It's Friday, April 27th, 2018, and you're listening to Up to Date, our weekly recap of Science News.

I'm Andrei Viscontas.

And I'm Kishore Hari.

While we're recording this, currently EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is getting raked over the coals by a number of Congress people about everything from his ethics to facing hard questions about

his policies. And he's not very popular right now for lots of reasons. In the scientific community,

he's faced a lot of heat because he's rolled back fuel emission standards to suggesting

hosting a quote unquote red team to challenge climate science data, which are

kind of odd choices. But I think the weirdest choice came this week where he suggested he's

going to delete studies from the EPA. But it's not so much that he wanted to delete some old

studies. It's why. In the name of transparency, he proposed a rule where any studies that

contain anonymized sources would be thrown out. But a huge number of stories going back decades

were conducted with confidentiality agreements to protect people's personal information.

This is super common in science, right? Yeah, absolutely. In fact, you can't, if you do a patient study,

for example, you can't identify that patient. I've actually rejected a paper to my journal

Neuro case because the individual who wrote it wanted his son, who was the patient in the story,

to be a co-author. And I just said that you can't do that.

I mean, there's some really famous environmental studies that involve workers at plants that

were reporting hazardous conditions who asked for confidentiality for protection from their employer.

There's ones that involve health details naturally given what the

EPA does, but they don't want to be identified in that. This is just bizarre. Like, I don't know of

any scientific institution that doesn't have confidentiality agreements in place. So this is one of

the weirdest policies I've ever heard of in science. And I hope he gets grilled today about why you would do this because there's nothing

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