New science policy directives revealed at HHS, EPA

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the EPA have each released new four-year strategic plans, continuing to reflect agencies’ adoption of the Trump administration’s policy directions. HHS has a streamlined science agenda that limits explicit connections to regulation while aiming to expand its overall capacity for research. EPA’s new plan is emphasizing science solely in support of legislative requirements and state requests.

HHS emphasizes capacity, patient care

The first two objectives of the new HHS strategic plan prioritize improving “surveillance, epidemiology and laboratory services” and expanding the “capacity of the scientific workforce and infrastructure.” The strategies toward these objectives highlight improved data access and collection, a wide variety of training measures, and multiple forms of process/resource sharing. The descriptions are relatively light on facility development, apart from a point on “modernization” of facilities that links back to NIH’s 2016 infrastructure program plan. The emphasis on resource sharing, process and training over hard improvements may partially explain how the administration can balance goals of capacity building with a budget request that calls to reduce staff expenses and maintain equipment costs.

The HHS plan also updates the agency’s objectives for its scientific output. These are concentrated on prevention and treatment research, while prior HHS plans have placed a strong emphasis on connecting science to the agency’s regulatory functions. Part of this adjustment may be related to changing health priorities — the FY 2014 plan had an objective on regulatory science that mentioned tobacco, a topic receiving less attention in 2018. This de-emphasis on regulatory science is in alignment with the administration’s requirement to repeal two regulations for every new one introduced.

The plan’s science objectives give strong attention to the importance of “applied” and “translational” research. The administration’s science memo, released last year, called for health research that would lead to better treatment and give prioritization of basic research over later-stage development. HHS clearly intends to give greater weight to the former direction in the memo, with strategies that heavily emphasize applied research and activities that will quickly get research results into doctors’ practices. The plan recognizes the role that public and industry partners will play in these translational efforts, and even pledges to establish “platforms for interaction” supporting these activities.

EPA approaching science as a service

The EPA’s FY 2018-2022 strategic plan has changed structurally and is therefore somewhat difficult to compare to prior years. The plan is organized into a few, straightforward goals, rather than the multi-disciplinary objectives that provided the agency framework in the past. As a result, while science was mentioned as a core value and frequent component of many strategies previously, the new plan focuses on science almost exclusively in a single objective that describes the role of science across all of EPA’s core areas.

The greatest points of emphasis for science at the agency will be producing what is necessary to make legislatively-required policy and providing support for state and tribal research needs. The objective’s subhead — “refocus the EPA’s robust research and scientific analysis to inform policy making” — and similar statements throughout the section make plain that the agency does not intend to support proactive research into environment and health without a specific tie to legislative or partner requirement.

In the challenges section of the objective, the plan notes that attracting a scientific workforce to the agency may be a problem in the future but does not indicate the causes for its recruitment concerns.