Written by: Peter Brennan, McKenzie Brannon, Courtney Gammon and Nolan Kokkoris

In order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the role of science in policy-making, we examined some of the fundamental principles of federal law. We began by reviewing the basic structure of federal environmental laws, which can usually be broken down into four parts: the statutory trigger, definitions, requirements, and exceptions. We then transitioned the discussion to how federal statutes delegate rulemaking authority to administrative agencies such as the EPA, which need Congressional authority in order to make rules. After outlining the steps of the rulemaking process, we touched on some of the key issues that come up when a rule is challenged in court. Specifically, we noted that rules are often challenged on the basis of exceeding statutory authority, contravening the requirements of procedural due process, or as arbitrary and capricious exercises of agency discretion. With this foundation, we moved to discussing how the influence of politics on policy has increased in recent years.

To bring the topic into present-day relevance, Professor Wilcoxen and Professor Driscoll explained the role of Scientific Advisory Boards (SABs) in the EPA and discussed recent developments in the EPA surrounding rollbacks of environmental regulations by the Trump administration. This led us into a discussion of the interplay between politics and the environment with an emphasis on analyzing the increasing polarization of the two political parties in recent decades. Since the late 1980s, it seems that there has been an ever-widening gap between the two political parties when it comes to views surrounding climate change (Dunlap and McCright, 2008) specifically, and this polarization seems to have pervaded various other scientific topics of interest today.

After everyone presented their information about environmental law, the EPA, and related topics, we engaged the class by having them participate in an activity. The activity was a mock stakeholder forum in which we assigned various stakeholder titles to groups in the class. Their goal within their groups was to think about the Waters of the US rule that we had previously discussed from the view of their assigned stakeholder. We prompted them with questions like: Are there any amendments that you (the stakeholder) would like to make to the rule and why? The point of the activity was to get people thinking about some challenges of the challenges faced by environmental policymakers.