Political Quotes

“The sad fact is that the Environmental Protection Agency bases its regulations on data and modeling that is often withheld from the public. My amendment simply requires that the Environmental Protection Agency make available to the public the data that regulations are based on and to follow its own guidelines and submit regulatory impact analyses to peer review. It's my hope that transparency, sound science and peer review are principles that everyone can support. For example, it is frequently claimed that the Clean Water Act generates benefits that outweigh costs by a 30-1 ratio, but almost 90 percent of these claimed benefits are based on two studies whose underlying data has never been made public. I can verify this firsthand because for the last year I've asked the administration at committee hearings and on the record for this information and have been repeatedly rebuffed. This is not an acceptable way to run a regulatory agency that impacts our country's health, economy, unemployment--as we heard from the gentleman from Michigan--and ability to compete internationally. Both President Obama's senior science adviser and the head of EPA's independent science advisory board agreed with me at recent hearings that the scientific data used by the government to justify its regulatory actions should be made publicly available.…”