I don’t know if there’s a significant pro-science voting bloc out there, but if there is, Bush is in trouble. Or at least should be.
Yesterday, I talked about the Bush administration’s habit of manipulating government research and reports for political purposes. The truth is, the HHS report on race and health is really the tip of the iceberg.
In June, the White House deleted references to global warming in an EPA report on global environmental problems. The same month, the administration deleted concerns raised by the staff at Yellowstone National Park about ongoing environmental problems at the park. The Bush White House has also manipulated data and scientific research on stem cell research, contraception, and air quality at Ground Zero in New York after 9/11. The list goes on and on.
Today, the Washington Post offered another disturbing example. This time, the White House wants to politicize the peer review process.
Ordinarily, the peer review process is considered a cornerstone of modern scientific research. Results that are not subjected to peer review are not published in academia, nor are they taken seriously by other researchers. So, at first blush, a new White House initiative to rely more heavily on peer reviewed science may seem worthwhile. It isn’t.
As the Post explained, the administration’s proposal would “block the adoption of new federal regulations unless the science being used to justify them passes muster with a centralized peer review process that would be overseen by the White House Office of Management and Budget.”
In other words, the White House would shift the research process from an objective, dispassionate, and academic environment to a political one that Bush aides have total control over.
John Graham, OMB chief of regulatory affairs and a prime architect of the administration proposal, said, “Peer review in its many forms can be used to increase the technical quality and credibility of regulatory science… [and] protects science-based rulemakings from political criticism and litigation.”
Yes, under normal guidelines, that’s true. But the administration is planning to exploit this for their own ends — injecting politics into the process so the results can be applied the way the White House wants to.
“The way it’s structured, it allows for the political process to second-guess the experts,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the 50,000-member American Public Health Association, one of many groups that have spoken against the proposal.
Why would the administration do this? Why else — to help big business and slow regulations.
Under the current system, individual agencies typically invite outside experts to review the accuracy of their science and the scientific information they offer — whether it is the health effects of diesel exhaust, industry injury rates, or details about the dangers of eating beef that has been mechanically scraped from the spinal cords of mad cows.
The proposed change would usurp much of that independence. It lays out specific rules regarding who can sit on peer review panels — rules that, to critics’ dismay, explicitly discourage the participation of academic experts who have received agency grants but offer no equivalent warnings against experts with connections to industry. And it grants the executive branch final say as to whether the peer review process was acceptable.
Take a wild guess at which groups are supporting the Bush administration’s proposed changes? National Association of Manufacturers, the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, Ford Motor Co., the American Chemistry Council, the National Stone, Sand and Gravel Association (whose members include regulated mining concerns), and Syngenta, a pesticide company that has been in a public struggle over data suggesting that one of its products may be responsible for major declines in frog populations.
And who’s against it? A bi-partisan (and non-partisan) group of researchers and experts, including prominent former regulators from the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Among them are former labor secretary Robert B. Reich; former EPA administrators Russell Train and Carol M. Browner; heads of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under Carter and the elder Bush; and Neal Lane, who was director of the National Science Foundation under Clinton and head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
I don’t know about you, but looking at these lists, I’m siding with the scientists.