So much for political neutrality of the federal bureaucracy.
Employees of the Environmental Protection Agency joined protestors outside the agency's regional headquarters in Chicago Feb. 6 to oppose the nomination of Scott Pruitt as EPA administrator.
The Associated Press said the crowd of about 300 included "scores" of EPA employees.
On the same day, the Senate received a letter signed by nearly 450 former EPA employees calling for rejection of President Donald Trump's selection of the Oklahoma attorney general.
"Every EPA administrator has a fundamental obligation to act in the public's interest based on current law and the best available science," the letter said. "Mr. Pruitt's record raises serious questions about whose interests he has served to date and whether he agrees with the longstanding tenets of US environmental law."
If EPA hadn't treated law and science recklessly, those concerns would be valid. In pursuit of former President Barack Obama's aggressively liberal environmental objection, though, the agency lost control.
It was and remains tested in court many times for exercising doubtful authority-most famously with the Clean Power Plan now before the Supreme Court.
And it made artful use of supposedly scientific constructs such as the "social cost of carbon" and "cobenefits" to skew cost-benefit analyses of its proposals.
After the agency last June said a multiyear study found no evidence that hydraulic fracturing systemically threatened drinking-water supplies, a scientific advisory board of disputed balance challenged the underlying arithmetic.
Having been caught not counting what it couldn't find, the agency obediently changed its conclusion to imply that fracturing might, under certain circumstances, pose a threat.
This isn't science. It's politics.
Pruitt regularly challenged excesses like these. EPA lost its bearings. Protests by agency employees against Pruitt's nomination underscore the need for institutional reform.
Curing EPA of political activism requires a critical outsider like Pruitt, who won't be popular.
Only after that step has been taken can serious work begin on restoration of the agency's scientific credibility.
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted Feb. 10, 2017; author's e-mail: [email protected])
