SCIENCE, CULTURED

Speaking Truth From Power

New Rules to Protect Scientific Integrity Will Require Nuance

Today’s the deadline: The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will soon close its comments period on the president’s March 9 “scientific integrity” memorandum, with the goal of having a set of proposed government-wide policies to present by July 9. In essence, OSTP’s job is to determine precisely how the executive branch can best deliver on the memorandum’s six chief principles for ensuring scientific integrity in government. Those principles touch on science-related appointments, the dissemination of accurate information, government transparency, whistleblower protections, and much else. The overarching goal: “The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions.”

But let’s rewind and recall why we’re doing this. The last administration was—and I think this is an objective statement—the most scientifically controversial in modern American history. Hordes of journalists, advocates, and citizens have now documented all the various ways in which the handoff of information from government scientists to administration officials and the public was repeatedly and egregiously corrupted. The nature of the problem couldn’t be more clear—but as we’ll see, discovering how to fix it turns out to be quite intricate, complicated, and even off-putting.

In fairness, there are many reasons to feel hopeful about OSTP’s undertaking. On a structural level, the administration is doing exactly what it ought to: OSTP is the best choice to serve as the central federal nerve center for scientific integrity matters. The office will have to punch above its weight in this role, since it will need cooperation from much larger government science agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. But the president’s memorandum makes clear that this is now OSTP’s job, and everybody else in government needs to help out.

So we can now think of OSTP as the in-government advocate for the scientist—often the “little guy” in the context of larger federal doings. Finally, somebody’s going to stand up for him, or for her.

Still, it’s easier said than done. As Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the lead non-government advocacy group on scientific integrity matters, put it recently to Science Progress, “It’s not a simple thing to say, ‘Oh, let’s just outlaw abuses of science.’ It’s actually a fairly nuanced, complex thing to look at.” Indeed. Consider, say, the problem of potential conflicts of interest among scientists appointed to serve on federal advisory committees. Where do you draw the line between scientists who are too conflicted to serve and those who are somewhat conflicted, but probably okay? A regulation that isn’t flexible and sensible in such an area could cause more harm than good.

Or take another area of scientific integrity where the last administration saw plenty of controversy: The relationship between government scientists—who tend to be career civil servants—and public affairs officials—who are frequently political appointees. When a government scientist receives a media query on a sensitive subject like global warming, we’ve seen how public affairs “minders” can abuse their power, for instance by seeking to block the interview or listening in on it in a way that could be intimidating for the scientist in question. And yet at the same time, there may be very good reasons to have a public affairs official sit in on a media interview—including to protect the scientist involved. Similarly, there might be good and entirely apolitical reasons to redirect an inquiring journalist away from one agency scientist and to another better equipped to deal with a particular query. Only a very sensitive regulation or group of regulations can root out abuses in this area without going too far.

Indeed, to see how hard it can be to achieve the appropriate balance on matters of scientific integrity, just look at the very different sets of comments offered to OSTP by two key nonprofit advocacy groups on the same side of the issue: The Union of Concerned Scientists and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Both organizations have done important work on scientific integrity in government, sometimes even in collaboration. Yet their comments take a significantly different tone, and have strongly different emphases.

The UCS recommendations are all about transparency, transparency, transparency. They strongly emphasize the need for mechanisms to ensure greater public access to scientific documents produced by government, and to the scientific rationales underlying government actions. The basic idea seems to be that by making more information about science-based decision making available, and by liberating government scientists themselves to speak freely, we will change the system and ensure a much healthier relationship between science and government.

PEER doesn’t disagree about transparency. But by God, the organization wants scientific integrity wrongdoers to be punished—made an example of. Phrases like “negative career consequences,” “sanctions,” and “appropriate disciplinary action” adorn PEER’s comments, which are scathing in their remarks about government officials (and PEER names names) who have violated scientific integrity principles in some way. Moreover, the group wants an utter ban on the alteration of “technical documents for non-technical reasons unless the basis is included as part of the document.” Where the UCS approach is largely about letting in sunlight, then, the PEER approach largely focuses on outing and punishing abuses so as to deter future ones.

As such differences get worked out, the wonks and the lawyers will have to take over, and it’s likely their nuanced discussions won’t command much public attention. Catching a fossil fuel industry type messing with climate science documents in true “smoking gun” fashion sparks a lot more attention than a protracted deliberation about how to define “conflict of interest.” And yet tuning out now would be a massive mistake—we’ll be living with the results of scientific integrity deliberations for a long time. And if we don’t get it right now, we’ll be having the same discussion again in two decades.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

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