Congress has previously passed environmental and administrative laws that tethered the regulatory process to scientific evidence. Federal agencies were obliged to weigh scientific data, as well as dispassionate economic and legal analyses, as they developed and implemented regulations. The Trump administration sought to untether the rulemaking process from science and other forms of hard evidence and expert analysis by putting contrarian scientists in charge of science advisory boards and by sidelining the views of career scientists at federal agencies and academic scientists. That strategy paved the way for oil and gas insiders at the helm of these agencies to make decisions aligned with positions advocated by the oil and gas industry, which had shared its wish-list on deregulatory actions with the Trump administration. The administration sought to undermine the scientific basis of environmental regulations by promulgating the deceptively named Science Transparency Rule that would block federal agencies' consideration of epidemiological studies that had linked pollution to adverse public health impacts. That rule was built of the decades-long views advocated by oil- and gas-funded think tanks and pro-oil members of Congress. Fortunately for the scientific integrity of rulemaking, in January 2021 a federal court ruled that the EPA had exceeded its powers in promulgating that regulation and subsequently vacated the rule.