The House Oversight and Reform Committee is launching a broad investigation into the Biden-Harris administration’s so-called scientific integrity rules, which critics say are designed to empower career bureaucrats and impair the incoming Trump administration’s agenda, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
According to committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky.), the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services have quietly constructed scientific integrity guidelines to insulate the current administration’s agenda. As part of the probe, Comer fired off letters to both agencies on Thursday, seeking a bevy of communications and documents on the matter and warning of the implications for such guidelines.
The Oversight Committee’s probe provides a window into how the Biden-Harris administration is working behind the scenes to cement its own agenda. It also foreshadows the resistance the incoming Trump administration is bound to face from career bureaucrats as it assumes power.
“Policymaking by the administrative state should be informed by scientific evidence—including views that challenge the existing consensus—and accountable to the American people and their elected leadership, not beholden to career bureaucrats implementing their own agendas,” Comer wrote in the letters.
“Yet the regime implemented by the Biden-Harris Administration is likely to entrench the status quo without regard to scientific advances while enhancing the power of unelected federal officials to influence or stymie policy decisions,” he continued.
Comer added that federal scientific integrity efforts aren’t designed to ensure the best science is considered in policymaking but rather to “entrench far-left progressive policies in the administrative state.”
The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment.
“The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability’s decision to investigate the EPA and HHS is a much-needed step toward preserving the integrity of the democratic process,” Council to Modernize Governance executive director Curtis Schube told the Free Beacon. “The changes that the Biden-Harris administration made to agency scientific integrity policies would permit unelected bureaucrats to arbitrarily deem science-based actions ‘political’ or ‘inappropriate.'”
“These employees could then file ethics complaints if Trump administration officials issued directives that differ from their preferred personal and political opinions,” Schube said. “This effectively allows career employees to run the agencies, not people appointed by a democratically-elected president.”
Schube authored a report earlier this year, which highlighted how federal scientific integrity policies have been crafted “to remove political appointees from the decision-making process and stymie a future administration’s ability to revisit controversial or ill-advised regulatory proposals.” The report—which mainly focused on recent updates to the Environmental Protection Agency’s and Department of Health and Human Services’s policies—was cited in Comer’s letters on Thursday.
The Environmental Protection Agency released its updated scientific integrity policies in January, and the Department of Health and Human Services finalized its new slate of scientific integrity policies in September.
Under the Environmental Protection Agency’s new guidelines, political appointees are not able to impact the agency’s direction and are prohibited from “directing or suggesting that another covered entity interfere or inappropriately influence or unreasonably delay scientific activities.” The guidelines also state that the agency’s weighing of economic impact analyses is a “scientific decision.”
It is foreseeable that federal employees can use the guidelines to blunt the Trump administration’s efforts to revise or gut existing regulations targeting gas-powered cars and fossil fuel-fired power plants, according to Schube.
In addition, the guidelines incorporate factors like “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and “indigenous knowledge” into the scientific process. They also define a scientist as “anyone who collects, generates, uses, or evaluates scientific data, environmental information, analyses, or products,” ensuring that any career employee can be classified as a scientist.
“The ambiguous language opens the door to inconsistent and arbitrary application of the EPA’s scientific integrity procedures,” Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow James Broughel wrote in February. “By essentially treating all career staff as unquestionable scientists, the policy is likely to discourage future administrations from conducting proper oversight, framing their involvement as ‘political’ and career staff activities as ‘scientific.'”
The Department of Health and Human Services’s scientific integrity guidelines include similar changes, prohibiting “political interference or other inappropriate influence in the design, proposal, conduct, management, evaluation, communicating about, and use of scientific activities.”
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