13

The Party Line

donald trump has been portrayed by some as “hijacking” the Republican Party. This argument casts the forty-fifth president of the United States as a radical populist whose views and methods belie the history and ideological roots of the Grand Old Party.

On matters related to science and regulation, this claim is patently false. The Trump administration’s policies reflect a half-century of Republican hostility toward any scientific evidence that does not align with the needs of the party’s financial benefactors. The coalescence under Trump amounts to nothing more than a rebranding.

Disdain for science isn’t new in American society; it has been a long-running thread in its social fabric throughout modern history. Here I am not talking about the populist anti-intellectualism described by historian Richard Hofstadter in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. This is a different strain of anti-intellectualism, first identified by neoconservative Irving Kristol, through which leaders of corporate capitalism defend their power by stirring opposition to another elite that he labeled “the new class”—intellectuals, journalists, scientists and others who attempt to change the society in ways that adversely impact the corporate class.¹ What is notable today is that this strain of anti-intellectualism, intertwined with white nationalism, is now a core component of the platform of what used to be the party of Lincoln.

I had a first-hand encounter with the Republican ideology when I testified on OSHA’s policies and performance before the House of Representative’s Education and the Workforce Committee (since renamed the Committee on Education and Labor). This was in 2018, after I had returned to academia after heading OSHA for more than seven years. I was the sole Democratic witness on the panel that day. I was joined by the three Republican witnesses, one representing the Chamber of Commerce and the other two industry trade associations. At one point, Representative Glenn Grothman (R-WI) walked into the hearing room after missing much of the testimony, looked at the panel, and noted with a loud sigh that the Democrats had done it again: they had invited a professor, a word he enunciated with some derision. His attitude was clear: the business representatives were expert, knowledgeable, and worth listening to, while I was but yet another pointy-headed intellectual who couldn’t really know much about OSHA, seven years at the helm of that agency notwithstanding. Grothman, unsurprisingly, is a soldier in the Republican campaign to defend the tobacco industry. He opposed legislation for increasing spending on anti-smoking campaigns from $10 million, a pittance, to $30 million, a larger pittance. His reasoning: “Everybody knows you’re not supposed to smoke!”² Grothman was one of a handful of Republicans who opposed 2009 legislation that outlawed smoking in bars and restaurants in Wisconsin.³

Grothman’s anti-intellectualism and defense of tobacco are linked. Antipathy to science for the sake of corporate (and political) profit was honed and perfected by Big Tobacco and the fossil fuel industry in the second half of the twentieth century. This has become the ideology of the Republican Party. And in the latter days of the tobacco industry’s peak lobby efforts, it had no greater ally in government than Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence. Pence was a favorite of the industry and its aligned network of exceedingly wealthy individuals and families, led by the Koch Brothers.

Before assuming the vice presidency, Pence was a congressman from Indiana, a chair of the House Republican Conference, and then the state’s governor. His benefactors showered him with financial support, and his political positions returned the love. As a congressman in 1997, he parroted the industry line and opposed efforts by state governments (including that of Indiana) to force the tobacco industry to pay the costs of smoker’s diseases paid by Medicaid—litigation that eventually delivered billions of dollars to state treasuries. In an op-ed in the Indianapolis Star, he equated the health effects of smoking to those of eating candy, contending, “Our government was not established for the purpose of eradicating bad personal habits.”⁴

Pence showed no sympathy for victims of secondhand tobacco smoke, whose only “bad personal habit” would have been breathing in the presence of smokers. In a position piece published on his personal website in 2000, he wrote:

Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill. In fact, two out of every three smokers do not die from a smoking-related illness and nine out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer. This is not to say that smoking is good for you … news flash: smoking is not good for you. If you are reading this article through the blue haze of cigarette smoke you should quit. The relevant question is, what is more harmful to the nation, secondhand smoke or back-handed big government disguised in do-gooder healthcare rhetoric?⁵

In 2009, Pence and 89 of his Republican colleagues in the House—about half of the Republican caucus at the time—voted against the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, the landmark legislation that gave the FDA authority to regulate tobacco products.

Make no mistake: the Trump administration’s policy agenda on science is fundamentally the same as the Republican Party’s policy agenda. For evidence, look no further than what happened after the president pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2017: the controversial, ecologically devastating move was met with widespread cheering—and nary a few whispers of dissent—from Republican elected officials. The party has long been the political vehicle of choice for industries whose profit margins increase when they’re left unregulated by environmental and public health agencies. These corporations, typically polluters and manufacturers of dangerous products, have long relied on GOP efforts to defang such public health and regulatory agencies. Republicans’ primary objective, cloaked in phony rhetoric about “liberty” and “personal responsibility” and “free-market enterprise,” is to lower corporate taxes and reduce regulatory “burdens,” thereby enabling manufacturers to market dangerous chemicals and polluters to dump the waste haphazardly with little fear of regulation or litigation. This stratagem shifts the burden of protection from the government to the individual—who, in the very hollow American lore, is encouraged to think of regulation as an attack on individual liberty.

But can everyday consumers decide what food additives are safe? Or prescription drugs? Perhaps a few can, with some help. By and large, however, the core problems of public health and the environment cannot be solved by individuals. In fact, we are mostly powerless in protecting ourselves and our children. Air pollution, clean water, climate change, safe food, and so many other issues are problems “of the public good,” as economists put it. These issues must be addressed by the government, in all of our names. To pretend otherwise is sheer sophistry.

But the genius and deviance of the GOP is that they don’t often engage directly with ugly, specific issues. Rather, they police the public discourse around these issues, framing proposals for regulation as the encroachments of a reactive nanny state. In other words, you won’t see any Republicans defending unfettered smoking directly; that would be utter stupidity. No, if you want to make the argument that people should be free to smoke wherever they want, you disparage the evidence showing that secondhand smoke kills innocent nonsmokers. When you are defending an industry under attack for killing people or harming the planet, science is your adversary. So Republicans take steps to neutralize it by litigating scientific consensus and scientific expertise. And even though it might seem ludicrous to prop up the dying coal industry, since it is clear to everyone, most of all the residents of the coal-producing states, that many of its practices are destructive to the environment and human lives, the GOP is up to the task. Be bold—be best! (Note here: The Department of Interior under Ryan Zinke, former Republican congressman from Montana appointed by Trump, and who later stepped down amid concerns around alleged ethics violations, killed a half-completed study on the impacts on humans of the most extreme form of strip mining, which removes the tops of mountains, undertaken by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.)

It helps that Republicans can back up their attacks on science with hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps more. With total lack of transparency, the Koch network, Big Tobacco, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and their allies have funded nonprofit groups to elect politicians sympathetic to their positions and then ride these issues unrelentingly. This largesse has launched lawsuits to stop government action on tobacco and climate change. More importantly, it has funded the phenomenally successful movement to pack the federal courts with judges hand-picked to back the corporate position in almost every case. And these donors’ magnum opus is the creation of a Supreme Court majority that is hostile to regulatory action on behalf of human health and the environment.

My personal experience with Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s second Supreme Court appointee, suggests that he will very likely uphold his part in this dreadful progression. In the winter of 2010, a few months after I began work at OSHA, we were notified about a tragic death at SeaWorld in Orlando. In front of a live audience, the 12,000-pound killer whale (or orca) named Tilikum violently dragged trainer Dawn Brancheau underwater and killed her. Orcas have had their informal name for a long time: Pliny the Elder, the great Roman military commander and naturalist, so described them after witnessing these fierce creatures attack mother whales and their calves near the Straits of Gibraltar.⁶ We now know that in captivity, the appellation is also all too accurate: in closed settings, there have been multiple killer whale attacks.

Given that only a tiny number of U.S. facilities house captive killer whales, OSHA did not have a specific standard requiring employers to protect their workers from these animals. So government inspectors issued two citations under the agency’s general-duty clause, which requires employers to maintain workplaces free of “recognized, serious hazards.” SeaWorld’s lawyers challenged the citations, claiming that the company didn’t recognize that working closely with a killer whale was hazardous. The case was eventually argued before the three-judge District of Columbia Court of Appeals, where Judge Merrick Garland (President Obama’s ill-fated nominee to fill Justice Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court) and Judge Judith Rogers strongly affirmed the validity of OSHA’s citations (and the measly $14,000 fine).

Dissenting, though, was Judge Kavanaugh, who, as he almost always does, found for the corporation over the regulatory agency trying to protect the public. He claimed that Sea World trainers could and had willingly accepted the risk of violent death as part of their job. This was not only a clear misreading of federal law, but also an example of the valuing of corporations’ rights over human rights in his judicial decision-making.

In Donald J. Trump, the United States electoral system produced a president who questions the benefits of childhood vaccines. (Indisputably, the benefits greatly outweigh any risks.) Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade advisor, described his role as an advisor in these terms: “My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.” In this era, this is dismal science indeed, but in this administration, economics is in good company. The sciences are mostly unappreciated, and if Trump’s budget proposals were enacted, they would be disastrously underfunded. Unwelcome science is dismissed as “shoddy” and “politicized,”⁷ challenged at every turn by “alternative facts.”

Researchers at the Rand Corporation have termed this phenomenon “truth decay,” and it has spread across government with Trump at the helm.⁸ Purveyors of “alternative scientific thinking” were placed in countless important government positions, often endangering the basic work of the agencies they direct. As R. Alta Charo, Professor of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has noted, the allegiance to “alternative science” has been particularly endemic in the area of human reproduction. Teresa Manning, former lobbyist for the National Right to Life Committee, “insists that contraception is ineffective, despite evidence that hormonal methods are 91% effective and long-acting reversible contraceptives such as intrauterine devices (IUDs) are 99% effective at preventing pregnancy.” Under Trump, Manning played a central role in shaping federal family-planning programs. Similarly, Charmaine Yoest, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, “asserts that condoms (which can reduce the risk of HIV transmission by at least 70 percent) do not protect against HIV or other sexually transmitted infections.” According to Charo, Yoest also claims contraception does not reduce the number of abortions and that abortion causes breast cancer, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.⁹

Manning and Yoest are two examples of lobbyists who were allowed to play scientist in Republican government. They’re not alone in this path. Sam Clovis, a former right-wing talk show host who had been national co-chair of Trump’s campaign, was nominated as chief scientist at the Department of Agriculture. (He was forced to withdraw his name not because he is utterly lacking in scientific expertise, but because he was the direct supervisor of campaign aide George Papadopoulos, whom he reportedly encouraged to arrange a meeting of campaign staff with Russian officials.¹⁰ Papadopoulos later pled guilty and served prison time for lying to federal agents about his contacts with the Russian government during the campaign, and Clovis would have had to answer questions about those matters under oath had he continued with his nomination.) Another memorable nominee was Kathleen Hartnett-White, selected to chair the Council on Environmental Quality and serve as the president’s principal environmental policy adviser. Previously, she directed the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s “Fueling Freedom Project,” whose goal was to “end the regulation of CO₂ as a pollutant” and “explain the forgotten moral case for fossil fuels.”¹¹ “Fossil fuels dissolved the economic justification for slavery,” Hartnett-White has opined with absolutely no evidence. “The productivity made possible by fossil fuels led to the institutionalization of compassion and respect for the inalienable rights of each human individual.”¹² This nomination did make it to a Senate confirmation hearing—but disastrously. Hartnett-White suggested that the evidence of the human contribution to climate change was “very uncertain,” then could not answer a series of basic scientific questions that a science advisor would certainly be expected to know: she could not say, for example, whether ocean water expands as it warms. She withdrew her name from consideration shortly after the hearing, and the post remained unfilled for almost a year thereafter.

The list of Trump’s appointments of totally unqualified individuals to important government science or science-related positions posts is a long one. While many were lobbyists, many more were corporate scientists or attorneys with expertise in product defense. Their pronouncements are couched in traditional scientific terms that seem reasonable to lay listeners; in reality, they are flawed window-dressing science, carefully constructed for the purpose of creating a space that protects the sales of a product or defends it against costly litigation.

Pushing through the nominations of hacks and charlatans to run federal science agencies is damaging enough. What happens to scientific advisory panels within these agencies adds profound insult to injury. Until recently, most of the scientists on these panels were in academia. Their voluntary service represents a serious commitment, and they are not paid for this time-consuming work. Nevertheless, in most past administrations, the federal government had been able to call on these scientists to ensure that the government had access to the latest and best nonconflicted scientific advice. (I emphasize “most” because there have been exceptions. The George W. Bush administration was a notable one.¹³) You will not be surprised to learn that the Trump administration is, for the most part, dismissive of the entire idea of a federal advisory system. As an illustration: during my time as OSHA administrator, I relied on four safety and health advisory committees, plus another one focused on whistleblower protection, each of which was required to meet at least twice per year. In the first two years of the Trump administration, one of them held a brief telephone conference; and the other four had no meetings at all.

Then again, no advice is sometimes better than bad advice. The EPA has traditionally relied heavily on its Science Advisory Board (SAB). During Scott Pruitt’s tenure as President Trump’s EPA administrator, Pruitt turned conflict-of-interest rules on their heads by announcing that scientists whose research was funded by the EPA (presumably because they were doing studies of most value to the agency—and because they were good scientists) would be barred from serving on the SAB. Several of the members Pruitt inherited were thus pushed out and replaced by industry scientists with conflicts of interest so significant they would not have been seated in previous administrations, even that of George W. Bush. Others named to SAB held views so far outside the scientific mainstream as to make their advice questionable, if not dangerous. Consider Michael Honeycutt, Texas’s chief toxicologist and Pruitt’s choice to chair the board. Honeycutt has a long history of advocating for the loosening of EPA regulations on many known hazards, including mercury and arsenic. He believes the EPA’s rules on ozone are unnecessary because “most people spend more than 90 percent of their time indoors.”¹⁴

The Trump administration’s choice to chair the Clean Air Scientific Advisory committee was Louis Anthony (Tony) Cox, a long-time industry consultant who clings to uncommon opinions, like lowering ozone and the belief that PM_2.5 exposures would not improve public health.¹⁵ Cox was well-known at the Labor Department for his testimony on behalf of the National Mining Association, predictably claiming that the government’s risk assessment on respirable coal dust was flawed.¹⁶ Not just his science, but Cox’s integrity was called into question by the FDA following his efforts on behalf of Bayer to defend the use of an antibiotic in poultry production that the FDA believed would increase the development and spread of antibiotic-resistant campylobacter infections in humans. Taking an action that almost never occurs, in 2005, President George W. Bush’s FDA commissioner actually excluded Cox’s testimony from the proceedings; the agency found that he “intentionally misquoted published articles,” and “Dr. Cox’s credibility was such that his testimony was so unreliable that it was inadmissible.”¹⁷ (He’s also the same person who argued against OSHA’s new standard for silica in Chapter 8. This issue ended up in federal appeals court, where his position was rejected unanimously. But it’s worth noting that these same mercenary scientists have a way of popping up in front of almost every regulatory agency.)

Amid preposterous appointments and the stacking of advisory committees, including the firing of some of the nation’s leading scientists, congressional Republicans haven’t complained. That’s not to say that the regulatory rollbacks that followed weren’t taken to court; all of them were. And in most of the initial cases, usually involving the EPA or other agencies simply ignoring the law, the judges have ruled against the rollback and ordered the agencies to follow the law as written by Congress. In the long run, however, given President Trump’s appointments of arch-partisan federal judges who almost invariably prefer the arguments of corporations over those of the regulatory agencies, the outlook is grim.

On June 9, 2017, President Trump appeared at an event at the Department of Transportation that was organized as part of an ongoing campaign for infrastructure investment—specifically, infrastructure investment executed with reduced regulatory oversight and at lower cost. At one point during his remarks, Trump flipped through, then dramatically dropped to the floor, a thick binder containing something called an Environmental Impact Statement—a federal agency’s documentation of how they’ve examined possible ecological and social impacts on the surrounding area before embarking on any large construction initiative. “Nonsense,” he announced. “These binders on the stage could be replaced by just a few simple pages.”

I have long felt that the most important little-known environmental law is the National Environmental Planning Act (NEPA), which requires federal agencies planning major construction projects to conduct a public process to consider the ecological and social impacts of the proposed activities, along with possible alternatives. The product of this process is an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). The legislation does not require the agency to select the option least harmful to the environment, only to at least consider the impact of different options in planning the project. A pretty reasonable position, we might think—but according to Republican ideology, we would be wrong.

Trump’s stagecraft was unquestionably effective in the service of deregulation. But one of the most dangerous long-term impacts of the administration’s policies has been its unrelenting attempt to change the processes through which agencies evaluate scientific evidence, then use it to minimize the potential impact on human health and the environment. The long-term changes driven by these reports often do not get much public attention. The reports themselves are sometimes obscure and their details hard to follow. But one also saved the country from what might have been one of the worst environmental disasters in our history. And that particular environmental impact statement was overseen by the office I directed while working at the Department of Energy in the late 1990s, during the final years of the Clinton administration. The Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico was founded in secret in 1943 to lead the development work on the atomic bomb. Half a century later, the facility was still an important part of the nation’s ongoing nuclear weapons program, and as a result it had produced a vast amount of plutonium-contaminated waste material over the course of more than half a century. This waste was stored in thousands of standard-issue metal barrels sitting on wooden pallets in the government-owned forest nearby, where they were exposed to all the elements. In the late 1990s, the laboratory was planning some construction projects, and the parent Department of Energy conducted the mandated process to develop an environmental impact statement for the entire site. As part of the NEPA process, the plans were opened for public input. At one of the hearings that followed, local residents asked troubling questions about the potential impact of wildfire on all the toxic waste stored out in the open. (After all, wildfires were then, as they are even more today, endemic throughout the forested American West.) Had Los Alamos not asked this question of itself? Amazingly, perhaps, it had not. But now it did, and the final environmental impact statement for the Los Alamos construction was issued in December 1999. (With more than 900 pages, it filled a set of large binders similar to the ones President Trump would deride almost twenty years later.)¹⁸

With this process, the fire threat at Los Alamos was brought to the official attention of the DOE for the first time. And within months, appropriate actions were taken. The wooden pallets were replaced with aluminum pallets, and trees and brush cleared to make the storage area more open and safe. Not long after all this work was accomplished, the western United States suffered through what at the time was an unusually dry and severe wildfire season. Almost 7 million acres burned during that summer of 2000. One of those infernos, the Cerro Grande Fire, started as a controlled burn at the Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico, less than 10 miles south of the lab and the stored nuclear waste. On May 4, high winds drove this blaze out of control. The massive fire swept through Los Alamos, burning 50,000 acres of forest and residential land, including 30 percent of the laboratory’s land. The conflagration destroyed many of the historic buildings where the atomic bomb was invented and tested, along with more than 200 homes. The smoke plume reached the Oklahoma panhandle, several hundred miles away. The fire’s damage was estimated at $1 billion.

But with the brush cleared and the wooden pallets replaced, the huge fire could not reach the newly protected nuclear waste. If it had, the consequences would have been truly disastrous. That smoke plume would have transported plutonium particles across a large swath of the Southwest, contaminating everything and exposing millions of people to increased risk of cancer. Instead, the precautions developed through the NEPA review were successful. No radiation was released.¹⁹

Less than 1 percent of public works projects—only very large ones—actually require these environmental impact statements. And for those few, there is little question that the process can be made more efficient and less time-consuming. But the requirement that government agencies consider the environmental impacts of their major projects and involve the public in those discussions is valuable. Discarding this process would be reckless and costly—but Republicans in power are going to try.

The Republican marketing of deregulation as a return to individual rights has been highly successful. One of their new, more cynical efforts to ensure that federal agencies get off the backs of polluters and manufacturers of dangerous products is an EPA proposal speciously entitled “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science.”

A word here about transparency. As a scientist who has been deeply involved in promulgating regulations that protect the public’s safety, health, and environment, I recognize the importance of open science and providing access to the best available research findings. That’s not what this new proposal is about. In fact, the new EPA regulation would do the opposite of what its title suggests: it would make it more difficult for EPA to use the findings of scientific investigations to protect public health. It is part of a larger tack utilized across the political right, one that can only be characterized as weaponized transparency: making the data underlying scientific conclusions publicly available, then hiring mercenary scientists to re-analyze it in faulty, specious ways.

The broad strategy was hatched by—who else?—the tobacco industry, then embraced by polluters of all types. The history is highly revealing. By the mid-1990s, there could no longer be any doubt that secondhand cigarette smoke was causing cancer among nonsmokers. The industry was still claiming it wasn’t true (heck, they were still claiming that nicotine was not addictive!), but they understood this was a rear-guard action; they were destined to lose eventually if it was their only defense. In other words, Big Tobacco needed new ways to stop the government from applying the science to disease prevention, including in this case the EPA, which was focused on environmental exposure to second-hand smoke. Chris Horner, the tobacco attorney who would later apply his disinformation skills to the climate change debate, came up with a nefarious solution. In a memo to his client R. J. Reynolds, Horner proposed a legislative effort to “construct explicit procedural hurdles the agency must follow in issuing scientific reports.” The idea was to require the EPA to provide access to all the raw data in all the studies used to protect the public so that corporations could hire their own scientists to re-analyze the results and make the ones they didn’t like disappear. Horner recognized that this plan would never work if it were seen as an effort to defend tobacco smoke, so “our approach is one of addressing process as opposed to scientific substance, and global applicability to industry rather than focusing on any single industrial sector.”²⁰

Horner understood this strategy would appeal to other industries facing regulatory challenges. Sure enough, it was immediately picked up by the most polluting energy companies—fossil fuel producers and the coal-burning utilities—in their efforts to slow the EPA’s regulation of the particulates that cause thousands of premature deaths every year. And these companies found a new champion in Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX), who assumed the chairmanship of the House Science Committee in 2013 and introduced legislation forbidding EPA from using any study unless the authors submitted all the raw data, computer programs and analysis tools for the EPA to post on the Internet. He called it the Secret Science Reform Act.

Smith promoted his bill by claiming that sound science requires transparency and replication—and since the polluting companies couldn’t access the raw data of the studies on which EPA relied, how could we trust that the findings were accurate? But this justification is a caricature of how science really works. While in theory most studies could be reproduced, they rarely are, because it is a waste of resources. Instead, scientists try to approach the same topic from different angles, using different methodologies, to determine if the results acquired support each other. As Bernard Goldstein, associate administrator of the EPA under President Reagan explained, reanalyzing the same study over and over is about as useful as checking on a surprising newspaper article by buying additional copies of the same paper to see if they all say the same thing.

Polluting corporations that conduct their own research, if pressed to defend their products and emissions, would no doubt be able to provide whatever data and materials that this new legislation might require. But for independent researchers, this bill’s requirements would place demands that would render much of environmental science, particularly epidemiologic studies, outside the evidence base available to the EPA. In other words, they would become irrelevant to efforts by the agency to protect the public and the environment. Why? Because most studies involving humans provide the subjects with assurances of confidentiality, with the investigators agreeing in advance to keep raw, identifiable data secret; EPA promises to redact the information before posting would not be sufficient to meet the scientists’ obligations to the subjects. Moreover, it is unlikely that Canadian or European scientists would turn over their raw data to a U.S. agency for “independent validation,” especially with that agency increasingly known for anything but independent evaluation. And because important studies on disasters like Deepwater Horizon or Chernobyl are, fortunately, not reproducible—well, sorry. Great work on that once-in-a-lifetime disaster, but not good enough for the EPA.

When Smith introduced his proposed legislation in 2015, a slew of the nation’s leading science organizations came out in strong opposition, as did President Obama’s EPA. But with the Republican majority at the time, it still passed the House of Representatives with only a single Republican voting no. It then died in the Senate, thanks to the standing threat of a filibuster by Democrats. And even if it had passed the Senate, President Obama would have vetoed it.

But that was then. As of January 20, 2017, we no longer had that confidence. Lamar Smith lost no time reintroducing the legislation, but with a new title: “Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act,” aka the HONEST Act. Hoping to mobilize the scientific community, Tom Burke, who served as EPA science advisor under President Obama, and I prepared to write an editorial opposing the legislation at the request of the editors of Science, the leading U.S. science journal.²¹ In researching the new version of Smith’s legislation, it became clear how the Trump administration planned to use the bill, and it was exactly what all of us had feared. The EPA would use only studies provided by industry that met the new requirements, and not even that many of them. When Smith’s first version was under review, the EPA provided the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) its estimation for the cost of gathering, redacting and posting the data on a public website: $250 million annually.²² The Trump administration’s estimate of the implementation cost for the second version dropped to $1 million annually. How could this be? Here’s the candid, shocking explanation from the CBO:

EPA officials have explained to CBO that the agency would implement the legislation with minimal funding and generally would not disseminate information for the scientific studies that it uses to support covered actions. That approach to implementing the legislation would significantly reduce the number of studies that the agency relies on when issuing or proposing covered actions for the first few years following enactment of the legislation [emphasis added].²³

This was no doubt music to the ears of the House Republicans, and they passed the HONEST Act in a hurry, although the opposition did manage to convince seven out of the 232 Republicans to vote no. But again the Senate stood in the way, so the Trump administration decided to do an end-run around Congress and implement this drastic change through regulation. This effort has generated even more controversy. The same science organizations weighed in against the bill, of course, but now the Pentagon broke the informal rule against publicizing interagency conflicts and also openly opposed it.²⁴ (Different departments generally don’t oppose each other’s proposals—it’s not good form—but try to resolve their differences through the White House.) Lawsuits are inevitable in this case, and there is a chance this administration’s end-run around Congress will not be upheld by the courts.

These truly are perilous times. The direct impacts of the Trump administration’s actions—and more broadly, those of Republicans across the preceding decades—on health and life on this planet will be measurable only with the benefit of time. For now, the rejection of science in order to enable industries to operate unchecked has already delayed action to slow the buildup of greenhouse gases for years beyond what would have been optimal. We are already paying the price in rising sea levels, more fierce and frequent wildfires, new patterns of vector-borne illness, and extreme weather events in virtually every part of the globe. If Trump’s efforts to roll back EPA clean air rules prove successful, increased air pollution will result in tens of thousands of premature deaths and hundreds of thousands of cases of respiratory disease in children across the country.²⁵

Beyond these obvious health and environmental impacts, the Republican efforts to dismiss science and ravage federal science agencies will make future repair of a damaged regulatory system that much more difficult. The exodus of the country’s best and brightest from many federal agencies will, in the best scenario, take time to build back. Senior scientists and high-level managers, men and women with decades of expertise and willing to make the sacrifices required by a career in public service, are being forced out. Many others are leaving of their own accord, often in frustration or disheartened by the policy changes dictated from the top of the agencies. If and when American government becomes the mostly level playing field it was in past administrations, rebuilding the science-based agencies with talented, qualified people will still be difficult.

And what of the even more fundamental damage done by President Trump and the Republicans to the scientific enterprise itself? There are no “alternative facts” in science. Well-meaning observers can interpret the same data differently, but that isn’t what is going on now. We need the best science and the best scientists to solve the problems facing the world. To be successful, the climate change and evolution deniers, the defenders of secondhand smoke, and the product defense industry as a whole, must disparage science and scientists. Just as Trump’s attacks on fact-based journalism increase disbelief (if not animosity) toward the news media, attacks on science feed dangerous myths and misunderstanding about vaccines, abortion, climate change, and a host of other pressing issues. The result is cynicism about science and rejection of science-based policy. The costs to people, the environment, and our future are enormous.