US agency sacks major scientific review board members

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has dismissed at least five members of a major scientific review board in a step widely seen as downgrading science and elevating business interests, a media report said.

A spokesman for EPA's administrator Scott Pruitt on Sunday said he would consider replacing the academic scientists with representatives from industries whose pollution the agency is supposed to regulate, as part of the wide net it plans to cast, The New York Times reported.

"The administrator (Pruitt) believes we should have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community," spokesman J.P. Freire said.

"We want to expand the pool of applicants" for the scientific board, he said, adding "to as broad a range as possible, to include universities that aren't typically represented and issues that aren't typically represented".

The scientists dismissed from the 18-member Board of Scientific Counselors received emails from an agency official informing them that their three-year terms had expired and would not be renewed.

The dismissals came about six weeks after the House passed a bill aimed at changing the composition of another E.P.A. scientific review board to include more representation from the corporate world.

President Donald Trump has directed Pruitt to radically remake the E.P.A., pushing for deep cuts in its budget, including a 40 per cent reduction for its main scientific branch, and instructing him to roll back major regulations made during former President Barack Obama's tenure on climate change and clean water protection, reports The New York Times.

The agency has also removed some scientific data on climate change from its websites.

However, some who opposed the dismissals denounced them as part of a broader push by the E.P.A. to downgrade science and elevate business interests.

"This is completely part of a multifaceted effort to get science out of the way of a deregulation agenda," the New York Times quoted Ken Kimmell, President of the Union of Concerned Scientists, as saying on Sunday.

Courtney Flint, a professor of natural resource sociology at Utah State University who has served on the board since 2014, said she was surprised by the dismissal.

Another of the dismissed scientists, Robert Richardson, an environmental economist at Michigan State University, tweeted: "I was Trumped."

--IANS

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