It is no secret that the 109th US Congress was possibly the most idle in history, beating out the famous "Do-Nothing Congress." Following the 2006 midterm elections and a return of control to the Democrats, many have been looking for the US legislature to return to their role of oversight in maintainance of the checks and balances inherent in the US system.
The 110th Congress has been in power for a little under a month now, and already the signs are good. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has begun to hold hearings into the "Political Influence on Government Climate Change Scientists." Yesterday witnesses from academia, NASA and other organizations testified about how the Bush administration has exerted political control over the publication of federally-funded research on the subject of climate change.
In the past we've covered the story of how leading climate researchers at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) were censored by a 24-year-old political operative, but sadly George Deutsch was far from an isolated example. The Bush administration installed a former oil company lobbyist, Philip Cooney, as the chair of the President's Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). During Cooney's tenure at the CEQ, he made unilateral edits to official government reports on climate change in order to downplay the findings and conclusions of these reports, thus adding to the doubt over climate change that exists within the general public, if not the scientific community.
Rick Plitz, a former US government scientist and current director of Climate Science Watch at the Government Accountability Project, detailed the suppression of the National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, an evaluation produced between 1997-2000. Mandated by a 1990 law, the Global Change Research Act, the assessment was for use by federal and local governments in order to help form policy in the light of scientific evidence. Since 2001, the Bush administration has ordered researchers to delete any mention of this document from their reports, presumably because the conclusions are politically unpalatable.
Most worryingly, perhaps to my mind, is the testimony from Francesca Grifo, of the Union of Concerned Scientists. In a survey of more than 1800 federal researchers, they found that:
- 145 FDA [Food and Drug Administration] scientists reported being asked, for non-scientific reasons, to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information or change their conclusions in an FDA scientific document.
- Nearly half (44 percent) of all FWS [Fish & Wildlife Service] scientists whose work is to evaluate endangered species reported that they have been directed, for non-scientific reasons, to refrain from making findings that would protect a species.
- And, from the report we are releasing today, 150 federal climate scientists report personally experiencing at least one incident of political interference in the past five years, for a total of at least 435 such incidents.
In addition to this, the CEQ has resisted attempts by the Committee to obtain documents regarding Bush administration muzzling of science. For the past six months, the previous Chair, Rep. Davis (D-VA) and Rep. Waxman have been stymied by the CEQ, who to date have only turned over a total of nine documents. Commenting on the matter, Rep. Waxman said "The committee isn't trying to obtain state secrets or documents that could affect our immediate national security... ...We are simply seeking answers to whether the White House's political staff is inappropriately censoring impartial government scientists."
