Over Christmas dinner my evangelical close relative bemoan the
decline of and science and technology in the United States. And he said
Donald Trump is making America great again. Here's an article from the
New York Times to address that point, unless he call this fake new. MAGA
FOREVER!!!
=================
The Environmental Protection
Agency in Washington.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
·
Dec. 28, 2019
WASHINGTON
— In just three years, the Trump administration has diminished the role of
science in federal policymaking while halting or disrupting research projects
nationwide, marking a transformation of the federal government whose effects,
experts say, could reverberate for years.
Political
appointees have shut down government studies, reduced the influence of
scientists over regulatory decisions and in some cases pressured researchers
not to speak publicly. The administration has particularly challenged
scientific findings related to the environment and public health opposed by
industries such as oil drilling and coal mining. It has also impeded research
around human-caused climate change, which President Trump has dismissed despite
a global scientific consensus.
But the
erosion of science reaches well beyond the environment and climate: In San
Francisco, a study of the effects of chemicals on pregnant women has stalled
after federal funding abruptly ended. In Washington, D.C., a scientific
committee that provided expertise in defending against invasive insects has been disbanded. In Kansas City,
Mo., the hasty relocation of two agricultural agencies that fund crop science
and study the economics of farming has led to an exodus of employees and
delayed hundreds of millions of dollars in research.
Hundreds
of scientists, many of whom say they are dismayed at seeing their work undone,
are departing.
Among
them is Matthew Davis, a biologist whose research on the health risks of
mercury to children underpinned the first rules cutting mercury emissions from
coal power plants. But last year, with a new baby of his own, he was
asked to help support a rollback of those same rules. “I am now part of
defending this darker, dirtier future,” he said.
This
year, after a decade at the Environmental Protection Agency, Mr. Davis left.
“Regulations
come and go, but the thinning out of scientific capacity in the government will
take a long time to get back,” said Joel Clement, a former top climate-policy
expert at the Interior Department who quit in 2017 after
being reassigned to a job collecting oil and gas royalties. He is now at the
Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group.
Mr.
Trump has consistently said that government regulations have stifled businesses
and thwarted some of the administration’s core goals, such as increasing
fossil-fuel production. Many of the starkest confrontations with federal
scientists have involved issues like environmental oversight and energy
extraction — areas where industry groups have argued that regulators have gone
too far in the past.
“Businesses are finally
being freed of Washington’s overreach, and the American economy is flourishing
as a result,” a White House statement said last
year. Asked about the role of science in policymaking, officials
from the White House declined to comment on the record.
The administration’s
efforts to cut certain research projects also reflect a longstanding conservative
position that some scientific work can be performed cost-effectively by the
private sector, and taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to foot the bill. “Eliminating
wasteful spending, some of which has nothing to do with studying the science at
all, is smart management, not an attack on science,” two analysts at the
conservative Heritage Foundation wrote in 2017 of
the administration’s proposals to eliminate various climate change and clean
energy programs.
The president’s desk.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Industry
groups have expressed support for some of the moves, including a contentious E.P.A. proposal to
put new constraints on the use of scientific studies in the name of
transparency. The American Chemistry Council, a chemical trade group, praised
the proposal by saying, “The goal of providing more transparency in government
and using the best available science in the regulatory process should be ideals
we all embrace.”
In some
cases, the administration’s efforts to roll back government science have been
thwarted. Each year, Mr. Trump has proposed sweeping budget cuts at a variety
of federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health, the Department of
Energy and the National Science Foundation. But Congress has the final say over
budget levels and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have rejected the
cuts.
For
instance, in supporting funding for the Department of Energy’s national
laboratories, Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, recently said,
“it allows us to take advantage of the United States’ secret weapon, our
extraordinary capacity for basic research.”
As a
result, many science programs continue to thrive, including space exploration
at NASA and medical research at the National Institutes of Health, where the
budget has increased more than 12 percent since Mr. Trump took office and where
researchers continue to make advances in
areas like molecular biology and genetics.
Nevertheless,
in other areas, the administration has managed to chip away at federal science.
The
White House said it aimed to eliminate committees that were no longer
necessary. Panels cut so far had focused on issues including
invasive species and electric grid innovation.
At a
time when the United States is pulling back from world leadership in other
areas like human rights or diplomatic accords, experts warn that the retreat
from science is no less significant. Many of the achievements of the past
century that helped make the United States an envied global power, including
gains in life expectancy, lowered air pollution and increased farm productivity
are the result of the kinds of government research now under pressure.
“When
we decapitate the government’s ability to use science in a professional way,
that increases the risk that we start making bad decisions, that we start
missing new public health risks,” said Wendy E. Wagner, a professor of law at
the University of Texas at Austin who studies the use of science by
policymakers.
Skirmishes
over the use of science in making policy occur in all administrations:
Industries routinely push back against health studies that could justify
stricter pollution rules, for example. And scientists often gripe about
inadequate budgets for their work. But many experts say that current efforts to
challenge research findings go well beyond what has been done previously.
In an article published in
the journal Science last year, Ms. Wagner wrote that some of the Trump
administration’s moves, like a policy to restrict certain academics from the
E.P.A.’s Science Advisory Board or the proposal to limit the types of research
that can be considered by environmental regulators, “mark a sharp departure
with the past.” Rather than isolated battles between political officials and
career experts, she said, these moves are an attempt to legally constrain how
federal agencies use science in the first place.
But others have garnered
little notice despite their significance.
The Interior Department
headquarters in Washington.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The
New York Times
This
year, for instance, the National Park Service’s principal climate change
scientist, Patrick Gonzalez, received a “cease and desist” letter from
supervisors after testifying to Congress about the risks that global warming
posed to national parks.
“I saw
it as attempted intimidation,” said Dr. Gonzalez, who added that he was
speaking in his capacity as an associate adjunct professor at the University
California, Berkeley, a position he also holds. “It’s interference with science
and hinders our work.”
Curtailing
Scientific Programs
One
strategy: eliminate individual research projects not explicitly protected by
Congress.
For
example, just months after Mr. Trump’s election, the Commerce Department disbanded a
15-person scientific committee that had explored how to make National Climate
Assessments, the congressionally mandated studies of the risks of climate
change, more useful to local officials. It also closed its Office of the Chief Economist,
which for decades had conducted wide-ranging research on topics like the
economic effects of natural disasters. Similarly, the Interior Department has
withdrawn funding for its Landscape Conservation Cooperatives, 22 regional
research centers that tackled issues like
habitat loss and wildfire management. While California and Alaska used state
money to keep their centers open, 16 of 22 remain in limbo.
A
Commerce Department official said the climate committee it discontinued had not
produced a report, and highlighted other efforts to promote science, such as a
major upgrade of the nation’s weather models.
An
Interior Department official said the agency’s decisions “are solely based on
the facts and grounded in the law,” and that the agency would continue to
pursue other partnerships to advance conservation science.
Research that potentially
posed an obstacle to Mr. Trump’s promise to expand fossil-fuel production was
halted, too. In 2017, Interior officials canceled a $1 million study by
the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the health
risks of “mountaintop removal” coal mining in places like West Virginia.
Mountaintop
removal is as dramatic as it sounds — a hillside is blasted with explosives and
the remains are excavated — but the health consequences still aren’t fully
understood. The process can kick up coal dust and send heavy metals into
waterways, and a number of studies have suggested links to health problems like
kidney disease and birth defects.
“The industry was pushing
back on these studies,” said Joseph Pizarchik, an Obama-era mining regulator
who commissioned the now-defunct study. “We didn’t know what the answer would
be,” he said, “but we needed to know: Was the government permitting coal mining
that was poisoning people, or not?”
Credit...Brendan
Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
While
coal mining has declined in recent years, satellite data shows that
at least 60 square miles in Appalachia have been newly mined since 2016. “The
study is still as important today as it was five years ago,” Mr. Pizarchik
said.
The
Cost of Lost Research
The
cuts can add up to significant research setbacks.
For
years, the E.P.A. and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
had jointly funded 13 children’s health centers
nationwide that studied, among other things, the effects of
pollution on children’s development. This year, the E.P.A. ended its funding.
At the
University of California, San Francisco, one such center has been studying how industrial
chemicals such as flame retardants in furniture could affect placenta and
fetal development. Key aspects of the research have now stopped.
“The longer we go without
funding, the harder it is to start that research back up,” said Tracey
Woodruff, who directs the center.
In a
statement, the E.P.A. said it anticipated future opportunities to fund
children’s health research.
At the
Department of Agriculture, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced in
June he would relocate two key research agencies to Kansas City from
Washington: The National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a scientific agency
that funds university research on topics like how to breed cattle and corn that
can better tolerate drought conditions, and the Economic Research Service,
whose economists produce studies for policymakers on farming trends, trade and
rural America.
Nearly 600 employees had
less than four months to decide whether to uproot and move. Most couldn’t or
wouldn’t, and two-thirds of those facing transfer left their jobs.
The Department of Agriculture.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
In
August, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, appeared to
celebrate the departures.
“It’s
nearly impossible to fire a federal worker,” he said in videotaped remarks at
a Republican Party gala in South Carolina. “But by simply saying to people,
‘You know what, we’re going to take you outside the bubble, outside the
Beltway, outside this liberal haven of Washington, D.C., and move you out in
the real part of the country,’ and they quit. What a wonderful way to sort of
streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time.”
The
White House declined to comment on Mr. Mulvaney’s speech.
The
exodus has led to upheaval.
At the Economic Research
Service, dozens of planned studies into topics like dairy industry
consolidation and pesticide use have been delayed or disrupted. “You can name
any topic in agriculture and we’ve lost an expert,” said Laura Dodson, an
economist and acting vice president of the union representing agency employees.
The
National Institute of Food and Agriculture manages $1.7 billion in grants that
fund research on issues like food safety or techniques that help farmers
improve their productivity. The staff loss, employees say, has held up hundreds
of millions of dollars in funding, such as planned research into pests and
diseases afflicting grapes, sweet potatoes and fruit trees.
Former
employees say they remain skeptical that the agencies could be repaired
quickly. “It will take 5 to 10 years to rebuild,” said Sonny Ramaswamy, who
until 2018 directed the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Mr.
Perdue said the moves would save money and put the offices closer to farmers.
“We did not undertake these relocations lightly,” he said in a statement. A
Department of Agriculture official added that both agencies were pushing to
continue their work, but acknowledged that some grants could be delayed by
months.
Questioning
the Science Itself
In
addition to shutting down some programs, there have been notable instances
where the administration has challenged established scientific research. Early
on, as it started rolling back regulations on
industry, administration officials began questioning research findings
underpinning those regulations.
In
2017, aides to Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator at the time, told the agency’s economists to
redo an analysis of wetlands protections that had been used to help defend an
Obama-era clean-water rule. Instead of concluding that the protections would
provide more than $500 million in economic benefits, they were told to list the
benefits as unquantifiable, according to Elizabeth Southerland, who retired in
2017 from a 30-year career at the E.P.A., finishing as a senior official in its
water office.
“It’s not unusual for a
new administration to come in and change policy direction,” Dr. Southerland
said. “But typically you would look for new studies and carefully redo the
analysis. Instead they were sending a message that all the economists,
scientists, career staff in the agency were irrelevant.”
Sonny Perdue, the secretary of
Agriculture.Credit...T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York
Times
Michael
Abboud, an E.P.A. spokesman, disputed Dr. Southerland’s account in an emailed
response, saying “It is not true.”
The
E.P.A. is now finalizing a narrower version of the Obama-era water rule, which
in its earlier form had prompted outrage from thousands of farmers and ranchers
across the country who saw it as overly restrictive.
“E.P.A.
under President Trump has worked to put forward the strongest regulations to
protect human health and the environment,” Mr. Abboud said, noting that several
Obama administration rules had been held up in court and needed revision. “As
required by law E.P.A. has always and will continue to use the best available
science when developing rules, regardless of the claims of a few federal
employees.”
Past
administrations have, to varying degrees, disregarded scientific findings that
conflicted with their priorities. In 2011, President Obama’s top health official overruled experts at the Food and Drug
Administration who had concluded that over-the-counter
emergency contraceptives were safe for minors.
But in
the Trump administration, the scope is wider. Many top government positions,
including at the E.P.A. and the Interior Department, are now occupied by former lobbyists connected
to the industries that those agencies oversee.
Scientists and health
experts have singled out two moves they find particularly concerning. Since
2017, the E.P.A. has moved to restrict certain
academics from sitting on its Science Advisory Board, which provides
scrutiny of agency science, and has instead increased the number of appointees
connected with industry.
And, in a potentially
far-reaching move, the E.P.A. has proposed a rule to limit regulators from
using scientific research unless the underlying raw data can be
made public. Industry groups like the Chamber of Commerce have argued that
some agency rules are based on science that can’t be fully scrutinized by
outsiders. But dozens of scientific organizations have warned that
the proposal in its current form could prevent the E.P.A. from considering a
vast array of research on issues like the dangers of air pollution if, for
instance, they are based on confidential health data.
The Commerce Department.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
“The
problem is that rather than allowing agency scientists to use their judgment
and weigh the best available evidence, this could put political constraints on
how science enters the decision-making process in the first place,” said Ms.
Wagner, the University of Texas law professor.
The
E.P.A. says its proposed rule is intended to make the science that underpins
potentially costly regulations more transparent. “By requiring transparency,”
said Mr. Abboud, the agency spokesman, “scientists will be required to publish
hypothesis and experimental data for other scientists to review and discuss,
requiring the science to withstand skepticism and peer review.”
An
Exodus of Expertise
“In the
past, when we had an administration that was not very pro-environment, we could
still just lay low and do our work,” said Betsy Smith, a climate scientist with
more than 20 years of experience at the E.P.A. who in 2017 saw her long-running
study of the effects of climate change on major ports get canceled.
“Now we
feel like the E.P.A. is being run by the fossil fuel industry,” she said. “It
feels like a wholesale attack.”
After
her project was killed, Dr. Smith resigned.
The loss of experienced
scientists can erase years or decades of “institutional memory,” said Robert J.
Kavlock, a toxicologist who retired in October 2017 after working at the E.P.A.
for 40 years, most recently as acting assistant administrator for the agency’s
Office of Research and Development.
His
former office, which researches topics like air pollution and chemical testing,
has lost 250 scientists and technical staff members since Mr. Trump came to
office, while hiring 124. Those who have remained in the office of roughly
1,500 people continue to do their work, Dr. Kavlock said, but are not going out
of their way to promote findings on lightning-rod topics like climate change.
“You
can see that they’re trying not to ruffle any feathers,” Dr. Kavlock said.
The
same can’t be said of Patrick Gonzalez, the National Park Service’s principal
climate change scientist, whose work involves helping national parks protect
against damages from rising temperatures.
In
February, Dr. Gonzalez testified before Congress about
the risks of global warming, saying he was speaking in his capacity as an
associate adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is
also using his Berkeley affiliation to participate as a co-author on a coming
report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body
that synthesizes climate science for world leaders.
But in
March, shortly after testifying, Dr. Gonzalez’s supervisor at the National Park
Service sent the cease-and-desist letter warning him that his Berkeley
affiliation was not separate from his government work and that his actions were
violating agency policy. Dr. Gonzalez said he viewed the letter as an attempt
to deter him from speaking out.
The
Interior Department, asked to comment, said the letter did not indicate an
intent to sanction Dr. Gonzalez and that he was free to speak as a private
citizen.
Dr.
Gonzalez, with the support of Berkeley, continues to warn about the dangers of
climate change and work with the United Nations climate change panel using his
vacation time, and he spoke again to Congress in June. “I’d like to provide a
positive example for other scientists,” he said.
Still, he noted that not
everyone may be in a position to be similarly outspoken. “How many others are
not speaking up?” Dr. Gonzalez said.
Credit...Ting
Shen/Reuters
Brad Plumer is a reporter covering climate
change, energy policy and other environmental issues for The Times’s climate
team. @bradplumer
Coral Davenport covers energy and
environmental policy, with a focus on climate change, from the Washington
bureau. She joined The Times in 2013 and previously worked at Congressional Quarterly,
Politico and National Journal. @CoralMDavenport • Facebook
