Science ranks grow thin in Trump administration

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

Science ranks grow thin in Trump administration

By Annie Gowen, Juliet Eilperin, Ben Guarino and Andrew Ba Tran
1/23/2020, 3:45:05 p.m.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Dozens of government computers sit in a nondescript building here, able to connect to a data model that could help farmers manage the impact of a changing climate on their crops.

But no one in this federal agency would know how to access the model, or, if they did, what to do with the data.

That’s because the ambitious federal researcher who created it in Washington quit rather than move when the Agriculture Department relocated his agency to an office park here last fall.

He is one of hundreds of scientists across the federal government who have been forced out, sidelined or muted since President Trump took office.

The exodus has been fueled broadly by administration policies that have diminished the role of science as well as more specific steps, such as the relocation of agencies away from the nation’s capital.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/science-ranks-grow-thin-in-trump-administration/2020/01/23/5d22b522-3172-11ea-a053-dc6d944ba776_story.html

[hedda_foil]

1. Such loss. Such waste of knowledge. Such devastation -- laying waste to this nation.

[scarletwoman]

2. I wonder if anyone is keeping track of all these people, so they can be brought back when there's a

Dem administration again.

[murielm99]

3. A couple of years ago

I went to a town hall in a nearby university community. We invited the republican scum who allegedly is our congressman. He did not show.

Various people spoke. Some of them were scientists from the university. One of them recounted that a lot of data was being saved and sent to Canadian universities. He was speaking about climate data. Other scientific data was being saved and sent out of the country.

Maybe we can rebuild.

[scarletwoman]

4. Thank you for that information - it gives me some small hope.

There's going to be so much to rebuild - will it really be possible? Or will the poor, abused Earth finally do us humans in and render rebuilding moot.

[StevieM]

5. I remember hearing about that at the time.

I was curious as to what exactly they were trying to prevent. Did they actually believe that universities would be ransacked and their scientific date would be destroyed? That would be a pretty extreme course of events.

I'm not ruling out that it could happen, especially not in this day and age. It's just extraordinary that there was actually that level of concern right after Trump's election.

I guess I am not totally clear as to whether this data is somehow government owned or controlled data.

[murielm99]

6. It was a while ago,

so I do not remember it all. He seemed to be saying that the data was not being kept. Their hard work was being ignored. He did not say that anything was being destroyed, just not recorded. They wanted it to be kept safe somewhere, so they were relying on friends and colleagues. If someone has spent years recording scientific data, and there is no record of it, it might as well be destroyed.