The Secret Science Bill

Floor Speech

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, last evening, I had a couple of articles sitting on my desk and had the opportunity to read through them. I was somewhat--what's the term--oh, yeah, outraged at some of the comments in there, so that is the reason I am standing here on the floor today.

I want to walk through a concept and then try to ferret out why is the agency so terrified of this concept, something very simple. If you are going to make public policy, shouldn't it be based on data that is available to the public?

That public data, properly vetted, is used to make public policy, sort of this concept of almost the crowdsourcing of information.

So if there is a rule set made by an agency, we can all believe in it. We all know it has been properly looked at. It wasn't produced by a small silo of very smart elitists who may be ideologically set one way or another; but the data, the information that creates the rules that we all live under, belongs to all of us.

So how would you feel if you pull up a piece of paper and on that piece of paper is an article about a speech that Administrator McCarthy gave on Monday morning? And I do hope she is misquoted because we have treated her very kindly from the Science Committee and my subcommittee.

But if I came to you and read a line that McCarthy told the audience, on Monday morning, that she intends to go after a--one more time--go after a small but vocal group of critics, in light of what the IRS has done, doesn't that send chills down someone's back when you hear that an agency intends to go after its critics?

And then there is this arrogance that was, I hope, misquoted that only qualified scientists should be allowed to see, real scientists.

So you are telling me that a grad student or a leftwing group or a conservative group or just someone that has an interest in data shouldn't be allowed to see the datasets that are making public policy that literally cost trillions of dollars?

The concept of having a government that runs substantially on secret information is outrageous. So that is why I am trying to push forward on a bill--and maybe the title of the bill is a little inflammatory. It is called the Secret Science bill, a very simple concept that you make public policy with public data and that public data that we all have the right to vet and look at.

Look, the vast majority of Americans will never look at it, but shouldn't you have the right to access it?

Then there is this outlier that the agency is using that is complete obfuscation of the truth: well, there is personal data out there, and we don't know how to protect it.

Every single day, whether it be the Census Bureau, the CFPB, the Commerce Department, they collect personal data. There are standards out there where you blind data. As a matter of fact, there are actually protocols for the protocols on blinding data that we all get to use. It is done every single day.

Somehow, the EPA doesn't want to have that conversation because, somehow, they don't want you, the American public, and the academic community of all ideological stints to have the right to access it.

Mr. Speaker, Administrator McCarthy was quoted as saying:

You just can't claim the science isn't real when it doesn't align with your politics.

She is absolutely right. I am not asking for ideological data. I am just asking for data to belong to the public and
so everyone has the opportunity to study it and understand it.

Who knows, maybe that studying of that data will find better ways, smarter ways, more efficient ways to protect the environment, more rational ways; but we will never know until the EPA finally steps up and makes that data available to every American.

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