The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Tuesday finalized one of its most controversial rules, limiting the types of studies the agency can weigh when crafting its policies.

The rule has been one of the top concerns for public health advocates and environmentalists who say it will restrict the EPA’s ability to consider landmark public health research and other studies that do not make their underlying data public.

Dubbed by former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt as a way to battle “secret science,” the agency has billed the rule as a transparency measure.

But critics say it’s unnecessary for the agency to review spreadsheets full of sensitive personal health data or proprietary business information rather than evaluating the scientific underpinnings of the research itself.

“Too often Congress shirks its responsibility and defers important decisions to regulatory agencies. These regulators then invoke science to justify their actions, often without letting the public study the underlying data. Part of transparency is making sure the public knows what the agency bases its decisions on,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal late Monday before the rule was unveiled.

The first version of the 2018 rule sparked major pushback — the 600,000 comments it elicited made it one of the EPA’s most commented-on regulations ever. Its merits were even questioned by the agency’s independent science board, who said the agency had not resolved how to protect sensitive data.

“Their own scientists said this is just a bad idea, and they said, ‘Well we’re doing it anyway.’ If it’s about better science, don't you think the scientists might know something about that?” said Andrew Rosenberg, director at the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“They’re blocking epidemiological research during the biggest epidemiological crisis in the past 100 years.”...

Critics argue the rule takes a page from the book of the tobacco industry, which sought to undermine science linking its products to cancer. ...