year, your representative in Congress may be especially receptive to your feedback. So, if you value scientific integrity, consider contacting your member of Congress to let them know this issue is important to you.

But will the EPA follow CASAC’s recommendations? The agency has a checkered history on this issue and the Biden administration’s take on ozone standards is already foreshadowing a potentially problematic ruling.

Ground-level ozone pollution is a nasty air pollutant that can cause lung problems and asthma attacks. If you’ve ever been outside in an urban environment on a hot sunny day and wondered why the air just seemed worse in your lungs—think sore and scratchy throat or difficulty breathing while doing exercise—you have likely experienced some of the health effects associated with ozone pollution. Unlike other major air pollutants, ground-level ozone is not emitted directly into the air but is created by chemical reactions between nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, meaning that ozone pollution is tied to sources that emit these precursor chemicals, such as heavy duty vehicles.

Studies have shown that people experiencing elevated days of ozone pollution can result in increases in missing school or work and visiting the hospital or emergency room for asthma exacerbations; ozone pollution even increases the risk of premature death. And, as the CASAC draft report discusses in depth, some groups of people face an elevated risk of health effects, including children, people with asthma, outdoor workers, and communities of color.

Sadly, the process of setting an outdoor ozone pollution standard has a long history of being undermined by political leaders under the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. This track record is even more troubling considering that the Clean Air Act requires that only science can be used when setting the standard for major ambient air pollutants, something I covered in depth in a previous blog post.

As the EPA works through the process of setting a new ozone pollution standard, it is unfortunately all too easy to imagine a future where history repeats itself and the EPA once again sidelines science and fails to fully protect people from this dangerous air pollutant.

Setting the ozone standard is supposed to be a fully science-based process…

CASAC is a group of highly respected independent experts tasked by the Clean Air Act to provide science-based advice on national ambient air quality standards, including on the recent processes to update the EPA’s particulate matter standard. And it is a big deal when CASAC weighs in on the EPA’s scientific and policy reports for a pollutant such as ground-level ozone.

Here’s how the process is supposed to work. For major ambient air pollutants, the EPA is charged with assessing the state of the science every five years or so, producing two important assessment reports. One EPA report examines the latest scientific evidence on the air pollutant and how it can lead to health and welfare effects; the second report uses this science as a basis to form a set of policy options, which the agency can then use during its rulemaking process.

CASAC reviews these reports to, in essence, give the agency a nuanced thumbs up or thumbs down about them and to provide a set of evidence-based recommendations detailing what the air pollution standards should be. While the EPA is not required by law to follow CASAC’s recommendations, it is a really bad look if the agency fails to do so; the EPA administrator is even required to explain the reasoning for deviating from CASAC recommendations. And honestly, there aren’t a lot of good reasons to ignore CASAC’s recommendations, at least if you believe that the best available science should drive the process.

…But history shows a different story

There is ample reason to be concerned about whether the EPA under the Biden administration will fully commit to this science-based process. If we look at the history of how the ozone standard has been set during the 21^st century, we see a road of broken dreams, in which the EPA has promised to follow the science only to scuttle off and set the standards far too high when push comes to shove.

UCS has been watchdogging the issue since 2007, when we called out the Bush administration for blatantly ignoring CASAC’s recommendations to set the ozone standard to between 60 to 70 ppb. For reasons that had nothing to do with science—President Bush intervened shortly before the finalized regulations were to be issued and pressured the EPA to do an “emergency rewrite”—the EPA administrator set the ozone standard to 75 ppb.

The Obama administration continued this ugly tradition. In 2011, President Obama interfered with the EPA and pressured the agency to withdraw their draft ozone rule, delaying the rulemaking process by two years. In 2014, when CASAC weighed in and suggested a standard between 60 to 70 ppb, the advisory committee was explicit in stating that setting a standard at 70 ppb would be a very bad idea. The science at the time was showing that this measure would likely not protect public health, especially in groups of people who are more vulnerable to health impacts from ozone pollution. In 2015, when the EPA set what is now our current ozone standard of 70 ppb, the agency chose to ignore CASAC’s concerns about setting the standard at such a high level.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Trump administration took this sidelining of science to a whole new level. In 2017, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt tried to delay the implementation of the 2015 ozone standard based on what he termed “insufficient scientific evidence,” until a major lawsuit forced the EPA to implement it. In 2018, the Trump administration completely nixed the EPA’s ozone review panel – an advisory committee that specialized in the science of ozone pollution and helped inform CASAC’s science-based recommendations. In 2020, the EPA attempted to issue a new rule on the ozone standard using a flawed and expediated process and concluded that the status quo of 70 ppb standard was good enough.

The current EPA is no exception

The EPA under Biden administration has already shown some signs of continuing this problematic history. Last year, the EPA issued a draft policy assessment that concluded that the 70 ppb is just fine. The agency concluded this despite an increase of strong scientific evidence showing that levels of ozone pollution below 70 ppb can be dangerous to human health (see the American Lung Association’s recent public comment to the EPA for further information).

CASAC members were so disturbed by the EPA’s draft policy assessment that they took the rare and unprecedented step of pausing the review process. The advisory committee said that they can’t weigh in on the policy options and instead needed to go back a step to review the science.

In the recent draft report released this month, the advisory committee once again hammered home this point and chided the current EPA on their poor procedures in reviewing the science, citing in particular how the agency prioritized certain forms of scientific evidence over others in a way that would drown out the health effects experienced by more sensitive populations, especially children, outdoor workers, and people with asthma. CASAC’s conclusion: EPA needs to drastically lower the standard to 55 to 60 ppb in order to be protective of public health.

Seriously EPA, do better and follow the science

In the next few month, the EPA faces a major choice. Will it follow the recommendations of CASAC to the fullest extent possible and thereby provide the strongest science-based protections to protect the country from ground-level ozone pollution, including populations most at risk of developing health effects when exposed to ozone? Or will the agency choose a standard that deviates from the best available science—as it did under all three of the most recent presidential administrations—and thereby fail to protect the health and safety of people across the nation from this pollutant?

If the EPA truly believes in its science-based mission statement to “protect human health and the environment,” it will buck this temptation and follow CASAC’s recommendations to tighten the ozone standard and safeguard the health of millions of people.

Three months ago, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released the framework document calling for strengthening scientific integrity policies and practices. It includes the first government-wide definition of scientific integrity, a roadmap of activities and outcomes to protect scientific integrity, a model policy, and critical policy features and metrics that can be used to assess and track agency’s progress in implementing these actions. My colleague Jacob Carter previously wrote about this landmark achievement and how, despite some weaknesses, the framework includes many innovative components—including some that the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has been advocating for nearly two decades—that promise to really help protect federal scientists from undue political interference.

We at UCS, along with 12 partner organizations, recently sent OSTP a letter urging them to address some weaknesses in its proposed scientific integrity framework. In particular, we make four recommendations to OSTP for improving their model policy—the policy that most federal agencies will adopt in part or in full. We want the OSTP framework and the model policy to be:

• More transparent about how investigations are conducted into potential violations of scientific integrity;
• More explicit in delineating scientists’ ability to communicate with the media and public;
• More specific about how enforcement actions will be carried out to ensure that all scientific integrity violators are held to account;
• More robust in its protections for federal scientists from retaliation when they report scientific integrity violations.

We expect over the next few months that federal agencies will draft new scientific integrity policies in line with the OSTP framework and carry out a public comment process to allow the public to provide input into their policies. But the uncomfortable truth is that, as federal agencies work to implement this framework into their scientific integrity policies, it will be far too easy for some agencies to decide to do only the bare minimum, to take shortcuts with the process, or even to try to retain some detrimental policies and procedures.

Scientific integrity policies help protect people from harms

Scientific integrity principles boil down to a simple concept: the need to stop unnecessary political intrusion into what should be science-based processes—such as scientific reports, data collection, or policymakers using science in decisionmaking.

We’ve collected hundreds of examples in which federal agencies have blatantly violated scientific integrity in ways that have led to serious consequences for the public. For instance, the White House under the Obama administration overruled the FDA and imposed an age restriction on use of an emergency contraceptive for reasons that had nothing to do with science, while the White House under the Trump administration buried a CDC report outlining the dangers of PFAS chemicals because Trump officials considered it a “potential public relations nightmare.” The people of the United States deserve a government that uses science to decide how we keep people safe from toxic chemicals or how medicines are administered to the public, not a government that will shelf science when it is politically convenient.

Upholding scientific integrity principles at federal agencies also translates to being better able to protect underserved communities from environmental and health harms. While people across the United States can be affected when scientific integrity is violated at federal agencies, underserved communities most often bear the brunt of the harms, including disproportionately higher exposures to air pollutants, toxic chemicals, and climate change impacts.

Additionally, violating scientific integrity can undermine the ability of federal agencies to carry out robust and independent scientific data practices that can help identify health disparities in the first place. Scientific integrity protections at federal agencies make it possible to use science to identify and address the legacy of systematic racist policies that still disenfranchises Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities across the nation.

We need the strongest scientific integrity policies possible

Scientific integrity policies at federal agencies matter, and how dozens of agencies choose to implement the OSTP framework will matter a great deal. Weak, ineffective, or poorly enforced scientific integrity policies can create openings for unscrupulous political officials to use for their own benefit at the expense of the health and safety of the communities across the country.

The details of the process unfolding now will profoundly affect tens of thousands of federal scientists for years to come, along with all of us in the United States who rely on the research of federal scientists to keep our food safe, our water clean, and our environment free of pollutants.

Opportunities to influence federal scientific integrity policy are rare and the public now has a chance to help secure the quality of science across the federal government. That’s why it’s imperative for us to raise our voices to insist that our federal agencies need the strongest scientific integrity measures possible to protect federal scientists from undue political interference in their work. Stay tuned for more information from UCS about upcoming opportunities to let public officials know how important it is to strengthen scientific integrity policies at federal agencies.

The court decision has already been condemned by a wide variety of stakeholders, including the FDA, the Biden administration, medical institutions including the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, editorial boards of newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, and more than 400 pharmaceutical executives and investors.

US Attorney General Merrick Garland has confirmed that the Justice Department will ask the Supreme Court to intervene, saying, “We will be seeking emergency relief from the Supreme Court to defend the FDA’s scientific judgment and protect Americans’ access to safe and effective reproductive care.”

A volatile situation as high courts weigh in

The US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit has now temporarily blocked Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling. But, in that process, the federal appeals court also sidelined the best available science by reinstating an outdated set of restrictions that significantly restrict access to mifepristone.

The appeals court ruled that the FDA needed to at least temporarily roll back a series of science-based regulatory decisions that the agency has made since 2016. Because of that decision, patients’ ability to receive mifepristone through the mail now stands in jeopardy. And because the decision ordered the mifepristone label to revert to a version approved in 2000, health providers who wish to offer mifepristone beyond seven weeks of pregnancy (the FDA had approved the medication for use up to 10 weeks) must now resort to what is known as off-label prescribing—a common practice, but one that could bring increased scrutiny in the current climate.

This appeals court decision prompted the Justice Department to file an emergency application to the Supreme Court on Friday morning, asking the highest court to intervene and pause parts of the appeals verdict limiting the availability of mifepristone to the public. Late on Friday, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. granted the Justice Department’s request but only until midnight Wednesday. This gives patients and health providers full access to the drug until then, but these measures are woefully temporary and it is uncertain what access patients can expect to have to mifepristone in the weeks ahead.

Court ruling ignores scientific evidence

The details of Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling are unsettling in so many ways. And Judge Kacsmaryk’s history clearly shows his political and personal biases against reproductive rights, some of which he tried to hide during his senate confirmation.

It is clear that his ruling does not consider the best available science. As a result, it can set the stage for further undermining the FDA’s authority to approve and regulate medications.

In his ruling, Judge Kacsmaryk contends that the FDA “acquiesced on its legitimate safety concerns—in violation of its statutory duty”  and he raises, without serious evidence, the charge that the agency “faced significant political pressure to forgo its proposed safety precautions to better advance the political objective of increased ‘access’ to chemical abortion.”

The statements are breathtaking in their absurdity, and could only be made by someone willfully ignoring the actual scientific evidence. As I detailed in a previous blog post, there is a veritable mountain of scientific evidence showing that this drug is safe and effective, which is further confirmed by data from the five million people who have safely taken mifepristone since 2000. Some studies show that mifepristone is even safer than medications such as Tylenol or Viagra. One could hardly have picked a worse drug to attack based on its safety profile.

In fact, the FDA has been steadily reducing restrictions to access to mifepristone in recent years based on the scientific consensus of the drug’s safety and effectiveness. This January, for instance, the agency announced its approval of a plan to certify pharmacies to dispense mifepristone. This is precisely how the process is supposed to work. The agency is supposed to restrict or ban drugs where the weight of scientific evidence shows them to be harmful, and increase access to needed drugs where the weight of scientific evidence shows them to be safe.

We can already see that Judge Kacsmaryk’s reasoning is not universally shared by others in the federal judiciary. Within an hour of the ruling’s release, a federal judge in Washington state, Judge Thomas Rice, issued a ruling on another case that came to the opposite conclusion. Judge Rice ordered the FDA not to make any changes restricting access to mifepristone in the 17 states and District of Columbia that filed the suit.

Drug approval must be based on best available science

I do not want to live in a world where a medication is approved or banned by a single individual. None of us should be subjected to such a world.

Since the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, Congress has given the FDA the authority to rule on the safety and efficacy of drugs. As part of this often arduous and extensive process, drug companies must conduct a series of animal studies and human clinical trials to provide enough solid scientific evidence to the agency that a drug is a safe and effective treatment for a disease or a medical condition.

Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling risks setting the horrifying precedent of undermining the FDA’s authority, potentially setting in motion future legal and potentially politically motivated challenges to the agency’s ability to regulate a wide variety of medications and medical devices. The ruling not only poses a threat to women, girls, and non-binary and transgender individuals who can become pregnant, but also to anyone who believes that the FDA’s science-based approach is essential for approving and assessing medications.

The ruling interjects opinion and bias into a process that should be guided by science. It could make the approval of medications you and your loved ones need subject to the whims of future litigants. And given that this issue is now likely to be decided by a Supreme Court that issued numerous anti-science rulings last year, it can feel like a dark and uncertain time.

But this is not how things will end. We at UCS will continue to fight back against anti-science forces and press those in positions of power to protect people’s health and safety using the best available science, evidence, and science-based decisionmaking. The stakes are simply too high to do anything less.

But the oral comments also included several speakers representing the industries producing a substantial amount of this deadly air pollution. Their main arguments include two disturbing tactics that come straight out of the disinformation playbook: casting doubt on the science, and pressing the EPA to violate a law passed by Congress.

The terrifying part is that these disinformation strategies, first honed by the tobacco companies, have a long history of successfully swaying public officials away from science-based decisionmaking and towards industry-favored positions that gravely endanger public health. Therefore, it is useful to examine these tactics more closely to better guard against their detrimental effects.

The science is clear, soot pollution kills people

Soot pollution, known as particulate matter, is a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets found in the air. One especially dangerous form of this pollutant–and the one that the EPA’s rule has major consequences for–is called fine particulate matter, also known as PM 2.5, that is, particulate matter that measures 2.5 microns or less in width.

PM 2.5 pollution is responsible for millions of deaths worldwide. It is especially linked to harm in the cardiovascular and respiratory systems, but it also has the ability to damage practically every organ in the body. One recent study found that 99 percent of world’s population is exposed to levels that the World Health Organization deems unsafe, with especially high concentrations found in countries in the Global South.

There is a growing body of evidence (see here, here, and here) showing that Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities are disproportionately exposed to more PM 2.5 pollution than white communities. One study linked the higher PM 2.5 pollution in BIPOC communities with the redlining practices of the 1930s, which continue to disenfranchise communities of color today.

The largest contributors to this deadly type of pollution come from human-made emission sources that burn fossil fuels, such as coal-fired power plants and vehicular emissions of diesel and gasoline. This process is estimated to be responsible for 1 in 5 deaths worldwide. In the United States, of the 100,000 deaths every year associated with human-made sources of PM 2.5 pollution, half of the deaths are attributable to the burning of fossil fuels.

EPA’s PM 2.5 rule is a good step, but more is needed

The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to periodically review the science for six criteria air pollutants, including particulate matter, and to use this science to set a standard known as the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. These science-based standards form the basis of how the federal government protects communities across the United States from harmful PM 2.5 pollution.

My colleague Derrick Jackson has gone into greater detail about this, but the basic gist is that the EPA is currently proposing to tighten the primary annual PM 2.5 standard to between 9 and 10 micrograms per cubic meter and to keep in place the current 24-hour PM 2.5 standard of 35 micrograms per cubic meter. This is both an excellent and a terrible decision. It is excellent to see the EPA wanting to tighten the annual standard (the current standard is 12 micrograms per cubic meter) but it is also terrible that the EPA is not fully committing to the best available science by lowering the annual and 24-hour standard further.

The EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), an independent and highly respected group of scientific experts, weighed in extensively on the EPA’s scientific and policy documents and concluded that even low levels of PM 2.5 pollution can cause harm to human health, and therefore the standards need to be tightened. Specifically, the majority of CASAC members recommended lowering the annual PM 2.5 standard to between 8 and 10 micrograms. Additionally, a majority of CASAC favored lowering the 24-hour standard and “suggested that a range of 25 to 30 micrograms per cubic meter would be adequately protective.”

As I’ve written before, the EPA’s approach to reviewing the science on particulate matter is a robust one. But it also has some inherent weaknesses in how it incorporates the pollutant’s health effects for populations that are more sensitive, such as people with lung disorders, and for populations that are more disproportionately exposed, such as BIPOC communities. Therefore, the EPA would do well to choose the most protective standards possible in order to protect underserved communities.

Fossil fuel industry wants to undermine science-based protections

The EPA’s public hearing on its proposed PM 2.5 rule took place in late February over a three-day period. Of the 281 speakers who presented, 94 percent (263 speakers) urged the EPA to lower the annual PM 2.5 standard to 8 micrograms and lower the 24-hour standard to 25 micrograms.

Of the 6 percent of commenters who urged the EPA to retain or weaken the proposed PM 2.5 standards, the vast majority had direct ties to industry. The speakers included representatives from the American Chemistry Council and American Petroleum Institute–industry trade groups infamous for casting doubt on public health and environmental science to benefit their clients’ profit margins. For years, we at UCS have written extensively of the dangerous disinformation practices of the American Chemistry Council and American Petroleum Institute and their ongoing efforts to dismantle public health protections.

As noted above, the speakers arguing for less protective PM 2.5 standards primarily utilized two tactics. Let’s look at them in more detail.

First, they claimed that the science is in doubt. This is frankly ridiculous. Particulate matter pollution is one of the most well-studied types of air pollutants; for decades the evidence in the scientific literature has overwhelmingly shown how deadly PM 2.5 pollution is, even at low levels of concentration. The EPA’s supplement to the integrated science assessment on particulate matter runs to more than 300 pages that painstakingly review the scientific literature and conclude that, even at low levels of exposure, the relationship between PM 2.5 concentrations and cardiovascular effects and mortality is “causal.” This is the highest level of scientific certainty possible for this process and shows that the weight of scientific evidence is simply undeniable.

Second, industry representatives argued that economic considerations should be taken into account when setting PM 2.5 standards. This argument is utter hogwash because it stands in direct violation of the Clean Air Act. Standards for outdoor particulate matter are governed by section 109 of the Clean Air Act which clearly states that the standard must be based on criteria that “are requisite to protect the public health.”

This part of the law, requiring the government to consider only science-based evidence that can protect public health, has been upheld for years. As a congressional research service report from 2017 put it: “For 45 years, EPA has interpreted Section 109 as prohibiting the [EPA] Administrator from considering costs in setting the standards. In 2001, this interpretation was affirmed in a unanimous Supreme Court decision, Whitman v. American Trucking Associations. The Court pointed to numerous other CAA [Clean Air Act] sections where Congress had explicitly allowed consideration of economic factors, concluding that if Congress had intended to allow such factors in the setting of a primary National Ambient Air Quality Standards, it would have been more forthright—particularly given the centrality of the NAAQS concept to the CAA’s regulatory scheme. The court concluded that Section 109(b)(1) ‘unambiguously bars cost considerations from the NAAQS-setting process.’”

The EPA needs to pass the most health-protective measure possible

During the public hearing, industry representatives asked the EPA to set less protective PM 2.5 standards. This position ignores the best available science and lets thousands of people die every year so that industries can continue their practices of burning fossil fuels and polluting the air.

Fossil fuel companies are well aware of how harmful the air pollution generated by their activities can be for human health. For instance, reporters from the Guardian examined documents showing that the oil industry knew for at least 50 years that the PM 2.5 pollution associated with the burning of fossil fuels could harm human health. Just as fossil fuel industries have cast doubt on the science of climate change for decades, they are now using similar disinformation tactics to undermine the policy process protecting people from dangerous PM 2.5 pollution.

According to the EPA’s own analysis, if we tighten the annual PM 2.5 standard to 8 micrograms per cubic meter, we will save the lives of between 6,600 and 12,000 people every year. If the EPA is serious about following the best available science and protecting the health and safety of communities across the country, this is what it must do: lower its annual PM 2.5 standard to 8 micrograms per cubic meter and its 24-hour standard to 25 micrograms per cubic meter.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) recently conducted a survey of federal scientists to ask about the state of science, and the results are in. This is our tenth version of the survey since 2004 and, to our surprise and delight, while challenges remain, the widespread consensus is that scientists in the federal government feel more positive about their workplaces now than they have at any other time we have administered the survey.

We sent the survey in September and October of last year to over 46,000 scientists at six federal agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Environ­mental Protection Agency (EPA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The survey was conducted in partnership with the University of New Hampshire Survey Center and the project received approval from the University of New Hampshire’s institutional review board.

Several interesting trends in the survey data made us say either “Eureka!” or kindled our interest to learn more. Here are three takeaways that we think offer important insights about how to further strengthen scientific integrity policies at agencies.

Marked improvements in scientific integrity training

We at UCS feel strongly that federal scientists should be well trained on the contents of their agency’s scientific integrity policies. It is important for scientists to thoroughly know their rights, to have easy access to scientific integrity policy documents, and to know who to turn to–and what the investigative process will be like–if they witness a potential scientific integrity violation.

Training on scientific integrity policies may even be a way to help strengthen diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility considerations at agencies. Scientists who are earlier in their careers or who identify with a historically marginalized group may feel less able to speak up when they witness a potential scientific integrity violation. Training can therefore help provide them with a basic set of tools to understand their rights. As my colleague Jacob Carter previously wrote, “Early-career scientists typically do not receive training on scientific integrity despite the issue’s clear importance to the scientific community. Training early-career scientists on this critical issue could help bring greater awareness about the issue of scientific integrity and help educate the future scientific workforce.”

A majority of the scientists we surveyed–73 percent (1,170 respondents)–reported that they had been adequately trained on their scientific integrity policies. This far outpaces the percentages when we conducted these surveys during the Trump and Obama administrations. For instance, at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, 72 percent (140 respondents) said they felt they had been adequately trained on scientific integrity policies, an increase of 16 percent compared to our 2018 results (56 percent, 189 respondents), and an increase of 40 percent compared to results from 2015 (32 percent, 250 respondents). And the US Fish and Wildlife Service is no outlier; we saw similarly large increases at all the agencies we surveyed.

While training on scientific integrity policies is certainly not the “be all and end of all” for ensuring that agencies are protecting scientists and their work from political interference, it is a good indicator that things are moving in the right direction and can help lay the groundwork for larger changes at agencies.

Staff capacity was a top concern

As UCS previously investigated, a large-scale exodus of scientific staff took place during the Trump administration. For instance, we previously found that the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, the agency’s scientific research arm, lost 12 percent of its workforce between 2016 and 2020. Our survey results indicate that, unfortunately, a lack of staff capacity continues to adversely harm science-based agencies.

Fifty-nine percent of surveyed scientists (982 respondents) reported noticing staff departures, retirements, or hiring freezes in the past two years. Of these, some 88 percent (868 respondents) reported that a lack of capacity made it difficult for them to fulfill their agencies’ science-based missions. Seventy percent (715 respondents) of those who reported burnout said it was due to lack of staff capacity. And respondents overwhelmingly chose limited staff capacity as the greatest barrier to science-based decisionmaking.

One NOAA scientist phrased it this way: “The most significant limiting factor for my agency’s ability to maintain scientific integrity is its staffing level. We are consistently being asked to do more with either less, or the current level of, staffing.”

The lack of staff has recently reached a dire level at the EPA and may impede the ability to fully implement President Biden’s climate goals. Staff levels at the EPA today stand at approximately the same levels as in the 1980s. Thousands of EPA employees associated with the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, a union representing approximately half of the EPA’s workforce, are currently lobbying Congress to address staffing issues at their agency.

More than 160 scientists report being bullied or harassed

Online harassment and bullying against academic and federal scientists represent ongoing threats that have increased in recent years. Scientists from certain fields – such as climate scientists, social scientists, and COVID-19 scientists – appear to be especially prone to online harassment. For instance, a March 2022 survey conducted by the journal Science found that 38 percent of COVID-19 researchers report­ed experiencing at least one type of attack, ranging from person­al insults to death threats.

We asked two new survey questions to assess whether federal scientists are being bullied or harassed by people outside the government as a result of their scientific work. Our results indicate that this is not a common problem facing federal scientists; 79 percent of scientists (1,283 respondents) reported that they had not experienced such harassment in the last two years. However, we are deeply concerned that 10 percent of surveyed scientists (162 respondents) stated that they had been bullied in the last two years. At 16 percent (52 respondents), CDC scientists reported the highest percentages of bullying among the six agencies we surveyed.

Even one scientist that experiences this form of harassment is too much. Scientists are simply doing their jobs, carrying out studies and analyzing data to better understand aspects of our world; these activities should never lead to threats to their lives or their family’s lives or other forms of harassment.

Additionally, we found a much more mixed response when we asked whether scientists were aware of the process for reporting external harassment in their agency and if they felt that their agency would sufficiently protect them from harm. Some 45 percent (725 respondents) agreed this was the case while 28 percent (451 respondents) disagreed. The results indicate that agencies can do more to make federal scientists aware of how to raise concerns about external harassment and to feel better protected when such situations arise.

Solid gains found but more work needed

The scientists who took our survey reported stronger and more effective scientific integrity protections at their agencies, better workplace conditions for scientists, and progress on measures to increase diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility at agencies. However, scientists also described a number of challenges that remain, including a lack of staff to carry out the agency’s science-based work, doubts on whether scientific integrity protections will last beyond the current administration, and an ongoing lack of diversity at agencies’ workforces, leadership, and advisory committees.

It is clear that the Biden administration has made some real progress to strengthen the state of scientific integrity at agencies. Recently, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy released a scientific integrity framework that agencies are now in the process of adopting. It should help further standardize and strengthen scientific integrity across agencies.

However, there is still a lot more work to be done to protect scientists and their work from political interference, including the need for Congress to codify these gains into law so they can stand no matter what administration comes to power. We at the Union of Concerned Scientists will continue to monitor these issues closely as we have done since 2004. And we’ll continue to press agencies to ensure that unfettered science and data are informing government policies.

Recently, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report that will likely have major effects on how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) protects people from dangerous air pollutants.

At issue is the EPA’s process of compiling what the agency calls an “integrated science assessment.” The focus might sound esoteric, but the stakes could not be higher, especially given the fact that a large and growing body of evidence links air pollution to death and illness, particularly cardiovascular disease, cancer, and respiratory problems. For instance, particulate matter air pollution is one of the leading causes of death around the world and it can potentially affect or damage every organ in the body.

Understanding the EPA’s integrated science assessment

When Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, they determined that six so-called “criteria air pollutants”—particulate matter, ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, lead, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide—were so dangerous they required a rigorous and regularly updated process of assessment and policymaking. The law requires that the EPA carry out a study, called an “integrated science assessment,” that combs through the scientific literature and articulates exactly how dangerous these pollutants are to people’s health and the environment. The EPA’s integrated science assessment forms the scientific backbone of the national ambient air quality standards, the set of standards that determines how the federal government protects communities across the United States from these harmful air pollutants.

There’s little question that the EPA needs the strongest possible science-based process to do its job of safeguarding the public from air pollution. The report by the National Academies of Science—one of the nation’s most well-respected institutions of scientific expertise—is, in essence, the scientific equivalent of a report card that can help the EPA make its integrated science assessment process even more robust.

The National Academies report is largely positive about the EPA’s weight-of-evidence approach for determining causality (that is, determining if a particular air pollutant causes harm to health and welfare). This finding itself is important for validating that the EPA’s approach is scientifically rigorous.

But the National Academies also makes several recommendations about where the EPA can improve its methods, including how best to assess harms that are occurring in populations that are more vulnerable to the detrimental effects of air pollutants. The EPA would be wise to listen to these recommendations because doing so will translate to policy decisions that can better protect human health and the environment.

Centering “sensitive” populations

The first recommendation in the National Academies report presses the EPA to more fully assess the impacts of air pollutants on populations (human and other biological organisms) that are especially susceptible to their effects. In this recommendation, the National Academies also notably includes impacts to at-risk ecosystems which can help highlight impacts on endangered and threatened species and other sensitive or critical habitats especially vulnerable to air pollution.

For the six criteria air pollutants, the Clean Air Act charges the EPA to provide health protections to all human populations, including “sensitive” populations such as asthmatics, children, and the elderly. Recently, the EPA has been trying to prioritize an examination of the health and welfare effects on sensitive populations, as can be seen by the EPA’s 2021 supplemental integrated science assessment on particulate matter air pollution. However, the agency has separated this examination from its efforts to determine causality. This is concerning since causality determinations of a health or welfare effect essentially form the basis of whether the EPA will set looser or more stringent standards for a particular criteria air pollutant.

As the report highlights, numerous scientific organizations (including UCS) over the years have pointed out that the EPA also needs to give greater attention to marginalized communities—such as communities of color, low-income communities, children, and the elderly, and people with pre-existing health conditions—that are at-risk of developing more frequent and severe health impacts from exposure to air pollution.

The problem is that the current way the EPA assesses air pollution science tends to overlook health effects that are occurring more often in marginalized communities. For instance, the National Academies report highlights an instance where a very large study on healthy human adults—which was conducted at multiple sites and appeared to find less evidence of health effects due to ozone pollution—appeared to drown out smaller studies that showed strong evidence that people with cardiovascular conditions, or at-risk of cardiovascular conditions, were susceptible to health effects due to ozone pollution. Additionally, many studies of human exposure to air pollutants have tended to exclude people with serious health conditions and often do not have good representation of people or color and low-income individuals.

The National Academies report finds that unless the EPA has specific methods in place to assess whether at-risk populations are experiencing health symptoms caused by the air pollutant being examined, its current methodology will place a greater weight on health risks to the overall, average population rather than health risks occurring in marginalized populations. If the EPA is serious about its commitment to environmental justice, it needs to follow this recommendation and fully implement an examination of at-risk population when assessing causality.

More transparency needed

The National Academies report also points out that more transparency is needed in EPA’s methodology, such as by: providing details on how the agency chooses the studies it decides to include (and not include) in its integrated science assessments; considering more types of confounding variables that can influence study results, such as weather effects and socioeconomic and demographic differences; and articulating a clear process for identifying which scientific disciplines and perspectives will be needed when making a causal determination.

As we learned under the Trump administration, this process can become sidelined when political leaders work to disband and/or undermine the scientific advisory committees and EPA scientists who help assess the scientific literature on the health and welfare dangers of air pollutants. Therefore, it is vital for the EPA to implement the National Academies of Sciences’ recommendations as this transparency can enhance public trust in the EPA’s process and thwart attempts by current and future political leaders who might want to meddle in the process.

The EPA needs to assure the public that it is committed to using an equitable and rigorous science-based process to protect all people in the United States, particularly marginalized communities, from the enormous health burdens that can result from exposure to air pollution.

While every toxic chemical named in the book was either banned or severely restricted in the United States by 1975, Carson’s underlying message of the need for strong science-based policymaking to protect us from the harms of toxic chemicals is still especially applicable today. As Carson put it, “If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals—eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones—we had better know something about their nature and their power.”

The need for science-based decisionmaking about toxic chemical exposures is particularly acute for marginalized communities—such as Black, Indigenous, people of color, low-income, and rural communities—that often face the brunt of the harms from environmental hazards due to the long and cruel legacy of systemic racism and white supremacy. This equity-focused lens is missing from Carson’s book. It was first brought to the forefront by the dedication of leaders in civil rights and worker rights, such as Martin Luther King Jr and Cesar Chavez; later, it was taken up by members of impacted communities and coalesced into the environmental justice movement. It is important to acknowledge this oversight in Carson’s work, and in the subsequent regulatory infrastructure designed to regulate chemicals, and to commit ourselves to do better in today’s world by working to identify and address these environmental injustices.

As we continue to press our government to take stronger actions to study, regulate, or ban the tens of thousands of potentially harmful chemicals, it is helpful to take a moment to reflect on what Carson’s 1962 book can teach us about today’s world.

Carson was a badass federal scientist

Rachel Carson spent most of her professional life as a marine biologist and writer for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. According to the book’s foreword, the inspiration for Silent Spring came directly from Carson’s time there. While working for the agency, she and her scientific colleagues became alarmed by the widespread use of DDT and other long-lasting poisons in agricultural control programs.

These concerns are still alive today. In our 2018 survey, for instance, a number of scientists at the Fish and Wildlife Service expressed alarm at how science was sidelined or politicized for issues like endangered or threatened species protection. We are currently surveying scientists from the Fish and Wildlife Service this year, as well as scientists at six other agencies to see if and how these concerns may have changed during the current administration.

While reading Silent Spring, I was struck by how Carson brilliantly used her training as a federal scientist to make a case for science as a foundation for policymaking. In chapter ten, for instance, Carson describes the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) disastrous attempts in 1957 to control the invasive fire ant species. The plan was to carry out a massive pesticide spraying operation on 20 million acres across nine southern states. One of the pesticides used was heptachlor, a probable cancer-causing chemical that can damage the nervous systems of humans and other animals.

When federal and academic scientists published studies showing that the pesticide-spraying operations were causing enormous population drops in poultry, livestock, pets, and other wildlife, the USDA “brushed away all evidence of damage as exaggerated and misleading.” Carson pointed out that the USDA also failed to study whether these pesticides were safe. “In short, the Department of Agriculture embarked on its program without even elementary investigation of what was already known about the chemical to be used—or if it investigated, it ignored the findings.”

Carson also explicitly called out the hypocrisy inherent in government agencies at the time. Scientists were employed to work at federal agencies, but there was no requirement that agencies use their scientific work when making decisions about pesticides. “Much of the necessary knowledge is now available but we do not use it. We train ecologists in our universities and even employ them in our governmental agencies but we seldom take their advice. We allow the chemical death rain to fall as though there were no alternative, whereas in fact there are many, and our ingenuity could soon discover many more if given opportunity.”

Industry wanted her silenced

Rachel Carson bravely voiced her scientific opinion despite an onslaught of opposition from industry representatives who knew that the truth she was reporting would imperil sales of their products. Even before the book’s release, industry representatives and their political allies strongly condemned Silent Spring and carried out a substantial disinformation campaign to discredit it that included: threatening the book’s publishers with a libel lawsuit, raising $25,000 to fund a public relations counterattack (an enormous amount of money in 1962), and issuing a slew of advertisements and letters to the editor describing the benefits of pesticides.

Industry’s main argument was that if pesticides such as DDT were banned, restricted, or even regulated, the entire agriculture system would collapse. And yes, they really were that hyperbolic. In 1963, an executive of the American Cyanamid Company stated, “If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.” Two industry-funded chemists worked to misinform the public by claiming that bird populations actually increased after the introduction of DDT—a claim that was overwhelmingly refuted by the scientific community.

But perhaps most insidiously, some in the chemical industry targeted Rachel Carson personally. Her critics painted Carson as a probable communist (e.g., disloyal and unpatriotic) and as an unscientific, nature loving, “hysterical” woman. As one agricultural expert told a reporter who was covering the main congressional hearings prompted by the book, “You’re never going to satisfy organic farmers or emotional women in garden clubs.”

As we examined in a scientific study published last year, disinformation campaigns by industry have a long and aggressive history of manipulating the science-policy process. Industry has found that casting doubt on science, sidelining science, and harassing scientists are all powerful ways to shape regulatory policymaking to their benefit and to increase their profit margins.

Chemical safety requires science-based decisionmaking

In a swift response to Silent Spring, then-President John F. Kennedy set up a special panel called the “Life Sciences Panel” in the government’s Science Advisory Committee to study the health impacts of pesticides and investigate Carson’s research. At that time, the Science Advisory Committee provided scientific advice to the president, similar to the current President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. (It was later disbanded and replaced by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.) The panel’s report strongly supported Carson’s findings. Carson’s book also prompted congressional hearings and led to the first overhaul of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act in 1964, closing a major loophole called “protest registration” that industry was using at the time to keep pesticides on the market even when science showed they were causing enormous harm to public health and the environment.

Carson’s book also helped prompt the passage of the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, the main law that regulates chemicals today and requires the testing of new chemicals for safety. Unfortunately, however, this law has not fixed the problems that Carson pointed out in 1962: the chemical industry continues to deploy many of the same tactics from 60 years ago and continues today to undermine our ability to use science-based measures to regulate chemicals.  

Today, UCS is continuing Rachel Carson’s legacy by fighting industry disinformation and advocating for strong science-based protections on toxic chemicals such as PFAS and ethylene oxide. Our government has a fundamental duty to use science to protect us from environmental harms. Like Carson, we need to speak truth to power and hold our government to account to ensure that all communities, particularly underserved communities, are protected from these harms using the best available science.

We all rely on federal agencies to use unfettered, impartial science and data in their decisionmaking processes. After all, these agencies actions often have a direct impact on how well the public is protected from threats such as climate change impacts, natural disasters, unsafe food and drugs, transmissible disease, and air pollution.

Surveying federal scientists to hear directly from them about their experiences is one of the longest-running projects that UCS undertakes. This current effort is our tenth survey since 2004 and every iteration has provided a wealth of data and information. The results have provided valuable information to agencies, scientists, the media, the public, and Congress and have led to increased awareness of and transparency about how science-based agencies operate and how agencies can improve their practices to better support federal scientists and protect the public.

To ensure the highest-caliber practices, we are conducting this survey in partnership with the University of New Hampshire’s Survey Center. We are implementing strict data protections and anonymization procedures because we feel strongly that survey participants should feel secure in the knowledge that their data is being protected as stringently as possible (see our website for more information).

UCS surveys make waves

Over the course of the 18 years we have administered these surveys of federal scientists, the results have led to a variety of impacts. Federal agencies have used the data from these surveys to update their policies to create a better working environment for federal scientists and improve the extent to which science is informing their decisionmaking. The information from these surveys has helped agencies pinpoint where further investigation and policy reform are needed.

In 2011, for example, the National Science Foundation developed a new media policy in response to UCS’s survey responses and policy analyses. In 2012, the chief scientist of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) responded to our survey’s findings in a blog post, committing to pursuing, monitoring, and enhancing the FDA’s scientific integrity policies. In 2013, the US Geological Survey used the survey results to help improve its social media policy to better ensure scientifically accurate agency communications.

In 2020, we presented the results of our 2018 survey to a team at the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigating scientific integrity violations and political interference at public health agencies. When the GAO report was released earlier this year, it’s findings proved influential and led to a congressional hearing on the topic.

UCS survey results have been prominently featured in Congressional testimony, including at a 2022 hearing arranged by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis and at two hearings in 2019 and 2021 arranged by the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. Our 2018 survey, which documented significant workforce reductions under the Trump administration and led us to investigate the issue further, was also featured in a 2021 congressional report about the pressing need to rebuild scientific capacity at federal agencies. 

Our 2018 survey received widespread recognition from roughly a dozen news outlets, including The New York Times (2019, 2020), Washington Post (2018, 2021), Science (2018), and E&E News (2021), among others. Sen.s Sheldon Whitehouse and Tom Carper praised our 2018 survey on Twitter, as did Samantha Powers, the former US Ambassador to the United Nations.

One of the questions on the 2018 survey asked federal scientists to report on the impacts of their agency’s policy actions on historically marginalized groups or underserved communities. The responses were so eye-opening we decided to write a 50-page report on the topic, in collaboration with environmental justice community partners. We briefed congressional leaders on the report’s results in two panel sessions, one to the House of Representative’s United for Climate and Environmental Justice Task Force and Natural Resources Committee and the other to the Senate’s Environmental Justice Caucus.

We also published the results of our 2018 survey in the journal PLoS One in 2020. A major finding of our study was that perceived losses in scientific integrity were reported less at agencies where leadership expressed strong support of scientists and science-based decisionmaking processes, particularly at the CDC, FDA, and NOAA. In other words, we found that the more an agency’s leaders seemed to care about science and scientific integrity, the more likely they were to spark a cascading positive effect across the agency at all levels.

Federal scientists have valuable information to share

Have you worked at an organization where, from the outside it may look functional, but on the inside you witness numerous concerning and potentially unethical workplace practices that could have disastrous consequences? Or have you worked in a place where, after you joined, you were honestly impressed by the integrity and hard work of your colleagues, leaving you hopeful about the organization’s future and eager to learn more?

Federal scientists face similar types of scenarios at their jobs. They are some of the first people to observe when the leadership teams at science-based agencies place politics over science, or when a culture of fear or self-censorship develops at an agency. Federal scientists are also some of the first people to see and experience when agency leadership cares deeply about science or when there is a culture of working hard to maintain and improve processes to ensure robust science-based decisionmaking.

For instance, as we have learned, even under more science-friendly administrations, federal scientists have sometimes reported instances where scientific decisions are swayed by politics or political influence has inhibited their ability to carry out their agency’s mission. In our 2015 survey, for example, somewhere between 46 and 73 percent of respondents at different agencies surveyed reported that political interests at their agencies were given too much weight.

Under an administration openly hostile to science, these concerning trends often become even more prominent and can result in egregious consequences. In our 2018 survey, more than 1,000 scientists stated that they avoided using, or were ordered to avoid using, scientific words that were considered politically contentious–such as the phrase “climate change.”

By surveying federal scientists, we get a data-driven glimpse into the inner workings of our government’s federal agencies from the very people who are working there and trying to ensure that science at their agency is as robust and impactful as possible.

Got 20 minutes for scientific integrity?

We believe there is great value in hearing the voices and perspectives of federal scientists. This survey is our way of telling their stories to the public and to press agencies, and helping encourage these agencies, to carry out evidence-based changes that can better protect federal scientists and the public.

These surveys have informed many UCS recommendations, reports, studies, and advocacy efforts about how best to strengthen scientific integrity policies at federal agencies. The higher the response rate is on our survey, the more accurately we can represent perspectives from the wide diversity of people that make up the scientific workforce at agencies, such as scientists of different ages, genders, races/ethnicities, sexual orientations, and years working at an agency, among other attributes.

If you are a scientist at a federal agency, please consider taking 20-30 minutes to complete the survey and encourage your colleagues to do the same. Otherwise, stay tuned for the survey results and how you can help advance the role of science in decisionmaking. And, in the meantime, you can check out our past surveys here, and our website for our 2022 survey located here.

The federal government has a crucial role to play in protecting access to abortion. President Biden’s recent executive order is an important start. It instructs agencies to take steps on a range of topics, from improving access to medication abortion to promoting access to legal representation for patients, providers, and third parties who are lawfully involved with abortion care. Additionally, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra have issued strong statements laying out the actions that their agencies can take to ensure access to abortion continues under circumstances where it remains legal.

There is a lack of details on how exactly the Biden administration will carry out the goals laid out in the executive order, and there are further actions that the administration should consider taking. However, one thing is clear. One of the most important actions that federal and state governments can take to protect the right to an abortion is to provide people, to the fullest extent of the law, with access to medication abortion.

The science is clear: medication abortion is safe and effective

A two-drug protocol is currently approved by the Food and Drug administration (FDA) for terminating pregnancies during the first 70 days (10 weeks) of a pregnancy. One of these drugs is called mifepristone (sold under the brand name Mifeprex), and it blocks progesterone, a hormone essential to the development of a pregnancy. The second drug, which is taken 24-48 hours later, is called misoprostol (sold under the brand name Cytotec), and it works to empty the uterus.

In 2020, the majority of abortions were medication, rather than procedural abortions. In the coming years, medication abortion is likely to account for an even greater share of abortions in states where restrictions make it hard to obtain care.

The science is very clear on this: these drugs are safe and they work well. Data indicate that the approved regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol administered at nine weeks of gestation or before successfully terminates the pregnancy 99.6 percent of the time, and has only a 0.4 percent risk of major complications. In comparison, giving birth in the US is associated with a nearly 13 percent risk of major complications, and for patients undergoing cesarean delivery at low-performing hospitals, the risk of major complications rises to 21 percent.

Forcing people to give birth is not only traumatic and burdensome, but it increases the risk that women and other pregnant people will suffer severe health outcomes. This is especially true for Black and Indigenous women, who are two to three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women.

FDA continues to approve these medications for a reason

Since 2000, the FDA has approved mifepristone for use in the termination of pregnancies. In 2016, the body of evidence from providers, who were using different dosages and timelines from what the agency originally approved, was so substantial that the agency modified the approved dosages and increased the window of eligibility from 49 days to 70 days of gestation.

The FDA has been challenged in recent years to remove restrictions limiting access to abortion medications, prompting the agency to carry out an extensive scientific review of its restrictions on the medications.

In December 2021, the FDA decided, based on the weight of the evidence, that the in-person requirement for mifepristone could be removed and the providers can now prescribe the drugs via telehealth. Abortion pills can now be distributed by mail-in states that do not restrict telehealth for medication abortion. However, the agency still kept in place a major restriction: that pharmacies that wish to distribute the pills must become certified to do so. This additional procedural hurdle will likely result in fewer pharmacies stocking the medication abortion regimen than would do so if this regimen were treated like any other drug.

Since 2000, the FDA has carried a number of in-depth and extensive scientific reviews on mifepristone and misoprostol for use in abortion. Each time, the agency has not only confirmed the safety and effectiveness of these medications but has found that the science indicates more access, not less. The FDA should continue to work to drop the remaining restrictions to the fullest extent possible based on the best available science. Decisionmakers who disagree with the FDA’s current position and work to remove access to these medications are not guided by the best available science.

Some states are undermining the FDA’s authority

Prior to the Dobbs decision, states did not outright ban access to medication abortion, but instead placed additional restrictions on the medications that went beyond the FDA’s approach. For instance, 19 states prohibited access to abortion medications through telehealth services, and required an in-person visit to obtain the medications.

One particularly nasty tactic that some states codified into law forces doctors to lie to their patients about medication abortion. Specifically, seven states–Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Utah–passed laws that require doctors to mislead their patients by telling them that medication abortions can be reversed after mifepristone dosage (if the patient has not yet taken misoprostol) with a large dose of progesterone. These statements are not based on the kind of high-quality research and expert examination that should guide treatment decisions and discussions with patients.

State legislators appear to be gearing up to directly target access to abortion medication. Can states do this? Can states fully disregard the FDA’s scientific authority and make up their own rules on who gets access to these important treatments? At the moment, there is no clear legal precedent on this. Ongoing legal cases will likely clarify how closely state policy must align with FDA’s science-based decisions.

Banning abortion ignores science and is inhumane

The science is very clear that being denied access to abortion and being forced to give birth increases the risk of poor outcomes such as financial instability, missed educational and career opportunities, difficulty leaving an abusive partner, maternal mortality, and other severe health and wellness consequences. Furthermore, these public health consequences will disproportionately harm those who are most marginalized in our society, including people of color, low-income people, LGBTQ+ individuals, immigrants, people with disabilities, and people in rural communities.

My UCS colleagues and I have gone into further details on the enormous public health consequences of banning or restricting abortion. This includes discussions on how overturning Roe v Wade will harm reproductive health, the importance of abortion access for the health and safety of pregnant people and their families, how previous federal rulemaking forced doctors to lie to or mislead their low-income patients about abortion, how ideological policies that limit access to abortion are based primarily on misinformation, and how the scientific community needs to step up and declare that policies banning abortion are anti-science and deprive people of their basic human rights.

Several states are choosing to criminalize access to a safe, effective, and vitally important medical procedure and place a wide variety of people–such as medical professionals, people who have miscarriages, and anyone who helps a pregnant person obtain access to an abortion–in legal jeopardy. For those of you upset by the Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs and who want to do something, consider donating to your local abortion fund; if you need assistance with access to abortion yourself, INeedAnA.com can provide information, and abortion funds can provide support. Additionally, consider financially supporting organizations that work towards reproductive justice. And if you want to know what rights are still protected federally and in your own state, the Center for Reproductive Rights is a great resource.

This is the time to mourn the loss of a fundamental right to bodily autonomy, and to grieve for the rights that we may lose on contraception, gay marriage, and the right to privacy in our relationships. But this is not the end. We at UCS will continue to fight against these types of anti-science forces, and work to ensure that our government leaders do all they can to protect people’s health using science-based decisionmaking.

When I watched the hearing, the name rang a bell. This was the same Jeffrey Clark who oversaw environmental enforcement during the Trump administration, an area of (lack of) oversight that alarmed UCS.

Testimony and evidence have continued to build a case that Jeffrey Clark–a mid-level political appointee at the Department of Justice (DOJ) during the Trump administration–came close to taking over the top position at the DOJ. He appeared ready to follow President Trump’s wishes to cast doubt on the 2020 election in an attempt to subvert the fundamental core of our democracy. This action would have pushed the country into a constitutional crisis.

Given these serious allegations, it is worth exploring more about Jeffrey Clark’s track record at the DOJ before this point.

The DOJ environmental wing is meant to go after criminal polluters

Before resigning on January 14, 2021, Clark was the head of two divisions within the DOJ, the Environment and Natural Resources Division, and the Civil Division. Clark’s role at the Civil Division was in an acting position and for only a few months, so Clark’s primary influence at the agency was running the DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division.

From November 2018 to January 2021, Jeffrey Clark wielded enormous power over the environmental enforcement of our country. The division has approximately 550 lawyers who investigate issues like pollution, public lands, wildlife, and tribal sovereignty. This DOJ division steps in to prosecute crimes such as industries producing illegally high levels of air pollution, people harming or trafficking endangered species, people who throw raw sewage into rivers, oil companies drilling without the right safety equipment, and city governments that are not delivering clean drinking water, among other crimes.

The laws that this office enforces are some of the most important environmental laws in the country, including the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (also called the Superfund law). The health and safety–and even the very lives–of communities and wildlife across the country depend upon the enforcement actions of this DOJ division.

In other words, the same person accused of trying to subvert democracy was previously responsible for much of our federal environmental enforcement.

The Environment and Natural Resources Division is also home to the DOJ’s Office of Environmental Justice. Strong environmental enforcement has always been one of the rallying cries of the environmental justice movement, as powerful groups may be more emboldened to undermine the health and safety of marginalized communities over richer or whiter communities. Therefore Clark’s actions had an especially outsized impact on underserved communities that face a litany of environmental justice concerns.

Rewind: remember what happened under President Trump

The prior administration was one of the most anti-environmental administrations in recent years. At the Union of Concerned Scientists, we recorded 77 attacks on science during the Trump administration that directly involved environmental issues, the vast majority of which (53) occurred during Clark’s tenure as the Assistant Attorney General of the Environment and Natural Resources Division.

Several of these cases directly involved lawyers from Clark’s division defending the Trump administration’s most egregious anti-science and anti-environmental actions, including the administration’s efforts to gut the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and weaken the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS). While waiting for Congress to vote on his nomination, Clark directly argued on behalf of the Trump administration on a high-profile case at the US Court of Appeals, to scrap a rule formulated under the Obama administration that would have strengthened measures to ensure that hardrock mining companies would pay for the cleanup of the incredibly toxic pollution they wrought on nearby communities.

In a previous report, we investigated environmental enforcement at the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Criminal Investigation Division under the prior administration. For criminal environmental cases, this division of the EPA works directly with a subdivision in the DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, known as the Environmental Crimes Section. The EPA criminal investigators examine these cases, and it is the DOJ lawyers that prosecute these cases.

Our 2019 analysis showed an enormous decrease in criminal prosecutions of environmental crimes by EPA and DOJ personnel during the Trump administration as compared to the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Data from the third fiscal year of the Trump administration (October 1, 2018, to September 30, 2019) approximates to Clark’s first year on the job, as he was sworn in on November 1, 2018. What we can see is that Clark, like his predecessor Jeffrey H. Wood, who was the acting head of the division from 2017 to 2018, failed to properly enforce environmental laws.

In particular, Clark and Wood compromised the enforcement of two landmark environmental laws, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. These two laws are fundamental in keeping our air and water free from pollution, and therefore failing to enforce these laws can directly compromise the health and safety of communities and the environment.

Jeffrey Clark led a team that limited environmental enforcement

At times, Clark was willing to hobble the division’s ability to enforce environmental laws more than his predecessor. In 2017, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the head of DOJ, along with Wood, began to greatly limit a longstanding and important enforcement tool used by communities impacted by criminal levels of pollution from nearby facilities.

This enforcement measure, known as supplemental environmental projects, is one of the only enforcement measures available that affected community members can use during an EPA settlement case process that can help mitigate the damage caused by the polluter. It requires the polluting party to directly address the harm they caused in the local community when they violated the environmental law. In March 2020, Clark went beyond Wood and worked to stop the use of supplemental environmental projects in even more circumstances, leaving only one restricted avenue available for use for cases related to diesel emission reductions.

This means that Clark, except in one narrow situation, blocked an important way that communities could hold polluters directly accountable for their actions and press them to provide funding that can reduce that harm. In the past, supplemental environmental projects have been used to remove lead paint from public housing, install and operate air filtration systems in affected neighborhoods, and establish funds to reduce the runoff of pesticides from agricultural lands, among other things.

These actions run counter to decades of EPA policy and DOJ practice. But even in this circumstance, when Clark went a bit further than his predecessor, we can see Clark was acting very much in line with other Trump administration officials in the DOJ, including Jeff Sessions.

You don’t have to be a household name to do great harm

During his time as Assistant Attorney General of the Environment and Natural Resources Division, Clark was in charge of enforcing the laws that are at the bedrock of our public health and environmental protections–and he fell short in his charge. By managing a team that undermined enforcement, he had a substantial negative impact on the health and safety of the environment and of communities across the country, especially underserved communities.

Perhaps many of us have forgotten the day-in and day-out erosion of science and democracy that the prior administration carried out. But the example of Jeffrey Clark, an obscure political appointee, serves as a reminder–there are people willing and able to undermine the very purpose of our government agencies, subvert democracy, and endanger our health and safety for their own political benefit. And the main way to prevent the next Jeffrey Clark is for us to vote in leaders at local, state, and federal governments that advocate for equitable, democratic, and science-based decisionmaking.

I laid out in my oral and written testimony how political interference in federal science – such as buried reports, manipulated data, and censored scientists – can have drastic consequences on the health and safety of the public, especially underserved communities. This was especially prominent in 2020 when government officials repeatedly interfered with the ability of federal agencies to research, set policy, or communicate to the public about COVID-19. When federal scientists and officials faced this onslaught of political interference, they were not able to act on the best available science to protect the public which, in turn, translated to the virus spreading rapidly, hospitals being overwhelmed, and people facing severe illness. Communities of color, Indigenous communities, and low-income communities already experiencing longstanding health inequities were hit hardest by government failures to act on the science and protect public health.

The COVID-19 pandemic showed in the starkest terms why scientific integrity matters and for whom it matters most. I hope my testimony will help press congressional leaders to take action and strengthen scientific integrity policies.

What I told Congress:

“Thank you, Chairman Clyburn, Ranking Member Scalise, and Members of the Subcommittee for holding this important hearing. My name is Anita Desikan, and I am a Senior Analyst with the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). For nearly a decade, I have worked as a public health researcher and I have acted as a leading subject matter expert for a strong science-based and equitable response to the pandemic.

“I am thrilled to talk to you today about the need for strong scientific integrity protections across the government, and especially at our nation’s public health agencies. Scientific integrity refers to a process by which independent science can fully and transparently inform policy decisions, free from inappropriate political, financial, ideological, or other undue influences. UCS has played a leading role in researching scientific integrity and its role in science-based policymaking since 2004. Scientific integrity is integral to protecting the health and safety of communities across the country, especially underserved communities, and the pandemic has shown in the starkest terms possible why scientific integrity matters.

The pandemic showed why scientific integrity matters

“The COVID-19 pandemic was, and continues to be, a public health crisis of unimaginable scale and devastation. The number of people in the US who have died from COVID-19 is expected to soon reach one million. There is likely no person who is untouched by the fear, loneliness, and hardships that the spread of this virus has wrought. This is especially true for Black, Indigenous, people of color, low-income, and rural communities who throughout the pandemic have faced disproportionate harm and heartache.

“Science has been pivotal in protecting the health and safety of people during the pandemic. But the role of science in decisionmaking goes far beyond vaccines and lifesaving treatments. The use of the best available science is required by numerous public health laws and policies to protect the public from serious threats such as air pollution, toxic chemicals, and climate change impacts. Science, in other words, has played a major role in safeguarding the lives of millions, over generations.

A history of interference in federal science

“However, science at federal agencies has long faced a serious problem. Since at least the 1950s, some in government – often those with power and influence – have politicized federal science in service of their political agendas. Such tactics have included burying studies, censoring scientists, and halting data collection.

“These actions can have enormous consequences. For instance, the Trump administration’s numerous attempts during the pandemic to silence experts from speaking to the public and line-editing, delaying, or blocking the release of scientific documents deeply eroded public trust in scientific institutions. And the lack of clear, scientific information coming from federal scientists opened the door to the enormous spread of online misinformation and disinformation – the effects of which we are still dealing with to this day. These were not isolated events. According to our research, the Trump administration attacked science 204 times, which averages to an attack on science occurring once a week, every week, for four years.

Strengthening scientific integrity policies

“Since 2005, UCS has conducted periodic surveys on scientific integrity to thousands of federal scientists across the past three presidential administrations. In every survey we have conducted, we found a connection between workplace morale and scientific integrity. When federal scientists felt they could do their jobs and communicate about their work without undue political interference, they were more likely to report personal job satisfaction and that their agency was effective in carrying out its mission.

“The only way to prevent current and future administrations from engaging in politically motivated attempts to crush science is to put strong guardrails in place. Most science-based agencies have scientific integrity policies, but they can vary wildly in the rights and protections they afford their scientists. For instance, few agencies specify that political appointees are required to follow scientific integrity guidelines, and even fewer agencies appear willing to investigate a scientific integrity violation when a political appointee is involved.

“While the current system is functioning, it is full of holes, like water going through a leaky hose. Therefore we need stronger and more comprehensive measures, like the Scientific Integrity Act, to plug these holes. This would help ensure that agency decisions are informed by the best available science to protect people from the effects of the pandemic and other public health threats. The public needs and deserves a government that is willing to strengthen scientific integrity policies for the public good.”

These equity-focused commitments include a number of things to celebrate. Some of the commitments, for instance, tackle issues such as overcoming systemic barriers that block the public’s access to federal programs; others propose strategies to embed equity into the day-to-day functioning of agencies, or deliver concrete results to communities that have been historically underserved by the federal government; still others identify and enact accountability measures and metrics of success for this whole-of-government approach to advancing equity.

This initiative follows through on an executive order President Biden issued on his first day in office to advance racial equity and support underserved communities. In the executive order, President Biden directed federal agencies to deliver plans to identify and address ways people from historically marginalized groups could overcome systemic barriers when accessing governmental programs, goods, services, and benefits.

The plans represent an honestly impressive achievement. They emphasize the importance of equity at all levels of the government, including in science policy processes that we at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) often watchdog, such as implementing protections from toxic chemicals, pollution, and climate change impacts.

The devil will be in the details

Like all things related to equity and environmental justice policy, the Biden administration’s success at changing the legacy of discrimination inherent in US policy will hinge primarily on the details of its implementation plans and how well they are codified to prevent future administrations from undercutting important gains.

For instance, while reviewing the various materials related to these actions plans, I could not figure out to what degree agencies are pushing back on a “race-neutral” approach in research and decisionmaking, an inequitable process that fails to examine potential disproportionate effects by race/ethnicity. While implementing the Justice40 Initiative, for example, the White House was recently criticized for failing to include race as a factor when identifying communities facing environmental justice concerns. The best available science suggests that by not directly using race/ethnicity as a demographic factor in how we examine environmental and health disparities, we miss and disenfranchise communities of color. While the White House does highlight the importance of so-called disaggregated data – including data related to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and disability status – it is unclear the extent to which federal agencies will press hard to ensure that these racial data will be robustly collected, analyzed, and incorporated into decisionmaking processes to the full extent allowed under the law.

We are also watching how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will carry out its equity action plan. The EPA’s equity action plan includes recommendations that we at UCS have long advocated for, such as developing a comprehensive framework for considering cumulative impacts in EPA decisionmaking, engaging meaningfully with underserved communities, incorporating community perspectives into agency decisionmaking, and incorporating community science into EPA research and decisionmaking. But we are also worried that the EPA may fail to deliver on these promises for reasons we have often seen in the past, such as EPA offices failing to work together to tackle equity issues, or committing to fixing one environmental hazard at time rather than carrying out a holistic look at the various environmental hazards affecting fenceline communities, or failing to have enough staff or willpower to properly implement or enforce these measures.

The administration seems serious in its commitment

The White House honored the occasion by livestreaming a virtual convening on equity in which prominent members of the Biden administration spoke passionately about their intention to carry out a whole-of-government approach to incorporating equity.

For instance, President Biden described these commitments as a generational commitment that will require sustained leadership and partnership with communities, a talking point that is also highlighted in bold on the White House’s Advancing Equity website. This type of sustained, long-term thinking is exactly the mindset the government needs to tackle the numerous and often insidious ways policies can disenfranchise underserved communities.

Other promising signs:

• A shift at agencies toward proactive strategies for advancing equity, including using a data-centric approach to identify potential disparities in how government serves the public.
• A commitment to tackle both well-known issues of racial injustice, such as the unacceptably high mortality rates among Black and Indigenous individuals who are pregnant, and lesser-known issues of racial injustice, such as increasing access to national parks and other green spaces for underserved communities.
• Promises that many of these equity measures will be spearheaded by independent experts on task forces, commissions, and advisory committees.
• An open acknowledgment of the legacy of past harms to underserved communities by the federal government, and that it is incumbent on the federal government to dismantle the structures and practices that continue to disenfranchise communities.
• An effort to connect equity with the need for agencies to build capacity so that they can better serve the public, including by diversifying agency leadership and hiring staff from historically marginalized groups.

We need to hold the government accountable

Perhaps my favorite remark during the virtual event came from Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, who said, “We need you; we want to learn from you… thank you for holding us accountable.”

Because that is ultimately what it comes down to. The Biden administration’s effort certainly demonstrates the federal government’s commitment to equity. And we at UCS will continue to monitor this issue because we take it as a tenet of scientific integrity that all communities in the United States—not just richer and whiter communities—need and deserve strong science-based protections from pollution, toxic chemicals, and other environmental hazards.

But ultimately it is up to all of us to continue to watchdog the government, pressing to make sure these commitments to equity and justice are upheld and that these issues continue to be prioritized by elected leaders regardless of political affiliation.

Since 2019, a Texas state agency and its industry partners have been actively working to challenge the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) own science on the harms of ethylene oxide, a cancer-causing gas that affects thousands of people across the nation, especially those living in underserved communities. In 2020, the notoriously industry-friendly Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, along with the industry trade association American Chemistry Council and the firm Huntsman Petrochemical, submitted a petition to the EPA claiming that the work of EPA scientists is suspect and pressed the EPA to support the adoption of a far less protective standard based on the Texas Commission’s analysis.

The EPA recently weighed in on that petition. They formally rejected the analysis by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and stated that the EPA’s analysis remains the best available science to determine the health risks from ethylene oxide. Furthermore, the agency announced plans to use that EPA science in future rulemaking so as to better protect communities from industrial sources of the dangerous gas.

In other words, the EPA told the industry groups to take their cherry-picked analysis elsewhere, because the agency is not buying it. The response marks an important win for scientific integrity at the agency and something UCS has been calling for.

The EPA’s IRIS assessment represents the best available science

Ethylene oxide is a colorless gas that can cause short-term health effects such as headache, dizziness, nausea, fatigue, respiratory irritation, and long-term health effects such as several types of cancers including non-Hodgkin lymphoma, myeloma, and lymphocytic leukemia, and for cis-gender women, breast cancer. Breast cancer risks may also include people of other gender identities but our knowledge is more limited.

Industrial sources make up one of the major sources of ethylene oxide, specifically facilities that sterilize medical equipment. Communities located at the fenceline of these facilities—disproportionately Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and low-income communities—are at particular risk of exposure to the dangerous gas. According to an analysis by ProPublica, ethylene oxide is the biggest contributor to excess industrial cancer risk from air pollutants nationwide.

In 2016, the EPA released its Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) assessment for ethylene oxide, taking a deep dive into the potential health effects linked to the chemical gas. IRIS assessments on environmental contaminants represent the gold standard of chemical toxicity reviews at the federal, state, and local level, and even internationally. The 2016 IRIS assessment involved a decade-long process to systematically review and assess toxicological and epidemiological evidence about the health risks of ethylene oxide, which included a robust peer review process involving EPA scientists, independent scientists from the agency’s Science Advisory Board, and the public.

While the scientific community has known for decades that ethylene oxide could damage people’s DNA, a condition that can lead to cancer, the 2016 IRIS assessment brought to light just how dangerous the cancer risk from ethylene oxide actually is. The assessment concludes that people who continuously inhale the chemical as adults face 30 times more cancer cases than the agency had previously thought—50 times more cancer cases for those who are exposed since birth.

Texas agency’s analysis is flawed and biased

By way of comparison, the analysis submitted by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality used non-transparent methods to cherry-pick the data so as to diminish the health risks associated with ethylene oxide exposure. The analysis was also guided by people with major conflicts of interest. For instance, Michael Honeycutt, the former head of the Commission’s toxicology division in 2019 when the analysis was first developed, previously worked as a petrochemical lobbyist. Additionally, the Texas Commission spent years in court trying to prevent the release of thousands of pages of documents it had relied on as the technical basis for its analysis. My colleague Genna Reed first reported on this alarming situation in January 2020.

Importantly, the Texas Commission’s analysis is not based on new data or new scientific research. Instead, it reanalyzes the ethylene oxide exposure data used by the EPA IRIS program, a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health dataset of over 19,000 workers. But the Texas analysis adopted a value to estimate the cancer risk that is 2,000-fold less protective than that used by the EPA. According to the EPA, the Texas Commission’s analysis arrived at this number in part by excluding women from their analysis, thereby excluding “all lymphoid cancers in women, as well as the exclusion of breast cancer [in women] as an endpoint.”

We’ve seen this tactic before. During the prior administration, industry groups and their allies sometimes pressured federal scientists to reanalyze data in a biased manner to support a foregone conclusion (see here and here). This tactic is part of the disinformation playbook industry uses to undermine the science policy process and hinder agencies from developing and implementing strong public health and environmental protections. You can see this tactic on full display on the website of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, where the “commonly asked questions” section on ethylene oxide is filled with misleading and biased questions meant to downplay the chemical’s health harms, such as the very first question: “Is EtO [ethylene oxide] made naturally in the body?”

Tell the EPA you support science

To date, the EPA does not have a stellar track record when it comes to protecting communities from ethylene oxide. The EPA has previously failed to communicate the findings from its 2016 IRIS assessment to impacted communities, particularly to Black and low-income communities, leaving those residents unaware of the immense health risks they face when breathing in the air in their neighborhoods. Therefore, it is vital that we hold the EPA to account and press the agency to carry out robust and equitable science-based decisionmaking to protect communities from ethylene oxide’s immense health burdens.

If you feel strongly that the EPA needs to use the best available science to safeguard communities from the threat of ethylene oxide, you can add your name to this letter and tell the EPA directly (bonus points for sending a personalized comment using this guide). The EPA’s recent decision to use its own science and to reject the analysis they were pressured to adopt by industry, now stands in the form of a proposed rule. You can add your voice to tell the EPA they need to listen to the findings of their own scientists and use the robust and peer-reviewed 2016 IRIS value to protect the health and safety of communities across the nation from this dangerous chemical.

In honor of Black History Month, I would like to highlight the work of Onesimus, an enslaved man who lived in Boston in the early 1700s. Onesimus helped save hundreds of people in Boston from the horrors of smallpox. His contributions to science reverberate to this day, and his knowledge led to what became the first vaccine-related study in the United States. The techniques employed during this study are similar to those we still use hundreds of years later to determine if a vaccine is effective against an infectious disease.

Enslavement obscured Onesimus’s early history

We do not know the early history of Onesimus. But he was likely kidnapped from his homeland in North or West Africa, sold into slavery, and brought to the Massachusetts Bay colony by ship. Onesimus is not the name he was born with. As is true for so many enslaved individuals, the only recorded name in historical texts is the name bestowed to him by his enslaver. Onesimus means “useful” and therefore the name links him to the property status his enslaver conferred upon him as.

Massachusetts was the center of the early slave trade in the United States and was the first American colony to codify the right to own human chattel in 1641. In 1700, there were about 1,000 enslaved individuals living in Massachusetts.

In 1706, Onesimus was purchased by a church congregation in Boston and “gifted” to Cotton Mather, a prominent Puritan minister. You may already be familiar with Cotton Mather; he was a prominent and infamous figure during the Salem Witch Trials.

“Forever free of the fear of contagion”

In a 1716 letter to the Royal Society of London, Mather described a conversation he had with Onesimus about smallpox. At the time, white individuals often asked enslaved individuals if they previously had smallpox, since enslaved people were considered to be “worth” more if they had been previously exposed (people who survived smallpox did not get the disease again). When Mather asked Onesimus whether he had had smallpox, Onesimus replied, “Yes and no.”

Onesimus went on to state that as a child in Africa, he “had undergone an operation, which had given him something of the smallpox and would forever preserve him from it… and whoever had the courage to use it was forever free of the fear of contagion.” Onesimus described the operation, which involved taking pus from a smallpox patient and scraping it into his arm. It gave him a mild case of the disease and made him forever immune to smallpox. Onesimus said it was a common practice in the African community he grew up in and had been practiced for hundreds of years.

Onesimus was describing the process of variolation, a method of inoculation to protect people from smallpox. Variolation, a precursor to vaccination, was practiced for hundreds of years in China, parts of Africa, and the Middle East, though it was relatively unknown in England and the American colonies in the early 1700s. Variolation contained its risks, but it was considered far less deadly than natural smallpox. It usually resulted in provoking a mild form of the disease while conferring lifelong immunity to it.

Racism almost derailed one of the world’s first clinical studies

Onesimus faded from public record once he purchased his freedom in 1716. However, Cotton Mather went on to use the information that Onesimus provided to try to protect the people of Boston during the next smallpox epidemic in 1721. Mather championed the use of variolation (known as smallpox inoculation at the time) but faced fierce resistance from other white individuals living in Boston. While some of the resistance from white Bostonians was based on scientific uncertainty or on religious grounds, there is no mistaking that much of the criticism stemmed from their racist inability to view African individuals as having valuable scientific knowledge.

William Douglas, the only person in Boston with a medical degree at the time, and James Franklin, the older brother of Benjamin Franklin who ran a local newspaper, began a racist misinformation campaign. They claimed that enslaved Africans were trying to kill their enslavers by tricking them into infecting themselves with smallpox. Mather and Zabdiel Boylston, a physician who supported the technique, were vilified for taking medical advice from an African individual. In reference to Black people, Douglas stated, “There is not a Race of Men on Earth [filled with] more False Liars.” Someone even threw an unexploded grenade through Mather’s window because of his promotion of inoculation. In what may be the first precursor to later anti-vaccination protests, Bostonians took to the streets to oppose Boylston’s use of smallpox inoculations for his son and two enslaved individuals.

After the epidemic ended in 1722, Mather and Boylston performed one of the first quantitative analyses in medicine ever recorded. Boylston managed to inoculate 280 of the city’s 11,000 residents. Of those inoculated, only six people died (two percent). Among the non-inoculated population, 6,000 cases of smallpox occurred, with 850 people dying of the disease (14 percent). The clinical analysis compared the outcomes of a control and an experimental group, making it similar to our current assessments of the safety of vaccines and other medical interventions. The results indicated that people who were inoculated were seven times more likely to survive smallpox. Because of this evidence, inoculations became a common practice in Boston and throughout many US states, until they were replaced by the development of the smallpox vaccine in 1796.

Onesimus’s legacy lives on

For decades, the story most often told about these events was dominated by whiteness and the erasure of Black people. Mather and Boylston were portrayed as heroes while Onesimus and his African homeland were relegated to the background. Performing a clinical analysis of a new medical treatment and being open to utilizing Indigenous knowledge from an African enslaved individual were indeed achievements. But these men should not be lauded simply as heroes; they were men with complicated legacies. For instance, Boylston forced the inoculation procedure on two enslaved individuals he owned, thereby furthering a long tradition of using Black bodies in medical experiments without their consent.

We may never know how Onesimus felt about the role he played in saving the lives of numerous people in the United States. But Onesimus’s contributions to science cannot be denied. Despite his captivity and bondage, Onesimus was instrumental in fostering awareness of the efficacy of variolation in the United States, a development that helped lead directly to one of the first US scientific studies in medicine and, eventually, to the development of the smallpox vaccine. It’s quite a legacy, especially considering that, in 1980, the World Health Organization declared that, thanks to that vaccine, smallpox – one of the deadliest and most feared diseases in all of human history – was officially eradicated from the planet.

However, environmental justice experts are rightfully concerned by some developments including the recent resignations of Cecilia Martinez and David Kieve, two high-profile officials from the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality. Maria Lopez-Nuñez, a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, said of the departures: “It was a big blow to being able to believe in the administration’s seriousness to its commitment of environmental justice. I have a lot of questions about what’s going on.”

Additionally, some agencies have yet to advance tangible policy changes to address racial equity. For instance, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is failing to implement equity-based standards recommended by its own advisory panel to ensure that disaster relief funds are not systematically favoring white or high-income individuals over low-income individuals or people of color.

Considering the long history of both the successes and abject failures on equity and environmental justice policies at the federal level, it is far too soon to tell whether the Biden administration will be able to achieve its goals. It will take years of work to dismantle decades of policies based on a legacy of white supremacy. Therefore, the Biden administration must use the rest of its time in power to fully implement equitable and science-based policies that provide lasting relief to historically marginalized communities facing environmental hazards.

Still, some important steps have been taken. Below are three lesser-known but important efforts by federal agencies to incorporate equity, address environmental justice concerns, and support marginalized communities across the nation.

The EPA and DOJ strengthen environmental enforcement

Science-based laws, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Toxic Substances Control Act, were enacted to protect people from exposure to potentially dangerous environmental hazards. But these laws depend on agencies—particularly the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ)—to fully enforce them and prosecute those who violate them.

For decades, environmental justice advocates have touted the need for strong environmental enforcement in marginalized communities. Now the EPA and the DOJ appear to be listening. While it is still too early to assess how these agencies will implement these actions and what their impact will be, they represent promising steps in the right direction.

The EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance issued a series of memos directing all its offices to strengthen enforcement in communities with environmental justice concerns; to use its criminal enforcement program to further environmental justice; and to hold responsible parties accountable for the cleanup of hazardous substances in communities. The DOJ is currently working on an enforcement strategy to protect low-income communities and communities of color. Senior DOJ officials have stated that the agency is focusing on more “vigorous [environmental] enforcement,” particularly for corporate environmental crimes.

The CDC acknowledges racism’s impact

In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declared racism a serious public health threat. This is a major win for both science and equity, since there is a large body of evidence showing that racism is a fundamental driver of racial and ethnic health disparities in the United States. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic’s disproportionate impact on communities of color is rooted in racist structural processes that have disenfranchised Black, Indigenous, and people of color for generations.

This public declaration has led the CDC to start to use its resources to address racism, including by opening up major funding, research, program, and policy initiatives for health equity. The CDC has also created specialized research and program initiatives aimed at helping communities of color. For instance, the CDC recently published data showing that HIV prevention and treatment services are used less often by Black and Latino gay and bisexual men than they are by their White counterparts, indicating that there is a need to improve access to these health services to better serve individuals in these racial groups.

Additionally, this action fulfills a major request by some 1,200 CDC employees – or more than 10 percent of the workforce – who in June 2020 wrote a letter to the CDC urging them to address “ongoing and recurring acts of racism and discrimination” against Black employees. The CDC has announced that is currently trying to institute internal changes in an attempt to serve as a model for organizational and workforce diversity and inclusion.

The White House elevates Indigenous knowledge

In November, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) released a memo saying that they were committed to elevating Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge in federal scientific and policy processes. Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge refers to evolving knowledge acquired by Indigenous people over the years, sometimes over the centuries, through direct contact with the environment. While there have been previous attempts at federal agencies to incorporate Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge– for instance at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Forest Service, and the EPA –science-based federal agencies are, for the most part, not readily incorporating this evidence into their scientific, programmatic, or policymaking activities.

By formally recognizing Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge as one of the many important bodies of knowledge that contribute to scientific understanding, the Biden White House is highlighting the importance of incorporating Indigenous science into agency processes. The memo also outlines methods to afford due respect to the lived experience of Indigenous people and officially acknowledge the importance this knowledge deserves. For instance, the memo describes the importance of engaging with Indigenous communities on the use of this knowledge in a transparent manner, with full acknowledgment that Indigenous people are the owners of this knowledge and have the rights over the access, permission, and application of this knowledge.

This memo will likely lead to further federal efforts to engage with and support Indigenous communities and tribal nations. For instance, in November 2021, eight federal agencies committed to improving the protection and access to Indigenous sacred sites. This included increasing collaboration with Indigenous tribes to ensure stewardship of sacred sites and the incorporation of traditional ecological knowledge in the management, treatment, and protection of these sites.

People deserve protection from environmental hazards

American history is replete with examples of Black, Indigenous, people of color, low-income, rural, and other historically marginalized communities bearing the brunt of environmental hazards from their proximity to toxic waste sites, landfills, congested highways, polluting industrial facilities, and fossil fuel extraction sites compared with white or more affluent communities. The science suggests that exposure to these environmental hazards carries enormous and life-long health burdens, such as an increased risk of heart disease, asthma attacks, and premature death.

This sorry history makes it all the more imperative that federal agencies work to overhaul their processes and prioritize equity and environmental justice at all levels of agency work. The Biden administration has expressed a commitment to its equity and environmental justice goals and the commitment has already resulted in some prominent successes. Now, the administration will need to fully center equity and environmental justice in its scientific, policy, and enforcement work over the next several years, making sure that environmental justice efforts are provided with the resources and staff needed to carry out this important work. Only then will they be able to create tangible, meaningful, and long-lasting public health and environmental changes we need to protect marginalized communities.