How One GOP-Controlled Committee Is Waging a War on Science
Since Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) took over as chairman of the House Science Committee in the beginning of 2013, the GOP majority has been waging a war. Its enemies list is long: The Environmental Protection Agency. The National Science Foundation. Rules that prevent industries from polluting the air and groundwater. Climate scientists studying the effects of a warming planet. The very notion of non-politicized, peer-reviewed scientific inquiry.
For years, the House Science Committee was a quiet congressional backwater. Typically, its most contentious battles were over the future of American space exploration.
Smith has changed that. The traditionally collegial committee has been pursuing a more aggressive and party-driven agenda — one that’s closely aligned with the GOP’s relentless promotion of the fossil-fuel industry. Though critics say Smith’s campaign has been scattershot and at least somewhat dysfunctional, they’re alarmed about what could result from the various bills he’s pushed over the last 18 months.
Stocked with corporate-trained lobbyists in key staff positions, the committee’s majority has repeatedly attacked the EPA from several different vantage points. The committee participated in the congressional GOP’s efforts to block or limit virtually all regulations on coal, oil and natural gas facilities - including a reinvigorated effort to delegitimize and ultimately scrap the most important existing such laws like the Clean Air Act by tarnishing seminal studies conducted by researchers with Harvard University and the American Cancer Society. After encountering resistance to that effort, committee Republicans went much further by pushing a bill that would disallow the EPA from using any confidential data or information - a measure seemingly designed to completely disrupt its ability to protect the public.
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