Last week, Trump’s political appointees controlling the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doubled down on their years-long effort to censor science in the making of national environmental rules.

Remember since-disgraced former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s 2018 proposal to gimmick the agency rules by barring the consideration of most reputable scientific and public health study results? It would have forced the EPA to rely heavily on industry-backed pseudoscience instead. A huge public outcry and Pruitt’s own resignation placed this bad idea in temporary limbo.

Now former coal industry lobbyist and current EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler has come back with the same idea, expanded in scope to make its effects even worse. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Wheeler version of the policy would:

• Broaden the scope of the cases in which these restrictions apply
  
• Give Wheeler license to arbitrarily pick which studies EPA would consider, and which ones it would ignore, opening a huge hole for abuse of discretion
  
• Make the new restrictions retroactive, allowing Wheeler to throw out “the literally tens of thousands of studies that it has relied on to craft environmental laws. This radical approach could upend the decades of gains we’ve made in national clean air and water protections and force us to start from scratch — meanwhile, restrictions on polluters could be significantly relaxed.”

Other concerned public interest groups have joined in sounding the alarm on this renewed assault on using reliable science in making life-or-death pollution control and public health protection decisions across the nation.

This anti-science administration is still finding new ways to devalue the importance of verifiable scientific evidence in public policy. Its assault on science has become in itself a serious threat to public health. This comes as no surprise to observers of this administration’s bungling of the emerging coronavirus crisis.