Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials retaliated against three scientists who expressed dissenting scientific views, the agency’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) said Thursday.
Five different EPA scientists alleged to OIG that they had been subject to reprisals for expressing their differing scientific opinions about chemical assessments while former President Donald Trump was in the White House, and the watchdog’s office ultimately concluded that three of them had been subjected to blowback for doing so. The three scientists who faced retaliation were variously harassed, given lower grades on performance reviews, missed out on bonus payments or reassigned to different posts within the bureaucracy.
“The investigations conducted by the EPA OIG determined that three out of the five scientists were retaliated against in violation of the EPA’s Scientific Integrity Policy for expressing differing scientific opinions,” the EPA OIG said of its findings. “Of these three scientists, we found that one was also retaliated against after engaging in protected activities in violation of the Whistleblower Protection Act. The EPA OIG has consistently identified promoting ethical conduct and protecting scientific integrity as a top management challenge at the EPA.”
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“I sort of naively thought that working with pretty much all Ph.D. level scientists, that we would settle matters by looking at the science and having scientific discussions,” one of the three scientist whistleblowers told The Hill. “Instead, what we got was bullying, harassing, name-calling, directions to just override things without any explanation or rationale.”
Each of the three scientists who filed complaints alleged that the retaliation stemmed from scientific disagreements about the specific risks of particular chemicals and other EPA staffers’ attempts to revise their work, according to the OIG. The agency blamed the Trump administration for creating the conditions described by the EPA OIG.
“EPA has received the Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) reports on five whistleblower complaints in the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention’s new chemicals program,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The events covered by these reports began during the previous administration when the political leadership placed intense pressure on both career managers and scientists in EPA’s new chemicals program to more quickly review and approve new chemicals. The reports also point to the failure to provide additional resources for the increased workload in the new chemicals program that resulted when the Toxic Substances Control Act was amended.”
Kyla Bennett, director of science policy for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the organization that helped file some of the complaints, pushed back against the EPA’s assessment of the situation in comments to The Hill.
“Things under the Trump administration were horrific,” Bennett told the outlet. However, “all of these same issues are occurring under the Biden administration — both the retaliation and the underlying scientific issues.”
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