Scientific Integrity Culture Remains Even if Policies are Cut
News broke yesterday that the House Oversight Committee wrote letters to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) requesting correspondence about scientific integrity committees. The letters incorrectly characterize scientific integrity policies as a tool the administrative state utilizes to prevent the incoming Trump administration from implementing its agenda. That would only be true if Trump’s agenda is based on suppressing and ignoring scientific evidence. Scientific integrity policies are in place to ensure that science, free from undue political interference, informs critical policy decisions that protect public health and safety. If the Trump administration seeks to undo those policies – it’s a clue to how they view and will treat science.
The dots are connecting
In May of this year, I wrote this piece about a group called the Council to Modernize Governance that wrote a paper detailing a roadmap to undo progress on scientific integrity. The group’s board is led by David Bernhardt, Trump’s former Secretary of Interior, who often sidelined science at the agency. So, I was not surprised to see that roadmap cited by the House Oversight Committee’s letter. It is a signal that The Council to Modernize Governance, and possibly others who want to demolish scientific integrity policies, have the ears of members on the House Oversight Committee.
What does this mean for science-informed decision-making? Unfortunately, it means bad news in our new era.
The House Oversight Committee should play a crucial role in curtailing political attacks on science. If the committee's head and majority think that scientific integrity is a partisan tool to foil the incoming administration’s agenda, that doesn’t bode well for protecting science at federal agencies.
If someone has the ear of the chair of the House Oversight Committee, then they probably have the ear of Trump as well. I suspect we’ll see one or more executive orders from Trump that destroy the significant progress on scientific integrity made over the past four years.
There is hope
We have always known that scientific integrity policies could be undone with a stroke of a pen, so this is not news. It is why we’ve pushed Congress to protect federal agency science by passing the Scientific Integrity Act, a piece of legislation that has bipartisan support. Unfortunately, the bill is still languishing in Congress.
However, the issue is not lost even if scientific integrity policies are undone. A key reason for advocating for the creation of scientific integrity policies and training staff to implement them was to build up the capacity to push back on political interference in science-based decision-making. This culture of scientific integrity isn’t going anywhere. Federal agency staff understand why scientific integrity is essential and know how to identify political interference in science-based decision-making.
Career servants who have served as leaders on scientific integrity are also not going away. While the administration might change their work, scientific integrity officials still hold knowledge that is useful to scientists experiencing political interference.
The Biden-Harris administration also set up a Subcommittee on Scientific Integrity (SOSI) under the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC). We hope that the subcommittee will also remain. Federal scientists and scientific integrity officials who need advice regarding potential violations of scientific integrity can leverage the committee. The committee has the authority to oversee and adjudicate violations of scientific integrity when an agency cannot.
Federal scientists also have several other tools and resources at their disposal, many of which we’ve highlighted in this toolkit.
Agencies, the scientific community has your back
It will take a lot, and I mean a lot, more effort than cutting scientific integrity policies to sideline science. Scientists understand how important it is for policy decisions to be informed by the best available science. We know that the most underserved communities nationwide will bear the brunt of harm if we don’t step up to defend science.
So, the scientific community stands ready to defend science for the public good. We’ll march, we’ll write comments, we’ll testify, we’ll go to court – we’ll do everything we possibly can.
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