The administration is booting experts from advisory panels. Inconvenient studies are shut down early. Officials are forbidden from using certain words. But as professional integrity is compromised, scientists are getting creative in blunting the damage.
Michael Halpern is deputy director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He works to promote solutions that ensure government decisions are fully informed by scientific information, and that the public understands the scientific basis for those decisions.
When Administrator Scott Pruitt banned experts from serving on EPA advisory panels if they receive grant funding from the agency, he claimed to be defending scientific integrity and federal agency independence. The subtext, however, is that the experts whom the agency has decided are doing the most promising environmental and public health research should be banned from giving the agency advice. “This EPA decision is motivated by politics, not the desire for quality scientific information,” said Rush Holt, CEO of the usually cautious American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Science, like other independent checks on arbitrary decisionmaking, has become a significant target of this administration. In multiple departments, political appointees are at best neglectful and at worst hostile to the science-based missions of their agencies. The administration is gutting expert capacity, sidelining science and scientists from policymaking, and, most troubling, exerting control over the research process itself.
While science has been politicized by all modern presidents in one way or another, the Trump administration’s attacks are far worse in both scope and severity. Left unchecked, these actions will have profound long-term consequences for public health and the environment. But never before has the science community been so energized to push back.
The first measure of the administration’s attitude toward science is the people who fill the ranks — when they fill them. The president has yet to appoint a science advisor, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is a shell of what it was during the Obama administration. In recent years, OSTP has been directly involved in everything from preventing the spread of the Zika virus to addressing antibiotic resistance. No longer.
Many mainstream Republicans distanced themselves from Trump during his campaign, allowing people solely motivated by ambition and ideology to step in. An emboldened Stephen K. Bannon pledged the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” He wasn’t kidding. A track record of opposition to the authority of a federal agency was an important qualification for many cabinet-level positions. And while agency leaders get most of the headlines, lower-level appointees can wreak just as much havoc.
The American Chemistry Council is a trade organization that has downplayed and sometimes misrepresented data on toxic chemicals. Nancy Beck led chemical safety policy for ACC. She’s now part of the team overseeing EPA’s chemical safety decisions. Her ACC colleague Liz Bowman took a job in the EPA press office, where she has regularly stonewalled reporters. A disgraced banking executive with no environmental experience now leads the Superfund program. He helped Pruitt buy his house.
Then there’s Sam Clovis, the talk show host and Trump loyalist with no scientific training who was unsuccessfully nominated to serve as the Department of Agriculture’s chief scientist. After facing fierce opposition, he withdrew when he was linked to the Russia investigation. Kathleen Hartnett-White, a comp-lit major tapped to lead the Council on Environmental Quality, rejects climate change science and could not answer basic questions about science at her confirmation hearing. William Wehrum, who recently argued that human lungs are designed to deal with silica dust exposure, was too toxic for Senate confirmation during the George W. Bush administration. This time around, he sailed through the Senate to head EPA’s air office.
The administration’s pick for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief, AccuWeather CEO Barry Myers, could directly benefit financially from the agency’s decisions. Three former NOAA administrators declared that Myers is unfit for the position. Said one, D. James Baker, “You’ve got the potential of decisions being made on the basis of money rather than what’s best for the country.”
The Republicans who control Congress, perhaps afraid of being on the wrong end of a presidential tweet, have rubber stamped nearly every patently objectionable nomination. Only one science nominee has thus far withdrawn after senators indicated he could not be confirmed: Michael Dourson, named to oversee chemicals policy at EPA. He was paid to defend the use of the volatile organic compound trichloroethylene; at EPA, he would have been in charge of finalizing a plan to ban it. Public outrage from veterans and scientists poured forth in North Carolina, where water contamination with TCE sickened and killed people who lived at Camp Lejeune.
Once in place, appointees are politically targeting scientific capacity. Aggressive buyout schemes are combining with explicit and de facto hiring freezes to leave environmental agencies with insufficient staff to develop scientific analyses and fully enforce environmental laws.
The consequences are real. A rule to protect drinking water from lead contamination, due last January, has been delayed at least until this summer. The EPA Office of Water is short-staffed, and the assistant administrator in charge didn’t start until December.
In some cases, agencies have shut down studies midstream based on what they anticipate will happen. It isn’t at all subtle. In an unprecedented move, last August the Department of the Interior ordered the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine to stop research into the potential health risks of surface coal mining on communities in West Virginia. A NASEM study on offshore oil drilling safety was shelved in December. The decisions can’t possibly be considered anything but political.
The Department of Energy plans to shutter a $100 million effort aimed at improving tropical-climate models after just three years of its ten-year run. Tropical forests are critical to preventing climate change, and are therefore tremendously important to understanding Earth systems. And in December, the Government Accountability Office found that DOE illegally withheld $91 million of funding for an advanced energy technology initiative that the administration wants to eliminate.
Many of the most drastic cuts in the president’s proposed budget zeroed in on scientific initiatives, especially if those initiatives were climate-related. The EPA Office of Research and Development faced a 40 percent cut; a senior official told Science magazine that this would cause the agency’s science office “to implode.”
The president’s proposed budget called for deep cuts for the U.S. Geological Service library system. Existing information would be put into a dark archive, which is librarian-speak for restricted public access. NOAA’s Sea Grant program, a national network of 33 university-based research, extension, and education programs to benefit coastal and Great Lakes communities, would be eliminated.
Administration appointees traditionally go to Capitol Hill to defend their budgets from a skeptical Congress. Not so with Scott Pruitt; Republican members of Congress were in the highly unusual position of trying to convince him that he needed more resources to carry out EPA’s mission.
The research community pushed back hard against many of the budget cuts, and as a result, the most egregious have not yet been realized. So far, science champions in Congress have held the line, although the disastrous tax law passed in December will put significant additional pressure on discretionary spending.
Beyond the capacity squeeze, federal environmental agencies are excluding science and scientists from policymaking. The lack of interest in institutional and scientific knowledge began during the transition. At the Department of Agriculture, dutiful federal employees carefully prepared materials for the transition teams. Only one guy showed up. Brian Klippenstein possessed a singular fixation: the department’s work on climate change.
In early January, Klippenstein finally rustled up three other transition team members for a briefing on the department’s extensive scientific enterprise. It lasted an hour. “The Trump transition sent in these teams in the end just to say they were doing it,” a former White House official told Vanity Fair. Elsewhere, inquiries seemed more malevolent than indifferent. At DOE, the transition team requested answers to dozens of questions, including a list of all employees who worked on climate change, and a list of websites that staff had developed over the previous three years. After a public uproar, the department refused to comply.
Soon after the inauguration, aided and abetted by Congress, the administration triggered a seldom-used tool to circumvent science-based policymaking: the Congressional Review Act. The 1996 law had been successfully used previously just once, to rescind an ergonomics workplace standard finalized by the Clinton administration. The CRA substitutes political judgment for scientific analysis by allowing Congress to strike down environmental health and safety rules, developed over many years with notice-and-comment procedures and high evidentiary standards, without any scientific review.
Since Inauguration Day, with the president’s support, the CRA has been used successfully 15 times. Congress removed the Stream Protection Rule, which would have shielded communities from contamination from mining operations. Other CRA votes reduced data retention related to workplace injuries and the sharing of mental health data within the government, as well as the cessation of hunting restrictions on Alaska wildlife refuges. Without public pressure, more science-based public protections would have fallen.
At EPA, Pruitt’s schedule shows a steady stream of meetings with industry lobbyists but scant interaction with independent experts. Evidence suggests that the pesticide chlropyrifos harms brain development in children. In 2015, the agency proposed phasing out the chemical. In May, after multiple meetings and communications among the administrator’s office and industry representatives, Pruitt reversed the proposal. Public health and scientific organizations were not consulted, nor were the EPA scientists who put together the plan.
Advisory committee problems are rife. Some new committees — such as the president’s election integrity commission — reached their conclusions before they are even formed, eschewing members with expertise in favor of those with political agendas. Fortunately, the lack of credibility doomed the commission to irrelevance. All Department of the Interior advisory committees were suspended in May, and as of this writing, many of them are in limbo. This includes the Utah Resource Advisory Council, which provides advice (including science advice) to the Bureau of Land Management. As a result, decisions to severely reduce the size of national monuments in Utah were carried forward without advisory panel input. It also includes the Advisory Committee on Climate Change and Natural Resource Science, which was quietly disbanded over the summer. There is even an unwillingness to collect the necessary data in the first place. In March, EPA withdrew requests for oil and gas company operators to monitor and report on their methane emissions.
When all else fails, the administration is restricting the communication of science and interfering in the scientific process itself. Websites began changing on Inauguration Day, with references to climate science and policy removed from or buried in the White House and EPA sites. Climate change experts were prevented from presenting their work at conferences. Hundreds of USGS scientists were barred from participating in December’s American Geophysical Union meeting. For self-preservation, many scientists and career staff avoid referencing global warming.
Public and media scrutiny of the administration’s treatment of climate science has been strong — which also has its downsides, as it can lead to a rush to judgment. In 2017, the National Climate Assessment, a massive intergovernmental effort to synthesize current and future impacts of climate change in the United States, was moving through the internal review process smoothly. Then the New York Times published an already-public draft of the report with concerns from anonymous sources that the report was going to be censored. Report authors had urged the newspaper not to run a story, as they were afraid that undeserved attention would actually increase the possibility that it would be censored or manipulated. In an exception that proves the rule, policy wonks were surprised that the report came out intact.
But the pattern of political interference still persists. Deborah Swackhammer, who sits on the EPA Science Advisory Board, was pressured by the White House to change her testimony in advance of a congressional hearing where she would be critical of board member dismissals.
Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control have been told to check with political superiors on “everything from formal interview requests to the most basic of data requests,” a flagrant violation of the department’s scientific integrity policy. Employees were banned from using seven words essential to research — including “science-based, “diversity,” and “vulnerable” — in the CDC’s budget proposal. The ability to communicate science without political filters is essential to the government’s ability to share timely information about public health and the environment. At EPA, Trump campaign staffer John Konkus, who now works in the public affairs office, was put in charge of reviewing all agency scientific grants. Former Republican EPA administrators have been aghast. “We didn’t do a political screening on every grant, because many of them were based on science, and political appointees don’t have that kind of background,” said Christine Todd Whitman, administrator under George W. Bush.
It is unusual to pull back funding that has already been awarded. Yet EPA has rescinded funding to two organizations that would have supported the deployment of clean cookstoves in the developing world — which would curb the impacts of climate change from wood harvesting, and also limit indoor pollution that disproportionately affects women and children.
The administration’s actions to undermine science do not come out of a vacuum. Industry trade groups have long manipulated science and scientists to distort the truth about the dangers of their products. What’s different is that their influence has increased considerably; appointees are carrying out the wish lists of trade associations, anti-government activists, and some members of Congress who have long resented the strong role of science in bedrock public health and environmental laws.
The Endangered Species Act requires that decisions on whether or not a species merits protection be based solely on science. The Clean Air Act requires EPA to set ambient air pollution standards in much the same way. The grounding in science increases these laws’ success and makes them more resilient to political meddling.
Numerous bills have been introduced in recent years that would chip away at this capacity. There’s the Regulatory Accountability Act, which would paralyze science-based rulemaking by requiring redundant analyses. The REINS Act, which would require both houses of Congress to approve any major regulation put forward by an agency. The failed EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act, which would compromise the independence of the agency’s expert committees.
The legislation shares a common outcome: to get those pesky experts out of the way. Compromise the agency’s knowledge and it’s easier to put forward policies that lack a scientific basis.
F ortunately, while government scientists are now often sidelined from policy decisions, most are keeping their heads down and doing their research and documenting how it is being used — or not used — in policy decisions. In doing so, they create an administrative record that can be used in both litigation and accountability, including investigative journalism, inter-governmental watchdog investigations, and eventual congressional oversight.
The executive branch is still required to follow congressional laws, and the judiciary is still largely willing to enforce those laws. Presidential tweets aside, the removal or weakening of environmental protections must be rooted in the best available science, or they can be thrown out in court.
Legal challenges have already been filed, and are expected to mount as the administration makes more decisions that are either arbitrary or capricious (or both). The Union of Concerned Scientists has joined Earthjustice in challenging the executive order that would require agencies to withdraw two public protections for every one they put forward. We have also joined numerous other organizations in challenging the administration’s decision to delay implementation of the Risk Management Plan, a rule that would better protect communities from chemical accidents.
The science community outside government has slowly built its political muscle over the past two decades, and has shown its willingness to flex that power. The wakeup call came during the George W. Bush administration, when officials routinely muzzled scientists and rewrote studies to support predetermined outcomes. Experts began speaking out against political interference and created a movement to defend professional integrity. The need to protect science and scientists began to seep into their collective consciousness.
The unprecedented threat to science from the Trump administration has catalyzed a surge of scientist engagement. The March for Science, which drew 1.1 million participants worldwide last April, was a symbol of scientists stepping into public life that many hope will persist well beyond the Trump administration.
Enduring infrastructure is being built to make that a reality. My organization is developing state-based collectives of scientists to watchdog for science, providing microgrants for scientists to design and lead local advocacy projects, ramping up engagement training, and connecting young scientists with veteran policy mentors. Responding to increased threats against marginalized groups, scientists created 500 Women Scientists, an organization dedicated to making science more open, inclusive, and accessible. The group now has scores of local “pods” that are building capacity among future leaders to advocate for a strong role for science in society in a way that serves everyone.
Scientists worked with Data Refuge, a team of librarians, archivists, and environmental humanities scholars, to archive terabytes of data that were vulnerable to removal from government websites. These efforts prevented large-scale takedowns of information and led to the introduction of the Preserving Government in Data Act, sponsored by Colorado Republican Senator Cory Gardner and Michigan Democratic Senator Gary Peters.
In the absence of genuine political leadership, scientists are speaking up in creative ways. After Pruitt reconstituted EPA science advisory committees, the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors created a shadow advisory committee to review the official EPA advisors’ work. Experts who have served on the board during previous administrations will join other experts to help determine whether the committees have been compromised.
David Sedlak, editor in chief of Environmental Science and Technology, encouraged other societies to follow suit. He wrote, to assure “a skeptical public that the EPA’s advisory boards and panels are conducting unbiased analyses that draw upon the full range of necessary expertise, the research community must fill the void.”
The cumulative result of this work is that journalists and some leaders in Congress are laser-focused on exposing and calling out actions that undermine federal scientific capacity. It was front page news when Interior climate scientist Joel Clement was reassigned to work in the department’s accounting office. When agency scientific web pages are taken offline, or when scientists are censored, multiple mainstream media stories are up within hours. All of this work raises the price of politicizing science.
And despite the rhetoric, facts still matter to some in both major political parties. Bipartisan reform is possible. Republicans and Democrats have both spoken of the need to afford federal scientists more latitude to attend conferences to stay current. And members of both parties have advanced stronger whistleblower protections for employees who report abuses of science.
It will get worse before it gets better. The administration will continue to hollow out federal science agencies through buyouts and budgets. They will continue to sideline science in decisionmaking, enabling political appointees to do the bidding of their former employers. New ways of politicizing science that we have not yet conceptualized will be invented.
How far they get depends on our ability to demonstrate the consequences of their actions on public health and the environment. And with hard work, the scientific community will emerge from this national nightmare with the infrastructure that is necessary for sustained public engagement. TEF
