by Jim, the Photographer
On the White House Scientific Integrity guidelines – Part 1: OMB’s Secret ‘Openness’ Policy
[Via ClimateScienceWatch]
Scientific integrity guidelines for federal agencies issued December 17, 2010, by John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, ostensibly endorse open communication between journalists and scientists. But the available documentary evidence, including disclosures forced by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, strongly suggests that the White House Office of Management and Budget has impeded the drive for scientific integrity and openness. Has OMB dictated a policy that will allow agencies to keep scientists from talking freely with reporters and to continue keeping politically inconvenient scientific findings in the shadows?
[More]
OMB has been doing this for much of the last decade. It is an office where politics is used to trump science. It controls the budgets of all the agencies in the Executive Branch, It is not something anyone wants to tick off.
It appears that its political purpose, at least in some cases. continues. It asks for the science to be reframed; it delays publication of science; it makes sure that handlers are present during interviews.
The latter is the one that seems wrong for an open society.
The administration’s guidelines may be better than before but they are still a long way from transparent. My worry is that the system may already be so broken and corrupted that it can no longer be fixed. Both sides will simply abuse the system to their own benefit, not ours.
No putting Humpty back together again.
Read the whole series. Essentially, while making wonderful statements, the policy still leaves each agency with way too much say in how they implement these policies, meaning that they can still be used for political purposes.
Pretty amazing that public research paid for by public funds and done by public scientists can not be disseminated to the public directly but has to be vetted first by political appointees and press officers. That was the cause of much of the problems in the last Administration. The current one, while it espouses a loftier goal, does not seem to be a whole different on the ground.
The last paragraphs of the series were the most depressing because they really do show how some important things do not change, whether there is a Republican or a Democrat in the White House:
In 2002-3, when UN inspectors were looking for nuclear weapons in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, that nation’s nuclear scientists could not talk to inspectors without a Baath Party “minder” as chaperone. Nor could reporters wander Iraq’s streets without a minder.This, the wisest satraps and shrewdest nabobs of U.S. Intelligence concluded, was prima facie evidence that Saddam was hiding something and could not be trusted. On the strength of this conviction, war ensued. Then the Bush administration began requiring “minders” for news media interviews with its own scientists, whose findings were often inconveniently at odds with the administration’s pre-formed policy positions.
When scientific facts and ideology differed, under Bush, the facts had to be hidden, discredited, or disposed of. Thus it was that a pioneering climate scientist with a towering research reputation, NASA lab director James Hansen, was forbidden to do press interviews by 24-year old press officer George Deutsch, whose sole qualifications were that he had worked on the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign and had lied about having a nonexistent B.A. degree. The Bush administration had finally adopted and internalized the methods of Saddam — minders and permissions — for combating truths they found politically inconvenient for the public to know about.
The big surprise, however, was that many federal agencies under President Obama continued the “minders” press policy. But an even bigger surprise, perhaps, was that on December 17, the Obama White House issued scientific integrity guidelines that could be used by federal agencies to require – one might say ‘Saddam-style’ – that government scientists have minders when giving interviews — and now refuses to be transparent about the process that produced these late and inadequate guidelines.
by 
by 
by 
by 
