The White House really seems to love that editing pen

What’s the old saying? Once is an accident, twice a coincidence, and three times is a pattern?

The White House has demonstrated a disturbing, 1984-like tendency to take government reports and either “change” them before they’re available to the public, or get rid of the reports all together. First, the White House stopped the Bureau of Labor Statistics from publishing information about factory closings in the U.S., apparently embarrassed by the data. Then the White House stopped publishing a report called “Budget Information for States,” because it showed the administration wasn’t doing enough to help states in the midst of fiscal crises. Last week we learned that the White House deleted references to global warming in an EPA report on global environmental problems.

And now this week we see that the White House is fighting with the professional staff at Yellowstone National Park over whether there are poor environmental conditions at the park.

The park’s staff prepared a draft of a report for the United Nations, which in 1995 put Yellowstone on a list of list of World Heritage sites that are “in danger” of losing their grandeur. According an article in the LA Times, the staff documented several ongoing environmental problems at Yellowstone, including the quality of the park’s streams, bison herd, cutthroat trout populations, and to visitors’ overall experience of the park.

Bush administration officials reviewed the draft, deleted the staff’s concerns about environmental problems, and told the U.N. that Yellowstone should be removed from the endangered list.

I liked the quote from Roger Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service, who told the Times, “Tinkering with scientific information, either striking it from reports or altering it, is becoming a pattern of behavior. It represents the politicizing of a scientific process, which at once manifests a disdain for professional scientists working for our government and a willingness to be less than candid with the American people.”

I guess these tactics shouldn’t come as a big surprise seeing as this administration sees facts as, shall we say, malleable. But I nevertheless find it amazing the brazenness with which the Bush administration will just change and delete official documents to suit their political agenda.

The incomparable Molly Ivins, writing about the “edited” EPA report before the article about Yellowstone was published, thinks the White House may be on to something clever here.

“Think of the possibilities presented by this ingenious solution,” Ivins said. “Let’s edit out AIDS and all problems with drugs both legal and illegal. We could get rid of Libya and Syria this way — take ’em off the maps. We can do away with unemployment, the uninsured, heart disease, obesity and the coming Social Security crunch. We could try editing out death and taxes, but I don’t think we should overreach right away. Just start with something simple, like years of scientific research on global warming, and blue pencil that sucker out of existence. Denial is not just a river in Egypt.”