EPA tweaks controversial transparency proposal

Environment agency relaxes condition requiring public data for regulations, but expands scope of proposed rule

The United States Environmental Protection Agency has partly rowed back on a controversial proposal that environmental regulations should be based only on studies for which the underlying data are publicly available.

The rule, proposed in 2018 as a means to increase transparency in the regulatory process, met significant opposition from researchers, garnering 590,000 comments during a public consultation as well as criticism from the agency’s own Science Advisory Board.