Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

13. Environmental Protection Agency · Notable · Needs Congress

Legislate greater transparency for advisory bodies under FACA

Not started

439 13. Environmental Protection Agency · abridged

“Build on recent bipartisan proposals to increase transparency for advisory bodies, subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act as well as recommendations from the Administrative Conference of the U.S., to strengthen provisions for independence, accountability, geographic diversity, turnover, and public participation. This should include a prohibition on peer review activities for unaccountable third parties that lack independence or application of these same principles to non-governmental peer review bodies (including NASEM).”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Requires Congress, and no Federal Advisory Committee Act amendment has moved. The corpus of 18,433 bills contains no bill amending the Act's transparency provisions; the closest is the Federal Advisory Committee Database Act (S. 2317), read twice and referred to Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on 2025-07-17 and never voted, which would build a public database rather than strengthen independence, accountability, turnover or public participation. Nothing anywhere in the window prohibits peer review by unaccountable third parties or extends these principles to non-governmental peer-review bodies such as NASEM.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • A search of the bill titles we keep and search for “Federal Advisory Committee Act” found none; the broader search for “advisory committee” returns 19 bills, all of them committee-specific or unrelated.
  • A search of the bills and public laws we keep and search for “NASEM” or “National Academies” found nothing on peer review.
  • EPA did move Federal Advisory Committee Act management inside the agency: the FY2026 Congressional Justification addendum moves the FACA Management & Operations Division out of the Office of Mission Support and into the Office of the Administrator. That is an org-chart change, not a transparency statute, and it is recorded here rather than as Evidence.
Action
other
Object
Federal Advisory Committee Act transparency requirements
ID
1173