Secret Science Reform Act of 2014

Floor Speech

Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Chairman, I oppose this bill. I really believe that the so-called Secret Science Act is in fact a direct attack on American science.

I am a very strong supporter of transparency in government, as well as in science, and in Silicon Valley, where I am from, we believe more data in more hands benefits everybody, but I think this bill is not in fact an open data bill. It will be a data reduction bill.

It doesn't give the EPA greater authority to provide the raw data it uses.

It actually reduces the kinds of data that can be used by prohibiting the EPA from using any data that can't currently be publicly released.

That sounds reasonable except that in fact there is some data that you can't actually release under current law--medical records, confidential business data, trade secrets--all of which, if made publicly available, would run afoul of various provisions of law.

I believe that we could work together on a bipartisan basis to figure out how to fix the barriers to release of data while maintaining necessary confidentiality for some data. I think we should all agree on that.

I want to point out another way that the bill is a problem, and that is the additional cost that is going to be incurred per study. The estimate, according to CBO, is that there will be an additional $10,000 to $30,000 added per study. That means that if this bill were to become law, it would cost an additional $500 million to $1.5 billion a year to do science studies.

I would love to be disappointed, but I don't believe that the Republicans intend to add additional funding to the EPA to cover the cost of the science studies that this bill would create. In fact, this bill does not address that issue.

What this would do would be to actually cut the number of science studies that the EPA is able to do. I think that that is a result that would be very unfortunate for the country. What we need is more science, not less.

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