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Why Joe Biden's bid to restore scientific integrity matters
This is in Nature in the career feature section. I would expect it's open sourced:
Why Joe Biden’s bid to restore scientific integrity matters Virgina Gewin, Nature 17 Jan 2022.
Subtitle:
Federal whistle-blowers share stories about political interference in science, and explain why the long-awaited measures announced last week are needed.
Excerpts:
In September 2019, then-president Donald Trump falsely stated that Alabama was under threat from Hurricane Dorian as it approached the US mainland.
Three days later, despite assurances from local weather bureau officials that the claim was false, Trump showed reporters a map in which the storm’s projected path seemed to have been altered with a Sharpie permanent marker. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal agency, endorsed Trump’s assertion.
In June 2020, a NOAA review panel found that Neil Jacobs, an atmospheric scientist and the agency’s acting administrator, and Julie Roberts, its deputy chief of staff and communications director, had “engaged in misconduct intentionally, knowingly or in reckless disregard” for the agency’s scientific-integrity policy by backing Trump’s incorrect assertion.
The incident, dubbed Sharpiegate, features in ‘Protecting the Integrity of Government Science’, a long-awaited report that the Biden administration’s Task Force on Scientific Integrity released last week (see go.nature.com/3ztsjv6; see also Nature 601, 310–311; 2022). Ordered by the current US president seven days after his inauguration in January last year, the task force’s review of scientific-integrity policies at federal agencies sets out how trust in government can be restored through scientific integrity and evidence-based policymaking.
The report calls for an overarching body that works across federal government agencies to ensure and promote best practices, and to tackle scientific-integrity violations by senior officials that cannot be handled at the agency level. These include political interference and suppression or distortion of data.
Related Story
How to protect US science from political meddling after Trump
According to the Silencing Science Tracker, Sharpiegate is one of some 500 documented attempts to restrict, prohibit or misuse scientific research, education or discussion since Trump’s election win in November 2016. The tracker is a joint initiative of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (a non-profit organization that assists climate scientists who are silenced or face legal action because of their findings or fields of study) and Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, both based in New York City...
...In October 2019, after 40 years as a federal scientist, toxicologist Linda Birnbaum retired from her post as a director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in Durham, North Carolina, part of the National Institutes of Health. She says that politically motivated assaults on scientific research and findings reached new depths in March 2020.
“The overt attacks on science clearly came to a head with COVID-19,” Birnbaum says, citing as an example the tight controls placed on what officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) could and could not say about it.
During the Trump administration, Birnbaum says, she was discouraged, even blocked, from speaking to the press...
...In September 2017, marine biologist Peter Corkeron and his colleagues published data on a significant decline in numbers of the North Atlantic right whale1. But he alleges that his NOAA superiors ignored his findings until they were published, despite his repeated warnings about the severity of the situation, dating back to February 2016. North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) recovery had been a point of pride at NOAA, Corkeron says. But once the agency anticipated being sued by conservation and animal-protection groups for failing to prevent whale numbers decreasing, he declined to fall in line with the decision by NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service to stop putting information on the whales’ status in e-mails or internal memos...
...Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York, hosts the EDGI’s mirror of an EPA database whose records track the agency’s enforcement of federal environmental laws. This mirroring makes the information more accessible and understandable to the public. “We are actively building partnerships with academics and NGOs to use these tools to share EPA enforcement data in meaningful ways to engage the public,” Wylie adds.
The team also interviewed 50 long-term federal-agency employees and wrote ‘The First 100 Days and Counting’ (see go.nature.com/3tmxa2f). This report documented the fossil-fuel industry’s influence on the Trump administration, changes in how climate science was presented to the public and the administration’s hostility to scientific research and evidence...
Three days later, despite assurances from local weather bureau officials that the claim was false, Trump showed reporters a map in which the storm’s projected path seemed to have been altered with a Sharpie permanent marker. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal agency, endorsed Trump’s assertion.
In June 2020, a NOAA review panel found that Neil Jacobs, an atmospheric scientist and the agency’s acting administrator, and Julie Roberts, its deputy chief of staff and communications director, had “engaged in misconduct intentionally, knowingly or in reckless disregard” for the agency’s scientific-integrity policy by backing Trump’s incorrect assertion.
The incident, dubbed Sharpiegate, features in ‘Protecting the Integrity of Government Science’, a long-awaited report that the Biden administration’s Task Force on Scientific Integrity released last week (see go.nature.com/3ztsjv6; see also Nature 601, 310–311; 2022). Ordered by the current US president seven days after his inauguration in January last year, the task force’s review of scientific-integrity policies at federal agencies sets out how trust in government can be restored through scientific integrity and evidence-based policymaking.
The report calls for an overarching body that works across federal government agencies to ensure and promote best practices, and to tackle scientific-integrity violations by senior officials that cannot be handled at the agency level. These include political interference and suppression or distortion of data.
Related Story
How to protect US science from political meddling after Trump
According to the Silencing Science Tracker, Sharpiegate is one of some 500 documented attempts to restrict, prohibit or misuse scientific research, education or discussion since Trump’s election win in November 2016. The tracker is a joint initiative of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (a non-profit organization that assists climate scientists who are silenced or face legal action because of their findings or fields of study) and Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, both based in New York City...
...In October 2019, after 40 years as a federal scientist, toxicologist Linda Birnbaum retired from her post as a director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in Durham, North Carolina, part of the National Institutes of Health. She says that politically motivated assaults on scientific research and findings reached new depths in March 2020.
“The overt attacks on science clearly came to a head with COVID-19,” Birnbaum says, citing as an example the tight controls placed on what officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) could and could not say about it.
During the Trump administration, Birnbaum says, she was discouraged, even blocked, from speaking to the press...
...In September 2017, marine biologist Peter Corkeron and his colleagues published data on a significant decline in numbers of the North Atlantic right whale1. But he alleges that his NOAA superiors ignored his findings until they were published, despite his repeated warnings about the severity of the situation, dating back to February 2016. North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) recovery had been a point of pride at NOAA, Corkeron says. But once the agency anticipated being sued by conservation and animal-protection groups for failing to prevent whale numbers decreasing, he declined to fall in line with the decision by NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service to stop putting information on the whales’ status in e-mails or internal memos...
...Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York, hosts the EDGI’s mirror of an EPA database whose records track the agency’s enforcement of federal environmental laws. This mirroring makes the information more accessible and understandable to the public. “We are actively building partnerships with academics and NGOs to use these tools to share EPA enforcement data in meaningful ways to engage the public,” Wylie adds.
The team also interviewed 50 long-term federal-agency employees and wrote ‘The First 100 Days and Counting’ (see go.nature.com/3tmxa2f). This report documented the fossil-fuel industry’s influence on the Trump administration, changes in how climate science was presented to the public and the administration’s hostility to scientific research and evidence...
It's worth reading the whole document.
1 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
No "we'll get to it in the long term" here. 