I'll be on the Patt Morrison show on Southern California Public Radio at 1:40 Pacific time this afternoon appearing with Al Teich of the AAAS to discuss the
guidelines for scientific integrity released by the Obama Administration last week. Here is the KPCCadvance billing:
1:41 – 1:58:30
Separating the politics from the science, Obama administration releases new guidelines
The Bush administration was blasted for tainting science with politics, perhaps most notably in 2006, when scientist James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute, accused White House officials of preventing him from talking about findings that linked carbon emissions to global warming. Now after a long delay, the Obama administration is releasing its guidelines to wall off science from politics. The four-page document prohibits agencies from editing or suppressing reports and says scientists are generally free to speak to journalists and the public about their work. It also instructs agencies to describe both optimistic and pessimistic projections, one guideline experts feel might have helped the administration avoid overly optimistic estimates during this year’s BP oil spill. But not everyone thinks the wall is high enough—some scientists say the guidelines are too general, give too much discretion to the government agencies and leave open the possibility of another Hansen episode. Reading between the lines, what do the guidelines say and are they strict enough to keep science objective?
You can listen in online from the show's homepage.
7 comments:
Scientists in public employ should be no more able to speak to the public or the press unfettered than any other public employee.
Making scientists even more removed from public accounability thany they already are is not going to go well.
I think the whole "keep science objective" idea is worthy of further consideration. There are many scientific disciplines, each with its own set of standards. The reproducible experiment may be the exception rather than the rule. Yet we seldom discuss what this means for "science."
The more interesting question is what should elected officials (politicians) do when scientists openly adopt policy goals that conflict with the agency/administration they work for. If scientists choose to play politics do they still get to claim a professional mantle of immunity in order to deflect/push back in a policy battle?
In my experience as a lobbyist in Clean Air battles, politicians (of both parties)seem to have a better grasp on the line between science and policy than academics. Academics are more likely to believe that their policy preferences are to be afforded the same status as their their credentialed skills.
The real integrity battle is not scientists versus outcome-mandating-anti-scientific politicians--that is an easy enemy to identify and resist in a public forum. The harder struggle is resisting the seduction of activism and the illusion that the policy preferences of scientists are coextensive with their science. And if scientists fail in that regard, are their government employers allowed to notice and respond?
Every year political officials decide how to allocate limited financial resource across a broad spectrum of needs.
Journalists for newspapers like to talk about the existence of firewalls between the advertising and editorial departments.
In practice the firewall doesn't exist, if major advertisers become upset with the 'editorial direction' of a newspaper the advertising is pulled and 'layoffs' occur.
The editors know it and the journalists know it.
The same is true for every US Government Agency.
The idea that there is a firewall between those who approve funding and those that spend the money is delusional.
Roger, I listened to the radio interview. It sounded like for the two examples you cited of perceived misbehavior to scientists, that it wasn't actually an agency that did the wrong action. Did I hear you correctly? If so, have we chosen the age-old bureaucratic norm of punishing the innocent?
-5-Sharon F.
Thanks! Perhaps I was unclear, but my point was exactly that -- that the memo doesn't really address important parts of the issue, which is not in the agencies but in the EOP. For instance, with respect to the oil spill arguably, NOAA did everything right and OMB limited what they could release.
No, you were clear, but not having followed those issues closely it seemed to me to be an unbelievably egregious misplacement of effort to have the EOP shunt the work of "fixing the problem" to the agencies if the original problem was that EOP itself is the problem.
That's why I think it's so important to agree on what the problem was, and what went wrong before we send amall armies of mid-level bureaucrats off in search of a solution. Maybe we need OSTP to explain how current management science was used in developing the guidelines ;)!
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