WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 Eager to the turn the page on the Trump years, the Biden White House is launching an effort to unearth past problems with\u00a0the politicization of science within government\u00a0and to tighten scientific integrity rules for the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A new 46-person federal scientific integrity task force with members from more than two dozen government agencies will meet for the first time on Friday. Its mission is to look back through 2009 for areas where\u00a0partisanship interfered\u00a0with what were supposed to be decisions based on evidence and research and to come up with ways to keep politics out of government science in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The effort was spurred by concerns that the Trump administration had politicized science in ways that put lives at risk,\u00a0eroded public trust\u00a0and\u00a0worsened climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe want people to be able to trust what the federal government is telling you, whether it\u2019s a weather forecast or information about vaccine safety or whatever,\u201d said Jane Lubchenco, the deputy director for climate and environment at the White House\u00a0Office of Science and Technology Policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
People need to know \u201cit\u2019s not by fiat, somebody\u2019s sort of knee-jerk opinion about something,\u201d added Alondra Nelson, the science office\u2019s deputy director for science and society. Nelson and Lubchenco spoke to The Associated Press ahead of a Monday announcement about the task force\u2019s first meeting and part of its composition. It stems from a Jan. 27\u00a0presidential memo\u00a0requiring \u201cevidence-based policy-making.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Scientists and others have accused the Trump administration of setting aside scientific evidence and injecting politics into issues including the coronavirus, climate change and even\u00a0whether Hurricane Dorian threatened Alabama\u00a0in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard University historian who has written about attacks on science in the book\u00a0\u201cMerchants of Doubt,\u201d\u00a0said politicization of science undermines the nation\u2019s ability to address serious problems that affect Americans\u2019 health, their well-being and the economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere\u2019s little doubt that the American death toll from covid-19 was far higher than it needed to be and that the administration\u2019s early unwillingness to take the issue seriously to listen to and act on the advice of experts and to communicate clearly contributed substantively to that death toll,\u201d Oreskes said in an email.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lubchenco, who led the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the Obama administration, pointed to an incident during the Trump years that became known as\u00a0\u201cSharpiegate\u201d\u00a0as a clear example of \u201cpolitical interference with scientific information that was potentially extraordinarily dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During Sharpiegate,\u00a0the NOAA\u00a0reprimanded some meteorologists for tweeting that Alabama was not threatened by the hurricane, contradicting President Donald Trump, who said Alabama was in danger. The matter became known as Sharpiegate after someone in the White House used a black Sharpie \u2014 a favorite pen of Trump\u2019s \u2014 to alter the official National Hurricane Center warning map to indicate Alabama could be in the path of the storm. A 2020\u00a0inspector general report\u00a0found the administration had violated scientific integrity rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Sharpiegate case revealed flaws in the scientific integrity system set up in 2009 by President Barack Obama, Lubchenco said. There were no consequences when the agency violated the rules, Lubchenco said. Nor were there consequences for NOAA\u2019s parent Cabinet agency, the Commerce Department. That\u2019s why President Joe Biden\u2019s administration is calling for scientific integrity rules throughout government and not just in science-oriented agencies, she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lubchenco said\u00a0a reluctance to fight climate change\u00a0in the last four years has delayed progress in cutting emissions of heat-trapping gases. \u201cThat will inevitably result in the problem being worse than it needed to be,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat we have seen in the last administration is that the suppression of science, the reassignment of scientists, the distortion of scientific information around climate change was not only destructive but counterproductive and really problematic,\u201d Lubchenco said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kelvin Droegemeier, who served as Trump\u2019s science adviser, in an email repeated what he told Congress in his confirmation hearing: \u201cIntegrity in science is everything,\u201d and science should be allowed to be done \u201cin an honest way, full of integrity without being incumbered by political influence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Droegemeier said the White House science office, where Nelson and Lubchenco now work and where he used to be, is more about policy and does not have the authority to investigate or enforce rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last week,\u00a0Republican legislators accused\u00a0the Biden White House of playing politics with science when it removed climate scientist Betsy Weatherhead, who had been praised by atmospheric scientists, from heading the national climate assessment. Lubchenco said it was normal for a new administration to bring in new people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley said the Biden administration is trying hard but isn\u2019t approaching the task of restoring science quite right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s impossible to keep politics out of science,\u201d Brinkley said. \u201cBut you can do your best to mitigate it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He said that only looking as far back as the Obama and Trump administrations will doom the task force\u2019s efforts not to be politicized itself and looked at in a partisan way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s really needed, Brinkley said, is to \u201cget to the root of things\u201d and look back as far as 1945. Both Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, and John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, elevated science efforts and tried to keep out the politics. But Brinkley said that with the onset of the environmental movement, the distraction of the Vietnam War and corporations seeing science as leading to too much regulation during the Reagan era, a unified public admiration for science fell apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Harvard\u2019s Oreskes said her research indicated Ronald Reagan was \u201cthe first president in the modern era to exhibit disregard and at times even contempt for scientific evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The new task force will focus more on the future than the past, Nelson said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cEvery agency is being asked to really demonstrate that they are making decisions that are informed by the best available research evidence,\u201d Nelson said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the four task force co-chairs is Francesca Grifo, scientific integrity officer for the Environmental Protection Agency since 2013. She clashed with the Trump EPA, which would not allow her to testify at a 2019 congressional hearing about scientific integrity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The others are Anne Ricciuti, deputy director for science at the Education Department\u2019s Institute of Education Sciences; Craig Robinson, director of the Office of Science Quality and Integrity at the U.S. Geological Survey; and Jerry Sheehan, deputy director of the National Library of Medicine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
___<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This story has been corrected to show the climate scientist\u2019s surname is Weatherhead, not Wetherhead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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