This just in:

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research office and could fire more than 1,000 scientists and other employees who help provide the scientific foundation for rules safeguarding human health and ecosystems from environmental pollutants.

This is not just staff reduction, this is redefining the power of the agency.

The EPA summarizes its mission as follows:

The mission of EPA is to protect human health and the environment.

That is incredibly broad.  Their web site says that in order to do this they:

• Develop and enforce regulations
• Give grants
• Study environmental issues
• Sponsor partnerships
• Teach people about the environment
• Publish information

Note what is top of that list – they are a regulatory agency.  But. that said, they also generate “the science” on which that regulation is based using grants, sponsorships and their own laboratories, and further they then engage in communication (propaganda) to promote their science and regulation.  That is pretty much absolute power in their wheelhouse.

Let’s say they grow suspicious about a family of products called the “BS’s.”  The first question is, “What raised those suspicions?”  It could be ubiquity.  They are, after all, running around testing soil, air and water for things and they might find the BS’s everywhere. Maybe the BS’s contain a chemical “moiety” that in other settings and attached to other things caused cancer in newts.  But it could also be that they need a new family of materials to study, and give grants to study, to justify their continued suck down of our tax dollars.  Which is it?  Do we ever know for sure?

Then, once they have studied it, given away a boatload of money for others to study it, partnered with some start-up (i.e. funding the start-up), likely started by some retired EPA employee, to develop technology to remove the BS’s from the air, soil and water, they need to regulate it so we can get all the BS’s out of the environment (thus selling that technology developed) because somewhere in all that studying, granting and partnering is data that says BS’s might give cancer to 80-year-old adults three generations down the line if they bathed in it daily for those entire 80 years.

Now, there is a lot of hyperbole in the scenario I just spun.  The point is that the agency has the ability to declare a suspected problem, prove it is a problem then regulate the problem.  At that point they do not respond to issues and problems with the environment, they are a self-promulgating life-form.

This move by EPA is mostly based on the fact that they do not need to operate independent labs when they can pass out money to universities for the same work – and they already are.  But it also creates a tiny separation between the science that underlies regulation and the regulation proper.  Sure, grant money comes with a lot of strings, but at least it is not exactly the same people doing the science that write the regulations.  The possibility of conflict of interest is still there, but the probability of its occurrence has been lowered a bit.

It has long been my opinion that the EPA needs to be “narrow focused.”  The USGS is a good example.  They are a pure science agency.  They produce information, and that is all they do.  Based on that information, others may act, but they do not.  Companies may use the information produced to decide where to explore for oil.  Local building and safety departments may use the information the Survey produces to write building codes stronger than most places because that locality is prone to earthquakes.  The point is the Survey produces information, but it does not regulate, nor does it control the use of that information in any fashion.  It is limited in its power.

Were the EPA narrow focused, it could produce science, or it could regulate but not both – that is too much power.  This move by EPA is a small, a very small, step in the right direction, layoffs notwithstanding.  The environment will be fine, the grants will be written, and the science will still happen – the EPA just won’t be doing it directly.  I, for one, long for the day when the grants come from somewhere else altogether.  But, one step at a time.