President Bush was in the shipping department at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory last Tuesday, addressing NREL scientists, when he said, “We appreciate what you’re doing, we expect you to keep doing it, and we want to help you keep doing it.” We hope his welcome comment marks a turning point in the dismal relationship between the administration and federal scientists.
In recent months, the administration’s disrespect for independent scientific inquiry has gotten wholly out of control.
Some of the researchers under political siege work at or have ties to institutions in our state, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
For years now, administration appointees have sought to muzzle federal scientists or distort their work.
A particularly egregious example burst into public view recently at NASA, involving James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute who is among the world’s most credible climate researchers. Last month, Hansen said that administration officials warned him of “dire consequences” for speaking his mind about global warming. One appointee, George Deutsch, was a 24-year-old political operative who tried to tell experienced scientists what they could say publicly. Deutsch resigned earlier this month when it became public that he falsified his résumé – apparently he doesn’t even have a college degree. NASA chief Mike Griffin (whose own credentials are impressive) later promised his agency won’t censor scientists.
Yet the Hansen flap isn’t isolated, as Bush appointees have tried to stifle climate research at NOAA and NCAR, too. In 2005, former oil industry lobbyist Philip A. Cooney severely edited a Council of Environmental Quality report to downplay the risks of climate change.
At the EPA, scientists complain Bush appointees rewrote reports on health damage caused by mercury and soot.
Unlike NASA, things aren’t improving at the EPA: Two weeks ago, top officials directed employees to clear their public statements with politically appointed higher- ups.
Oregon State University experts say their federal grants were threatened when their research found damage from logging national forests after wildfires, a finding at odds with Bush administration goals.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management routinely restricts the ability of its biologists to monitor the harm done to wildlife by energy drilling, according to The Washington Post.
A survey of researchers in the U.S. Commerce Department’s fisheries unit found that most respondents knew cases where commercial interests “inappropriately induced reversal or withdrawal of scientific conclusions,” said the Union of Concerned Scientists. The UCS collected signatures from 8,000 scientists, including 49 Nobel laureates, who claim that “there is significant evidence that the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented.”
“Good science cannot long persist in an atmosphere of intimidation,” warned Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., chair of the House science committee.
“It’s no accident that we’re seeing such an extensive suppression of scientific freedom,” David Baltimore, Nobel Prize winner and head of the California Institute of Technology, said this month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Such undermining of science is at odds with Bush’s State of the Union call for more technological innovation.
We’d like to see the president halt the abuses. He could do so by publicly addressing the need for scientific freedom and impartiality.
