CEI Joins Coalition Letter Urging Scientific Transparency

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Dear Mr. President,

The undersigned organizations urge you to consider an executive order requiring full transparency of all scientific data and studies used to justify all pending or new regulations in the federal rulemaking process.

The Trump administration has done an admirable job of identifying and tackling a key economic problem– the current regulatory system in America that drains resources and creates a massive drag on our economy. The willingness to act on opportunities to repeal such burdensome regulation is a driving force behind the growth and strength the American economy is currently experiencing under your leadership.

However, there are still further regulatory reforms necessary to mend our broken process.

Regulations often serve as an unseen cost for the American public. Too often, the justifications for new regulations are hidden from the public by concealing the scientific data from voters, the business community, policy makers, and even scientific peers. If research is to become the basis for rules and laws that carry tremendous impact on our economy, it should be transparent, public, verifiable, and reproducible. But all too often, it is not. Transparency is a pillar of the scientific community. It’s time to end the era of unsound regulation backed by unaccountable processes. Accordingly, the conservative organizations, associations, and others represented below are calling for an executive order to reign in out-of-control agencies and make all data used for any pending and future regulations publicly available.

We can no longer wait for individual agencies to promote transparency regulations on their own– something that may never happen. This issue requires strong leadership from the Oval Office. By issuing an executive order you can quickly and uniformly put this idea into action and accelerate and extend economic growth in America.

We would support an executive order that requires all studies used to support all pending or new regulations and agency guidance:

• Be made public, including all methods and raw data on which the studies are based. And,
• Be peer-reviewed – and thereby meet the scientific standard for verifiability.

This executive order would build on a previous order issued by your administration– as part of a regulatory reform agenda that has resulted in 176 deregulatory actions saving tens of billions of public and business expenditures – that requires agencies to identify existing regulations that “rely in whole or in part on data, information, or methods that are not publicly available or that are insufficiently transparent to meet the standard of reproducibility.”

We encourage you to take the next logical step and extend this wise and open approach to rule-making from existing regulations to pending and new regulations and agency guidance. We hope that industry groups and the business community will join with policymakers in supporting full transparency in the data and research used to set the regulations that deeply impact everyday life for millions of Americans.

Sincerely,

Grover Norquist
President, Americans for Tax Reform

Marty Connors
Alabama Center-Right Coalition

Phil Kerpen
President, American Commitment

Matt Schlapp
Chairman, American Conservative Union

Tom Pyle
President, American Energy Alliance

Richard Manning
President, Americans for Limited Government

Brent Gardner
Chief Government Affairs Officer, Americans for Prosperity

Ted Tripp
Sr. Political Reporter, Boston Broadside

Tom Schatz
President, Citizens Against Government Waste

Chuck Muth
President, Citizens Outreach Foundation

Myron Ebell
Director of Global Warming, Competitive Enterprise Institute