An environmental program that distributes millions in grants to test the effects of chemical exposure on adults and kids is being shut down amid consolidation at the EPA, The Hill reported.
The National Center for Environmental Research has been shuttered to merge three offices at the Environmental Protection Agency, The Hill reported. The science staff will be reassigned elsewhere in the department, The Hill reported.
The merger will result in the creation of a new Office of Resource Management, which will take on the jobs of the three shuttered programs as well as handling Freedom of Information Act requests, records management, and budget formulation functions, The Hill reported.
An EPA spokesperson said the changes are meant to create more efficiency within the agency.
According to The Hill, NCER is known for the funding it provides through its premiere program, Science To Achieve Results (STAR). Under the STAR program, grants are given to the Children's Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research Centers, which were established in 1988 to discover methods to reduce children's health risks from environmental factors.
A former senior scientist and adviser at the EPA in the Clinton and Bush administrations was horrified.
"Those programs have been so successful in advancing our scientific understanding and our ability to address the ways that environmental chemicals can impact children's health," Tracey Woodruff told The Hill.
"They make it sound like this is a way to create efficiency, but it masks what's happening to this actually programmatic, scientific function of NCER and the STAR program. That makes you think, 'Is this really just an efficiency argument masking their real intention to get rid of the research grant program, which they have said they want to do in the past?"
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