Nearly one year ago, the Trump administration fired a panel of more than two dozen scientific experts who assisted the Environmental Protection Agency in its review of air quality standards for particulate matter.
Now, as the EPA prepares its report on those standards later this month, 20 of those scientists are meeting independently to release their own assessment of current air pollution levels, with a focus on the particles from fossil fuels that can make people sick.
These scientists and researchers, former members of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) on particulate matter, said the EPA has stripped the panel down to its core seven members, who are ill-equipped to set air quality standards and don’t have the time to do it.
“They fired the particulate matter review panel and they said the chartered CASAC would do the review,” Chris Zarba, who served as the staff director of the Scientific Advisory Board at the EPA until 2018, said. “In the history of the agency this has never happened. The new panel is unqualified and the new panel has said they were unqualified.”
In response, the group of former panel members reconvened at a meeting in Washington on Thursday and Friday that is open to the public — exactly one year after they were told that their expertise was no longer needed. This group of scientists, engineers and researchers have formed a nongovernmental committee called the Independent Particulate Matter Review Panel.