Opinion | Trump’s E.P.A. Chooses Rodents Over People

Snowball, the pig in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” uses this catchy adage to summarize his view that people are enemies and animals are friends: “Four legs good, two legs bad.” Bizarrely, the Trump administration appears to have been persuaded, announcing a policy that will harm human health to protect animals used in laboratory experiments. The move will compromise an important source of evidence of the impacts of contaminants.

This month, Andrew Wheeler, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced that the agency would significantly curtail its reliance on the use of mammals in toxicological studies conducted to determine whether environmental contaminants have an adverse impact on human health. Under this plan, the E.P.A. will reduce its requests for, and funding of, mammal studies by 30 percent by 2025 and eliminate them altogether by 2035, though some may still be approved on a case-by-case basis.

The new policy is likely to have adverse impacts on public health. Laboratory animal testing, particularly on rodents, has long been an important means for determining the toxicity of chemicals and other environmental contaminants. According to Mr. Wheeler, new methods are available to effectively provide information on chemical hazards without relying on animal testing. Experts don’t seem to agree with him. As Tracey Woodruff, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, has said, only animal testing, and not the methods extolled by Mr. Wheeler, is currently robust enough to gauge the full range of the impacts of contaminants on human populations. Even Scott Gottlieb, the Food and Drug Administration commissioner, stated last year, “Without animal research, it would be impossible to gain some of the important knowledge needed to prevent human and animal suffering for many life-threatening diseases.”

Mr. Wheeler asserted that the reason for this move was to protect animals used in laboratory experiments. Attempting to address skepticism about whether his motive was genuine, he stressed that this issue had been of “longstanding interest” to him, that when he was young his mother had told him about the “ethical problems” of animal testing and that one of his sisters was a zoologist and another was a veterinarian. Animal rights groups, including the Humane Society, praised the move.

But one does not need to scratch much below the surface to doubt that this policy was motivated primarily by concern for animal welfare. A move of this kind has been a priority of the chemical industry for several years. The American Chemistry Council, a trade association representing chemical manufacturers, has long supported a reduction in the government’s reliance on animal testing for regulatory purposes. Since taking office, the Trump administration has worked behind the scenes to establish a coalition of chemical companies and animal rights groups to oppose animal testing.

Why would chemical companies make it a priority to protect the well-being of animals used for laboratory experiments when they consistently oppose regulatory efforts to protect the health of human populations? Well, because without mammal studies, the toxicity of chemical substances will be more difficult to prove.

The new policy announced by Mr. Wheeler, however bad it is considered in isolation, is much worse when evaluated in the context of other actions by the Trump administration. Last year, the E.P.A., then led by Scott Pruitt, proposed a Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science rule, which would make it very difficult, and in many cases downright impossible, for the E.P.A. to rely on epidemiological studies that explore the adverse impact of pollutants on human populations, because of the confidentiality agreements necessary to obtain personal health data. Just last week, Mr. Wheeler defended the proposed rule’s rationale, though he indicated that it might be modified in some ways.

In another Orwellian twist, the agency claimed that this move was designed to improve the quality of the science on which it relies, yet major scientific organizations, including the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association and the American Medical Association, denounced the move. Though the E.P.A. asserted that the new policy would bring agency science in line with the publication policies of major scientific journals, the editors of those journals exposed the fallacy of the claim.

Toxicological studies on animals and epidemiological studies on humans are the two predominant sources of evidence on the adverse health effects of environmental contaminants. The Trump administration is working to undermine both, and if the agency gets its way, it will become more difficult, and in some cases impossible, to regulate harmful substances that cause tens of thousands of premature deaths each year. The Trump administration’s actions since taking office make clear that this goal, rather than protecting rodents used in laboratory experiments, is what it is really after.