Senate Advances "Secret Science" Bill, Sets Up Possible Showdown With President

sciencehabit writes: Republicans in Congress appear to be headed for a showdown with the White House over controversial "secret science" legislation aimed at changing how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses scientific studies. A deeply divided Senate panel yesterday advanced a bill that would require EPA to craft its policies based only on public data available to outside experts. The House of Representatives has already passed a similar measure. But Democrats and science groups have harshly criticized the approach, and the White House has threatened a veto.

Comments

For those wondering why this is a bad thing

[Overzeetop]

Every single study which involves health records would be forbidden to be used, because the RAW data is not available to the public. It's the perfect knot - previous law prevents the release of personally identifiable medical data, and this law makes it illegal to base any regulation on any study for which the raw data (in this case, personally identifiable - as it must be able to be 100% independently verified) is not released to the public.

This is about neutering the EPA's ability to "prove" that any particular pollutant causes harm to humans. If you can't provide the raw data that asbestos has led to lung cancer - patient records going back decades - you aren't allow to regulate it. Black lung? Chromium compounds in drinking water? Sorry, unless you publically release the medical records of every single person in every study you cite, it's "secret data" and junk science.

Re:Why is this even a debate?

[silentcoder]

>One of the effects of the bill will be to make it impossible to use data from large scale public health studie

That's not an effect, that's the GOAL. The Republicans have a problem preventing sensible regulations around things like air pollution and climate change backed up by solid scientific research - so they are trying to make the science that backs it up illegal.
Science that is not "secret" by any definition that applies to the scientific method at all - which is why scientists around the US has denounced the bill. There is no problem with reproducability at all.

What does put SOME access restriction on these large public health studies is that, because of when they were done, they were not anonymous. The only "secret" bit about them is confidential patient information. What the republicans want to do is exclude from scientific research all data that is covered by patient privilege.

Which is insane.