WEISS'S NOTEBOOK

Quiet Heroes

Within Misused Federal Science Agencies, Courageous Researchers

I’ve never been good at goodbyes, but “good riddance” I can do. And what else is there to say on this, the last day of an administration that has done so much harm to so many, and in particular has so damaged the discipline closest to my heart—science—and its stock in trade: evidence?

Good riddance to the lies, the deception, the White House-edited pseudoscience reports. Good riddance to the stacked science advisory committees, the faux peer-review of proposed regulations, the junkyard claims of “junk science.”

Good riddance to the scientist manqué at the top of the Environmental Protection Agency who big-footed actual evidence for political convenience. Good riddance to the leadership at the Office of Science and Technology Policy that supported President Bush’s skepticism about the need to address climate change aggressively.

Good riddance to the vice-president who thought the telecom revolution was about better bugging of innocent citizens’ phone calls. Good riddance to the president who cared more about human embryos than he did about children living in the lower Ninth Ward.

Now, however, comes the difficult task of looking forward—of finding the place for progressive voices in an administration refreshingly committed to treating science fairly, but burdened by an inheritance of underfunded agencies and dispirited federal scientists. And all this comes in the midst of an economic crisis that precludes the cash infusion that our emaciated science agencies and their surviving public servants need and so richly deserve.

But there are two aspects of the current predicament that give me hope. First, of course, is that when it comes to science, Obama really does get it. Back in October 2008, he sent via the government employees union several letters to federal workers in the science-based agencies, stating in no uncertain terms his commitment to evidence. “In an Obama administration, the principle of scientific integrity will be an absolute, and I will never sanction any attempt to subvert the work of scientists,” he wrote.

By my reading, those missives could be reduced to about seven words—two-sevenths exhortation—“Hang on!”—and five-sevenths supplication—“I’m going to need you!”

The supplication gets me to my second reason for hope, which is that despite all the failings at

• the Food and Drug Administration: the Plan B debacle, the parade of contaminated foods, and the failure to follow up on serious side effects of drugs
• the EPA, with its repeated overruling of science on pesticide approvals, chemical contamination standards, air and water pollution
• the Interior Department, which, according to The New York Times, is “riddled with incompetence and corruption, captive to industries it is supposed to regulate and far more interested in exploiting public resources than conserving them.”
• the Department of Agriculture, which has been repeatedly scolded by federal courts for its failed science policies and which, according to a just-released Inspector General report, “does not have a strategy for monitoring new transgenic plants and animals that may be developed and imported into the United States”
• the National Institutes of Health, which has not paid sufficient attention to conflicts of interest among its grantees and provided too much cover for the morally corrupt Bush stem cell plan
• the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—consider the Columbia disaster and the pending loss of the shuttle fleet with no other means of reaching the space station
• the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which failed in “almost every respect” to protect Hurricane Katrina victims from the well-understood risks of formaldehyde fumes, according to a congressional investigation, and which has alienated scientists around the world for failing to share important public health data

…Despite all these failings and more, the amazing thing is that every time I talk to the men and women who are actually doing the science in these agencies, I find them almost without exception to be hugely talented and dedicated professionals. Most of them are working on shoestrings but virtually all of them are squeezing all the integrity they can into the process, wanting nothing more (and nothing less) than to get the best answers to the smartest questions so the United States can be a leader among nations and help save the world. Who can’t relate to that?

In short, I am heartened that the nation is endowed with a huge corps of public-servant scientists devoted to going where the evidence takes them and who, as of Wednesday, will for the first time in years be respected by the highest officials in the land for what they do. What’s more, one of the silver linings of our recent eight-year nightmare is that scientists have awakened to the political context within which they work, and more of them than ever seem willing to speak their minds when it comes to how their studies are to be integrated into the world of public policy.

Now is the time for progressives inside and outside of science to solidify these gains for the common good—to avoid overreaching in these days of our political ascendance and instead prove that science can bring economic as well as environmental benefit, prove that scientists can be responsive to social, ethical, and cultural concerns, and prove that evidence is a better source of ideas than ideology.

Rick Weiss is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Science Progress.

Tags: CDC, censoring science, EPA, FDA, NIH, scientific integrity

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