Whistleblower Moves to Halt EPA Committee Work, Claims Members Conflicted by Reliance on Government Grants

A former member of an advisory panel at the Environmental Protection Agency has filed a petition to halt the work of a committee that could approve stricter air-pollution standards, pending the conclusion of a lawsuit against the agency.

Stanley Young, a statistician and former member of the Science Advisory Board (SAB) from 2018 until March of this year, filed the suit on October 7, months after EPA administrator Michael Regan fired 47 members of the SAB and all seven members of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC). Regan sought to reverse a Trump-administration policy preventing academics who received research grants from the EPA from serving on those panels.

Young’s lawsuit claims that the committees are now “unfairly balanced . . . because they lack a single member affiliated with regulated industries.”

Now, Young is petitioning to stop the CASAC from working until the committee can be restaffed. Young was nominated to CASAC but was not selected as a member by the Biden administration.

“Immediate relief is necessary to pause the Committee’s work before it is complete,” a new court filing by Jones Day, the law firm representing Young, claims. “Very soon, EPA will ask the Committee to rubber-stamp the staff’s policy assessment that the Agency should adopt stricter particulate-matter standards,” referring to stricter policies governing air pollution.

While the law firm was informed that the committee would not resume work before January or February 2022, the government will not cease the committee’s work pending a court judgment, according to the filing.

“To prevent the Committee from issuing its recommendation before the Court reviews EPA’s compliance with [the Federal Advisory Committee Act] and the [Administrative Procedure Act], this Court should preliminarily enjoin the Committee from conducting further activity and EPA from receiving any advice from the Committee until it is lawfully reconstituted,” the petition states.

Young’s suit says six of the new CASAC members are academics, including several who have funded their research through EPA grants. Nine new members of the SAB are also associated with EPA grants.

In the latest filings, Young notes there are “no longer any members of [CASAC] who, like myself, take the position that current air quality standards have not been shown to result in premature fatalities.”

“Instead, they believe that the minute associations they tease out with statistical analysis are causal,” he said. “There is some virtue signaling mixed in as well, and they ignore contrary publications and perspectives.”

He accused “EPA-funded researchers” of living “in an echo chamber.”  

“They, too, have no skin in the game beyond earning their next grants, and they are not scientifically skeptical,” he said.

Regan announced on March 31 that he would “reestablish” both committees, seeking to reverse the Trump-administration rule that prevented academic recipients of EPA grants from serving on those committees.

“Resetting these two scientific advisory committees will ensure the agency receives the best possible scientific insight to support our work to protect human health and the environment,” Regan said in a statement at the time. “Today we return to a time-tested, fair, and transparent process for soliciting membership to these critically important advisory bodies.”

Tony Cox, who served as chair of the CASAC from 2017 until March 2021 said in a signed declaration that the committee is now “woefully unbalanced” and that it “lacks technical expertise and scientific competence in key technical disciplines.”

“A wider pool of intellectual resources and experiences is needed to deliver scientifically sound advice,” he said. “The current CASAC has attracted EPA-funded academics with expertise in the EPA’s current grant-awarding and ‘causal determination’ processes.  The latter is essentially a consensus-building political process for deciding what to regulate based on the subjective judgments of participants, as expressed using terms with no clear operational definitions and using demonstrably arbitrary judgments.”

James Enstrom, president of the scientific integrity institute in Los Angeles, in the filings detailed “serious bias” on the current CASAC and SAB by at least three members, including Elizabeth Sheppard, CASAC Chair and SAB member.

Sheppard has been the recipient of more than $60 million in EPA funding  and was the lead scientific plaintiff in a 2018 Union of Concerned Scientists lawsuit against EPA. The filing adds that she has “unprofessionally exaggerated the cancer risk of glyphosate” and that she has never addressed a serious flaw that Enstrom identified in her 2007 New England Journal of Medicine article on PM2.5 nor cited his evidence that there is no relationship between PM2.5 and morality.