Environmental scientists report political interference

[Karl]

Chemistry World – 25 April 2008

(Read Full Article: Environmental scientists report political interference)

Hundreds of the US Environmental Protection Agency's scientific staff have experienced political interference in their work, a survey has revealed. Most worryingly, 224 scientists - 17 per cent of those who responded to the survey - said that they had been 'directed to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information' from EPA's scientific documents in the last five years.

The survey, conducted by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based lobby group Union of Concerned Scientists, also found that 492 scientists (31 per cent of survey respondents) felt they could not even express concerns about the EPA's work to colleagues without fear of retaliation. A total of 889 scientists (60 per cent of respondents) reported personal experience of political interference.

The proportion of EPA scientists reporting interference was highest in the agency's offices with regulatory duties and at its headquarters, while it was lowest in the Office of Research and Development, the EPA's main research arm. ‘This shows that risk assessments at EPA are really where the rubber meets the road in terms of political interference,' says UCS's Tim Donaghy, one of the survey report's co-authors. 'Manipulating the risk assessment makes regulation much more difficult.'

Examples of manipulation cited by the survey's responders include: changes in scientific reviews that alter the meaning of data; efforts to pressure agency scientists to ignore the impacts of a regulation on sensitive populations; and statements by EPA officials that misrepresent scientific findings. Roughly 10 per cent of the survey's respondents are chemists and 5 per cent are toxicologists.

[rc white]

The Bush administration along with its other wars has also been waging a war on science, we had this to a lesser extent in Australia with the now thankfully defunct Howard administration.
The major features of such attacks on science are that any findings that are contrary to the pre set notion of how things are, held by lunatic right wingers, are dismissed as being the work of left wing academics pushing their godless liberal agenda. Further it is not correct to expect the taxpayer to pay for commie propaganda being foisted upon them so government funding should be withdrawn.
As we can see this is nothing more than an updated version of shoot the messenger.
A friend of mine remarked that when a Bush administration official talks of the practical business of the real world and thinking outside the envelope, they are talking from the perspective of someone who walks around with their head up their arse, and what they see when they open their eyes wide with their head so positioned.