Policy Watch: EPA updates policy for publications by agency scientists

EPA updates advance approval policy for staff-written papers

The US Environmental Protection Agency’s new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions (OASES) has implemented an advance notification policy (PDF) requiring agency scientists to get preapproval of some types of publications. The policy applies to scientific papers that will be seen by the public; publications that suggest or show significant risks to human health or the environment; articles related to current EPA regulatory, policy, or guidance development; and publications on subjects that are priorities of the EPA administrator, the White House, or Congress, among other works.

EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch tells C&EN in an email that these advance notification requirements are to raise awareness and consistency across the agency and “are similar to” those of the Office of Research and Development (ORD), the agency’s former independent research arm.

The EPA created OASES in last year’s reorganization, which closed the ORD. Scientists and former EPA employees have expressed concern that because OASES is directly under Administrator Lee Zeldin’s direction, the office’s decisions on science may no longer be insulated from political influence.

According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), an advocacy group made up of former EPA employees, some scientists worry that the advance notification policy will suppress publication of research counter to the Donald J. Trump administration’s deregulation agenda.

The number of scientific papers coming out of the EPA is already down compared with 2024 and has been declining since 2018, according to PEER calculations. This year, EPA scientists have published 61 peer-reviewed papers as of April 30. At this pace, the agency’s scientists will publish only 183 articles by year-end. This output barely compares with 432 published papers in 2018—a record for the EPA—339 in 2024, and 275 in 2025.

“This retreat from published research will have a self-reinforcing effect in that young scientists who want to publish will avoid going to [work at] EPA,” PEER science policy director Kyla Bennett says in a statement. Publishing research papers is key to advancement in a scientific career, she says. “The net result is that the scientific contribution of EPA to a greater understanding of what affects human health and the environment will be diminished.”

—Leigh Krietsch Boerner

ARPA-H unveils a new program for AI-powered disease research

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) on Tuesday launched a new program that aims to catalyze research breakthroughs in complex diseases, particularly autoimmune diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and lupus. ARPA-H is an agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services that funds high-risk biomedical research.

ARPA-H expects that the program, named the Intelligent Generator of Research, or IGoR, will accelerate biological discovery—”at least ten times faster than traditional [research] methods,” according to the ARPA-H news release—by creating a research ecosystem that relies on artificial intelligence to guide the course of research.

The IGoR workflow has several components. First, research teams that win funding under the program will develop advanced mechanistic models of complex diseases, along with an AI system that can pinpoint the scientific questions that remain to be answered and suggest experiments to address these questions. The teams—which might have expertise in computational biology, AI and machine learning, experimental science, and lab infrastructure—will then create protocols for these experiments and establish a network of laboratories to conduct them, thereby generating data that will feed back into the disease models.

These laboratories could range from established contract research organizations and cloud labs to academic labs, says ARPA-H program manager Paul E. Sheehan in response to a request for comment. “The goal is to build a system that is both more rigorous and more flexible than what already exists,” he says.

Teams will have until Aug. 6 to apply for funding under IGoR, which will last for 5 years.

Dajiang Liu, director of artificial intelligence and biomedical informatics at the Pennsylvania State College of Medicine, says in an email to C&EN that the IGoR framework could be especially valuable in researching autoimmune disease, “where disease mechanisms are heterogeneous and involve complex interactions among genetic risk, immune cell states, environmental triggers, and tissue-specific biology.”

AI, he added, “can help prioritize which hypotheses, perturbations, [and] cell types . . . should be studied next, but its value will depend heavily on the quality, standardization, and reproducibility of the experimental data generated.”

—Yaakov Zinberg, special to C&EN

Former NSF and National Science Board leaders call for the Senate to restore agency leadership

After the recent firing of the entire National Science Board by the Donald J. Trump administration, 13 former NSB chairs and National Science Foundation (NSF) directors have called for the Senate to “restore full leadership and governance” to the agency and quickly seat new “highly qualified” NSB members in an open letter.

The Trump administration fired the NSB members on April 24, citing a 2021 Supreme Court decision that it says raises “constitutional questions about whether non-Senate confirmed appointees can exercise the authorities that Congress gave the National Science Board.” The administration says it looks forward to working with Congress to change the 1950 statute that formed the NSB, though some members of Congress have expressed doubt that the Supreme Court decision in US v. Arthrex (PDF) applies to the board in the first place.

The letter by the former NSB members and NSF directors also urges the Senate to quickly confirm a new, permanent NSF director, which the agency has been without since former director Sethuraman Panchanathan resigned in April 2025.

In February, Trump nominated Jim O’ Neill to serve as the new NSF director; however, his confirmation hearing has yet to be scheduled.

O’Neill previously served as the deputy secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services and as the acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Prior to those positions, he worked for a hedge fund and venture capital firm in Silicon Valley.

Although some in the scientific community have spoken out against O’Neill’s nomination, the letter by former NSF and NSB leaders doesn’t express any opinion about it. It simply asks Congress to “promptly address” the current vacancy, saying that “the NSF Director ensures the agency executes effectively and serves the country.”

Both the NSF director and the NSB positions need to be filled for the funding agency to help the country maintain its global scientific leadership, the letter says. “NSF is indispensable to meeting this challenge, as the government agency that explores the unknown and the unexpected—the discoveries that will lead to new critical technologies.”

—Krystal Vasquez

EPA to set worker limits for vinyl chloride chemical

The US Environmental Protection Agency announced May 1 that it will regulate 15 industrial and commercial uses of 1,2-dichloroethane (DCE), which is used mainly to manufacture vinyl chloride, under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

The agency found that DCE presents an unreasonable risk to human health via worker inhalation and skin exposures under 15 use cases out of the 20 investigated. Of these 15, 12 are also a danger to workers who don’t directly handle DCE in the workplace. The EPA did not find that DCE poses an unreasonable risk of injury to the environment or to consumers who come into contact with products containing the chemical.

In the risk evaluation, the EPA cited laboratory studies showing that ingesting DCE can damage the kidneys, while inhaling the compound can cause nasal and male reproductive system toxicity. In addition, the agency found that repeated workplace inhalation or dermal exposure over a lifetime can cause cancer.

The final risk evaluation for DCE was published in the Federal Register on May 5. The EPA will next propose use rules to ensure worker protections, including setting exposure limits and personal protective equipment guidelines.

—Leigh Krietsch Boerner