In one of several controversial moves made by its new administrator, Scott Pruitt, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has moved to bar scientists who receive agency grants from sitting on its expert panels. The EPA has been a major funder of environmental research, and the new rules, some fear, could effectively shut out many academic researchers.

The directive applies to three of the EPA’s 22 advisory committees – the Science Advisory Board (SAB), Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) and Board of Scientific Counselors (BoSC).  Pruitt, who was appointed to his position earlier this year by incoming US president, Donald Trump, said the changes are a way to limit conflicts of interest and ensure "independent, arms-length input" on issues to be regulated.

The new policy will apply to grant recipients who are listed as investigator or co-investigator on award contracts, meaning an academic whose university receives EPA grants but is not personally involved in the work would not be affected, reports said.

Around $77 million in grants has been made available to members of the panels over the past three years, Pruitt said in announcing the changes. “It just is not right” for the agency to be issuing these grants “and then asking these people to be providing independent counsel.”

The fact that some of the EPA’s advisory boards are filled with members whose research receives millions of dollars of funding from the EPA “is an obvious conflict of interest that should never have been allowed to develop," added Myron Ebell, director of the conservative Center for Energy and Environment and an adviser of Donald Trump. "Advice from people who are financially dependent on those they are advising may of course in many instances be sound, but it will always be suspect," he said.

Some critics have accused the administrator of applying a double standard, as they say under Pruitt’s aegis the EPA has been relying more and more on the advice of scientists from industry, who they contend have a natural conflict of interest. The agency has made headlines recently with staff appointments coming directly from industry.

That people who work for regulated industries will still be able to serve, “makes no sense,” said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy. “It turns the idea of conflict of interest on its head.

As with other Trump administration appointments, some of the new members of the EPA’s boards have adopted positions that critics say do not reflect the necessary neutrality. New CASCAC chief Tony Cox is president of a Colorado consultancy that has received funding from the American Chemistry Council and the American Petroleum Institute. Its research describes the EPA’s methods for calculating optimal air quality standards for ozone as “unreliable, logically unsound and inappropriate for drawing causal inferences.”

More controversial is the appointment to the SAB of Robert Phalen, former director of the Air Pollution Health Effects Laboratory at the University of California Irvine. Phalen once claimed that America’s air was "a little too clean for optimum health,” as children’s lungs need to breathe irritants so their bodies can learn to fight them