Protesters hold up signs and shirts behind EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, accompanied by Holly Greaves, EPA chief financial officer, as they testify on the department’s budget during a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Capitol Hill, in Washington.
Credit: Alex Brandon/AP/REX/Shutterstock

The Environmental Protection Agency made news recently for excluding reporters from a “summit” meeting on chemical contamination in drinking water. Episodes like this are symptoms of a larger problem: an ongoing, broad-scale takeover of the agency by industries it regulates.

We are social scientists with interests in environmental health, environmental justice and inequality and democracy. We recently published a study, conducted under the auspices of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative and based on interviews with 45 current and retired EPA employees, which concludes that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and the Trump administration have steered the agency to the verge of what scholars call “regulatory capture.”

By this we mean that they are aggressively reorganizing the EPA to promote interests of regulated industries, at the expense of its official mission to “protect human […]