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On a late spring morning in 2012, Michelle Boone settled into her seat on an expert panel at the U.S. Environmental Protection in Washington, D.C. As the day wore on, she felt more and more uneasy. Boone, an ecologist who works with amphibians at Miami University of Ohio, was chosen to be one of a handful of people to weigh in on the effect of a widely used pesticide on amphibians. The panel was part of the EPA’s reassessment of the rules governing the use of the controversial pesticide, called Atrazine, which has been used on billions of acres of wheat, corn and other crops since the late 1950s. It is estimated to be the most widely used weed killer in the country. The group of experts in the room that day, Boone included, had read the existing literature and had come to a unanimous conclusion, which they presented to officials: Atrazine was found in several studies to impair the reproductive development of amphibians, and should be investigated further.

But as the presentations continued, it became clear that the EPA officials had heard this all before. The agency had been at this for a while; expert panels on the same topic in 2003 and 2007 had all more or less concluded the same thing, Boone says. Yet nothing had been done; Atrazine was still marked as having no adverse effect on amphibians. It was Boone’s first time on an EPA panel, and she was shocked.

“You wonder why you’re even there, to repeat things that have already been said, and then to be ignored for reasons that are unclear,” Boone tells Newsweek.