Republicans have crafted an excuse to hamstring the EPA: to prohibit it from considering the results of scientific studies unless all their data and software are published.

In medical studies, the data is personal medical data that and can't be released. Aside from that, ideally the studies should be published as specified here. The problem is that the EPA looks at some 50,000 studies each year, and the EPA does not run them, so it would have to disregard them.

If Congress wants to improve scientific publication standards, it should require funded researchers to publish more of their data, methods and code, and provide funds to do this.