EPA Cannot Bar Grant Recipients from Science Panels, Court Rules

A federal judge at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cannot bar recipients of agency grant funding from serving on its science advisory committees. Former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt issued the directive prohibiting researchers receiving EPA research funding from serving on any of the agency’s nearly two-dozen advisory committees in October 2017. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) sued the agency over the directive last year. In an opinion written earlier this year, Senior Judge Denise Cote of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said that EPA needed to provide a “reasoned explanation” for the 2017 order as the agency had “failed to articulate any reason for changing its longstanding practice of permitting EPA grant recipients to serve on EPA advisory committees.” The April 15 ruling from Judge Cote “vacated” the directive’s provision specifying that EPA grant recipients could not serve on its advisory committees. “It simply means that the EPA may not categorically exclude EPA grant recipients from serving on advisory committees, given this Court’s conclusion that the EPA’s reasoning and record rendered its decision to do so arbitrary and capricious,” wrote Judge Cote in her decision. “The EPA must simply return to the standards that it historically applied until those stan...
Source: Public Policy Reports - Category: Biology Authors: Source Type: news