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March/April 2004

Knowledge of scientific results now endangered by OMB plan

by Charles Davis

What you think about the politicization of science might depend to some extent on your political ideology. Regardless, what once was an esoteric science story has morphed into a story of global importance to us all. Reporters looking for a national story to localize are being handed a beauty of a White House proposal that could limit the access of reporters and the public to scientific information about environmental health risks. It is beginning to attract the nation's attention.

In August 2003, the White House Office of Management and Budget floated a proposal to centralize under OMB the "peer review" of science by almost all government agencies. Read carefully,it is clear that the proposal allows for limiting disclosure of scientific results if OMB raises objections.

The OMB Bulletin, which carries the force of law for executive branch agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, and the Interior Department, is an interpretation of authority claimed by the White House under the Data Quality Act. The Society of Environmental Journalists, which has been sounding the alarm in its excellent e-mail newsletter, reports that OMB, joined by the usual assortment of conservative and business groups, has claimed the Data Quality Act gives them authority to prevent "dissemination" of inaccurate information, although SEJ quite rightly points out that the law, still untested in the courts, does not define this term.

Beneath this seemingly arcane law lie some real power politics. Industry groups long frustrated with the science underlying many of the regulations they so despise support the OMB bulletin. Opposing them are virtually the entire gamut of public interest-minded scientists, scientific groups, environmental groups and right-to-know groups, who read the OMB Bulletin as a how-to on manipulating scientific findings to industry's specifications.

A somewhat bipartisan group of 20 former top federal regulators, including former EPA Administrators Carol Browner and Russell Train, called on OMB to withdraw the proposal and let the National Academy of Sciences handle the issue. As they pointed out, the National Academies long have handled the peer review process, and are less moved by competitive or industry pressures.

Still, many industry chieftains and congressional Republicans favor even more intrusive controls on peer review. The battle lines are drawn; what is missing is the public's knowledge and reaction to what would be a massive, unprecedented change in the way government uses and disseminates information about science seemingly produced in the public interest.

White House control of such information bothers critics who remember the saga of government pronouncements on Lower Manhattan air quality after the 9/11 attacks. In the days immediately afterward,according to a report by EPA's Inspector General, the agency issued public reassurances that the air was safe to breathe – when in fact it lacked evidence that this was so. Moreover, the IG revealed, the White House Council on Environmental Quality had reviewed, censored and doctored EPA statements, to "add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones."

In a column on peer review in the Jan. 6 edition of the Christian Science Monitor, Barton Reppert, a former AP science writer, provides much-needed perspective:

"Playing politics with science is nothing new in Washington, of course. President Nixon shut down his White House science office because he didn't like the advice he was getting on arms control and the supersonic transport. Nevertheless, several science-policy experts argue that no presidency has been more calculating and ideological than the Bush administration in setting political parameters for science. President Bush's blunt rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and his decision restricting stem-cell research are only the most obvious and widely publicized examples of what has become a broader pattern across the administration."

And there is more, much more. Rep. Henry Waxman of California cites 21 separate acts of scientific manipulation, interference or distortion in a House Government Reform Committee report, available at www.house.gov/reform/min/politicsandscience.

As Dr. Anthony Robbins, professor of Public Health at Tufts University School of Medicine, wrote in a Dec.7, 2003, editorial in The Boston Globe:

"The Bush administration seems to have rejected an accepted tenet of American democracy – 'government of the people, by the people, and for the people' – and recast government as a special interest entity that needs to be balanced against other groups in our society. For those of us who have worked in government for most of our scientific lives and who did so to serve the people, it is particularly distressing to learn that the Bush administration sees us a threat to America."

Thus far at least, one of the most radical departures in science in the history of the republic remains a conversation between experts. Much reporting remains to be done. What do scientists, industrialists, educators and other citizens think? What influence peddling is winning the day? What local groups in your community have a stake?

Policy with such huge implications for all of us demands no less than our best work.

Charles Davis is executive director of the Freedom of Information Center, an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and a member of IRE 's First Amendment task force.