May 18, 2020 – The Clinic filed comments today on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s supplemental notice for its “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” proposal on behalf of Harvard President Lawrence Bacow and more than three dozen other leaders in science and medicine from Harvard University. The supplemental notice expands on a proposed rule from 2018 that would prevent EPA from relying on the best-available, peer reviewed scientific information in many contexts and would therefore undermine EPA’s ability to fulfill its mandate to protect the public health and safety of Americans.
The comments address the following issues:
- The supplemental notice still fails to identify any need for the dramatic change in EPA decision-making represented by the proposal.
- The proposal’s focus on reanalysis as the basis for determining the reliability of scientific studies is inconsistent with scientific best practices and EPA’s prior practice.
- The supplemental notice’s expansion of the scope of the proposal to apply to “all data and models” and to “influential scientific information” exacerbates the problems with the Proposal and would hamper EPA’s regulatory functions.
- Both the tiered access and reduced weight alternatives proposed by EPA are vague, not within EPA’s legal authority, and present the same problems as the initial proposal.
- The supplemental notice adopts only a partial approach to advancing transparency, treating academic and industry research differently.
- Multiple aspects of the supplemental notice are incomplete, ambiguous, or otherwise fail to provide adequate notice of the contents of the Proposal.
- Neither the Housekeeping Statute nor the other statutory provisions cited by EPA grant it the authority to promulgate the proposal.
- Even as modified by the supplemental notice, the proposed waiver authority under 40 C.F.R. 30.9 leaves the EPA Administrator with impermissibly broad discretion to pick and choose which studies EPA may rely on in its decision-making.
- The proposal violates multiple statutory and executive order requirements.
- The comment period that EPA has provided for the supplemental notice is inadequate in light of the global pandemic.
The comments were written by Clinic Deputy Director Shaun Goho, Clinic Fellow Lynne Dzubow, and Clinic students Maria Dambriunas (JD ’20) and Jeremy Dang (JD ’21). You can read them here.
The Clinic’s 2018 comments on the initial proposal on behalf of Harvard faculty are available here, and its 2018 comments on behalf of other environmental law clinics are available here.