Lamar Smith: “This amendment reflects the core principles of two bills passed by the House earlier this year with bipartisan support.…”

“This amendment reflects the core principles of two bills passed by the House earlier this year with bipartisan support. They are H.R. 1029, the EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act, and H.R. 1030, the Secret Science Reform Act. I am pleased to be joined by the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology's former Subcommittee on Environment chairman, Representative David Schweikert, who sponsored the original version of the Secret Science bill in 2014. The amendment simply requires the Environmental Protection Agency to base its regulations on publicly available data that can be verified. Why would the administration want to hide this information from the American people? We must make sure that Federal regulations are based on science that is available for independent review. Many Americans are unaware that some of the EPA's most expensive and burdensome regulations, such as its proposed climate and ozone rules, are based on underlying data that not even the EPA has seen. This amendment ensures that the decisions that affect every American are based on independently verified, unbiased, scientific research instead of on secret data that is hidden from the American people. That is called the scientific method. This amendment also ensures that the EPA Science Advisory Board is able to provide meaningful, balanced, and independent assessments of the science behind the EPA regulations.…”