Bush Misuses Science

Report Says: Democrats Say Data Are Distorted to Boost Conservative Policies 

RICK WEISS / Washington Post 8aug02

The Bush administration has repeatedly mischaracterized scientific facts to bolster its political agenda in areas ranging from abstinence education and condom use to missile defense, according to a detailed report released yesterday by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

The White House quickly dismissed the report as partisan sniping.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.)

The 40-page document, "Politics and Science in the Bush Administration," was compiled by the minority staff of the House Government Reform Committee's special investigations division. It marks the launch of a new effort by Waxman and others in Congress to highlight simmering anger among scientists and others who believe that President Bush—much more than his predecessors—has been spiking science with politics to justify conservative policies in areas such as reproductive rights, embryo research, energy policy and environmental health.

"The Administration's political interference with science has led to misleading statements by the President, inaccurate responses to Congress, altered web sites, suppressed agency reports, erroneous international communications, and the gagging of scientists," according to the report, posted yesterday at www.politicsandscience.org [Executive Summary in HTML here]. "The subjects involved span a broad range, but they share a common attribute: the beneficiaries of the scientific distortions are important supporters of the President, including social conservatives and powerful industry groups."

White House spokesman Adam Levine said it would take time for the administration to address the specifics of the report. However, he said, "I'm hard-pressed to believe anyone would consider Congressman Waxman an objective arbiter of scientific fact."

Several prestigious scientific journals have editorialized about the Bush administration's dealings in science in recent months, including Science, Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine.

An editor at Science, for example, recently said in print that the administration was injecting politics into arenas of science "once immune to this kind of manipulation."

And the editors of the Lancet noted "growing evidence of explicit vetting of appointees to influential [scientific] panels on the basis of their political or religious opinions" and warned against "any further right-wing incursions" on those panels.

The General Accounting Office has been investigating such allegations since some in Congress asked the agency to do so in September, but it has not released any findings.

Among the purported abuses documented in the report:

• "Performance measures" used to determine the effectiveness of federally funded "abstinence only" sex education programs were altered by the administration in ways that made it easier to say the programs were effective. And information about how to use a condom—along with scientific data showing that sex education does not lead to earlier or increased sexual activity in young people—was removed from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site.
• In testimony before Congress, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton omitted—and in at least one case misstated—federal scientists' findings that Arctic oil drilling could harm wildlife.
• The administration altered a National Cancer Institute Web site in a way that wrongly implied there was good evidence linking abortions to breast cancer.
• The Education Department circulated a memo instructing employees to remove materials from the department's Web site not "consistent with the Administration's philosophy," prompting complaints about censorship from national educational organizations.
• Bush has appointed to key scientific advisory committees numerous people with political, rather than scientific, credentials. For example, his appointee to a presidential AIDS advisory committee, marketing consultant Jerry Thacker, has described homosexuality as a "deathstyle" and referred to AIDS as the "gay plague."

A spokesman for Waxman said the report will be updated on the Web as new examples arise.

source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31318-2003Aug7?language=printer 18aug03