Science and Democratic Policy in a Data-Driven World

Data have no politics. It is, for this reason, lamentable that a recent proposed rule from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dealing with the transparency of data used to develop regulations is being evaluated for its effect on political battles. The rule would require EPA to make regulatory decisions only based on research with publicly available data, unless EPA’s Administrator grants a waiver when public data access is impossible to provide, consistent with law, privacy, or security. Ideally, public policies will be factually based and non-partisan. However, politicians will always hold the reigns of regulatory agencies, and politicians will seek to influence regulatory decision-making for political purposes. As a check on the influences of politics and ideology that result from political control of regulatory agencies, citizens need for agency officials to rely on transparent, data-driven approaches to policymaking. Public access to the data underlying…

Read more detail on Recent Administrative Law posts –

This entry was posted in Administrative law and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply