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

13. Environmental Protection Agency · Minor

Retract science and risk-assessment delegations from career officials

Not started

437 13. Environmental Protection Agency

“Retract delegations for key science and risk-assessment decisions from Assistant Administrators, regional offices, and career officials.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No retraction of science or risk-assessment delegations is on any allowlisted source, and the search now has a stated edge. Executive Order 14303 pushes in that direction — it requires each agency head to designate a senior appointee to run the process for evaluating alleged violations of its scientific rules — but it retracts no delegation, and EPA published no delegation change. EPA's Delegations Manual, the instrument that would carry one, is not published: nine candidate paths answer 404, `epa.gov/irmpoli8` now serves the Office of Finance and Administration's IT/IM directives index instead, and all seventeen EPA Federal Register documents in the window with "delegation" in the title delegate Clean Air Act authority to states and local agencies rather than reallocating authority inside EPA. The negative reaches EPA rulemaking and EPA's published web record; it cannot reach EPA's internal directives system.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • One negative search covered the EPA science, appointees and advisory bodies asks on pp. 436-437.
  • Checked again 2026-09-06; no way to the document was found. Status unchanged. The pages tried, the test of EPA’s site search and the Federal Register search for delegations are written up once under #1120, which needs the same document; the short version is that nine likely epa.gov pages no longer exist, EPA’s site search (search.epa.gov) returns a byte-identical 12,097-byte page for a real and a nonsense query so no negative may be taken from it, and no internal EPA delegation was published in the window. This item and #1120 and #1189 all turn on the same unpublished manual, and all three stay not started on the absence of a public record rather than on a finding that nothing happened.
  • Where a retraction would otherwise show: EPA’s scientific-integrity pages still route research-misconduct allegations through the Scientific Integrity Official, coordinating with the Office of Inspector General (epa.gov/scientific-integrity/policies-and-practices, updated 2026-04-24, read 2026-09-06), which is the opposite of a retraction of career officials’ authority. That is #1166’s ground and is recorded there; it bears on this item only as an indication that no delegation change has surfaced anywhere EPA does publish.
  • The reorganization moved scientists into program offices (#1165) but says nothing about who holds the decision authority.
Action
rescind
Object
delegations for science and risk-assessment decisions
ID
1162