An equity and environmental justice assessment of anti-science actions during the Trump administration

The US Congress, by enacting legislation, has charged federal agencies with protecting public health and the environment [1, 2]. Many such safeguards, including air pollution standards and restrictions on toxic chemicals, rely on scientific evidence. In practice, federal agencies sometimes fall short of fully executing their congressionally mandated duties to protect public health and the environment. There may be a variety of causes, but one contributing factor is willingness of some government officials to sideline science for political, financial, or ideological reasons. Not surprisingly, these actions often align with presidential administration priorities. These losses of scientific integrity may weaken health protections in communities across the US, especially in underserved communities.

Underserved communities (Black, Indigenous, and low-income communities, and communities of color) are those faced with significant barriers to accessing the benefits associated with environmental and public health protections, and often experience the brunt of harms when policymakers sideline science. This, in turn, exacerbates long-standing health inequities. Since at least the 1980s, a growing body of research has shown that members of underserved communities face disproportionately high exposure to pollution and other stressors [3,4,5,6,7,8]. Residents of underserved communities are exposed to greater health hazards in their homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods than are residents from whiter and more affluent communities. The hazards relate to long-standing inequities and systemic racism, such as residential segregation due to ‘redlining’ practices in which governments marked up neighborhoods on maps and gave lower grades in red to places where they expected property values to decrease, often in areas with Black homeowners [9]. Underserved communities are more likely to be located near sources of environmental hazards such as sewage systems, mines, landfills, industrial facilities, major roads, and fossil fuel extraction operations [6]. A groundbreaking study conducted in 1987 found that race was the most potent variable for predicting location of commercial hazardous waste facilities in the US. [3]. Evidence continues to build, making it ever clearer that underserved communities face disproportionately higher exposure to environmental harms [6, 7], that may cause cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, cancer, and death [8, 10].

For decades, environmental justice advocates, scientists, and members of underserved communities have advocated for policymakers to use a framework for analyzing environmental justice centered on a right of all individuals to be protected from environmental degradation; adopt a public health strategy based on scientific evidence to identify threats to underserved communities, particularly before these threats result in harm; shift the burden of scientific proof to polluters to show that their activities are not resulting in harm to underserved communities; and target resources toward communities experiencing disproportionate adverse health effects from environmental hazards [4, 5].

Implicit in this framework is the role of robust and independent science to identify health disparities and for policymakers to rely on the best available science to carry out policy actions equitably. Science-based and science-informed decision making can help counteract implicit bias and systemic racism in policy decisions, and, in turn, help protect underserved communities from these health threats [11,12,13]. When policymakers choose to sideline science when making decisions, they undermine the pressing need to address disproportionate health outcomes in underserved communities. These communities face cumulative effects from a range of unjust policy decisions (such as job instability, unfair wages, less access to government aid, and inadequate healthcare coverage) that exacerbate the harms and make recovery from them more difficult [7, 14]. For some political officials, undermining science is a powerful tactic to shape regulation. Outside groups with financial incentives, such as corporations, have long established a playbook on how to do so [15, 16]. Officials can bury research, censor scientists, cut off funding for scientific research conducted by agency scientists or otherwise funded by agencies, or stop data collection [17,18,19]. How officials handle science and pressures from outside groups indicates whether a governmental system values and incorporates science-based decision making and whether underserved communities experience health burdens as a result of exposures to environmental health threats.

This connection is particularly prominent at science-based federal agencies that employ thousands of scientists to carry out robust and independent data collection and analyses. These same agencies employ political appointees in high-level positions who may sideline science. Within the federal government, this tension is usually described in reference to scientific integrity, a set of principles, guidelines, and policy documents adopted by federal agencies to ensure that rigorous scientific research is free from politically motivated suppression or distortion [11, 13, 20,21,22,23]. Since 2010, federal agencies have worked to establish scientific integrity policies, stronger or weaker ones depending on the agency [24]. The administration of President Biden, through its Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), has worked to harmonize and institutionalize stronger scientific integrity policies across agencies and to explicitly include in them commitments to equitable workplaces and prioritization of science-based decisions that affect underserved communities [11,12,13].

While every administration since at least the 1950s has sidelined science to advance a political agenda [17], the Trump administration’s attacks on science were unprecedented in frequency [16, 18, 19, 22, 23]. And they often hindered progress on environmental justice [25,26,27,28,29,30,31]. In the context of equity and environmental justice, the clearest examples of the Trump administration’s anti-science actions occurred at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with attempts to defund and reduce staff and undermine the agency’s science-based policymaking processes [16, 27,28,29,30,31]. Previous research suggests that this led to a culture of fear and censorship among thousands of EPA scientists. Federally employed scientists surveyed in 2018 across 16 agencies, including at the EPA, reported a diminished focus on equity and environment justice [26]. At least through 2020, however, research also suggests that environmental justice had been traditionally devalued, underfunded, and marginalized by presidential administrations for decades, especially within the EPA’s environmental justice office [29]. Thus, this history of repeated sidelining of environmental justice across administrations provides important context for evaluating effects of further erosion of science and equity at an unprecedented pace during the Trump administration.

The relationship between the Trump administration’s diminution of scientific integrity and related harms on underserved communities has not yet been discussed in the literature. Several universities, law firms, newspapers, and non-profit organizations tracked and documented the Trump administration’s anti-science actions and deregulatory rulemakings in real time, but none of these efforts examined the effect of the actions on underserved communities [18, 19].

To understand the role of science in decision making and environmental justice, we examined the effects of the Trump administration’s anti-science actions using two approaches. First, to understand the scope, breadth, and frequency, we analyzed the data and documented incidents of attacks on science by the Trump administration (Figs. 1, 2). We also analyzed the data on attacks on science that we determined had an effect on underserved communities. Second, to contextualize how these attacks on science undermined the science policy process, particularly for underserved communities, we examined a set of equity and environmental justice case studies and focused on how policy gaps and breaches of agency norms made the agencies vulnerable to losses of scientific integrity. Finally, we used data from the attacks on science that had effects on underserved communities to outline how current and future administrations can bolster or create policy infrastructure with the dual purposes of ensuring independent science and placing environmental justice at the center.

Fig. 1figure 1

The Union of Concerned Scientists' criteria to characterize an attack on science

Fig. 2figure 2

The Union of Concerned Scientists documented 206 attacks on science during the Trump administration

留言 (0)

沒有登入
gif