Alongside already known or implemented moves rolling back decades of US environmental protection legislation and the 31% cut in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) budget, the administration of new US President Donald Trump and the Republican-led Congress are planning sweeping changes in how science is used to govern public health.

As part of efforts to flatten regulatory hurdles for business, legislation has been drafted or passed by Congress that some chemical companies think are counter- productive. Two bills overturning legislative achievements of the past decade were passed last week by the House of Representatives and will now go to the Senate for approval.  Others are being planned.

Among the most controversial is a bill that would bar the EPA from creating any regulation based on data that is not publicly available or cannot be replicated. The bill introduced by Republican congressman Lamar Smith of Texas, chair of the House committee that oversees the EPA, is known as the Honest Act.  “Open and honest science should be at the core of the EPA’s mission rather than rules that end up costing American taxpayers billions of dollars,’’ Smith said.

The act, which its sponsors said would mandate the use of the “best available science,” would eliminate studies citing epidemiological research as a basis for banning chemicals or products from the market. Important legislation of the past that banned the insecticide DDT, shown to cause cancer in humans and deadly effects in birds, or leaded gasoline, linked to brain damage in children, was based on epidemiology, the legislation’s critics note.

A second game-changing law passed the House by a vote of 229 to 193. The EPA Science Advisory Board Act would open the environmental watchdog’s expert advisory panels to industry representatives, allowing them to serve without special permission. However, it would exclude scientists whose research receives EPA funding. Its sponsor, Oklahoma Representative Frank Lucas, also a Republican, said this would “prevent extreme views.”

Revising the makeup of the board would “create a more balanced situation” and move standards “closer to the middle” politically, Lucas asserted. However, critics of this bill said it would make it easier for industry representatives with conflicts of interest to serve on EPA advisory boards and potentially slow the regulatory process.

The Better Evaluation of Science and Technology Act, also called Best Act, sponsored by Oklahoma Republican Senator James Lankford, is aimed at reducing the number of lawsuits filed against government agencies and according to its sponsor would diminish concern about the quality of underlying data in regulations.

Environmentalists also fear that Congress will try to overturn the EPA’s Safer Choice program, which supports the use of household products free of hazardous substances. Many companies whose products are subject to review would like to see it remain in place. Some 200 of them including Dow Chemical and BASF, along with retailers, wrote to the new EPA head, Scott Pruitt, saying the regulation is useful as it helps consumers, business and procurement officers /purchasers to identify products that go beyond regular safe standards.