https://socialistaction.org/2017/11/27/trumps-war-on-science/
Trump’s war on science
/ 19 hours ago
Dec. 2017 Kathleen White
Texas cattle rancher and climate-change denier Kathleen Hartnett White
was named head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
By CLIFF CONNER
Cliff Conner is currently writing a book entitled “The Tragedy of
American Science.”
How loathsome is the Trump administration? Let me count the ways. On
second thought, let me not—it would take too long. But one important
threat it poses to the United States and the world is to the integrity
of American science. Earlier this year, on Earth Day, April 22, hundreds
of thousands of people responded to that danger by participating in the
March for Science in Washington, D.C., and 600 other cities and towns
across the country. How has American science fared since then?
Many right-wing politicians and public intellectuals are torn between
repugnance for Donald Trump’s truculent ignorance and exuberance at the
prospect that he can help them accomplish their goal of “dismantling the
administrative state.” Trump’s first year in office helped advance their
strategy of destroying public faith in “big government” by discrediting
it. Not only are the Trump administration’s various agencies and cabinet
offices laughably incompetent and ethically compromised; the office of
the presidency itself has forfeited all claim to the respect of
intelligent citizens.
The offensive against “big government” is driven by billionaire donors
who finance right-wing think tanks, political campaigns, and media
outlets. Their single-minded goal is to reduce their taxes and roll back
governmental regulation of their businesses, especially with regard to
environmental and public health protection. Their crusade against
federal regulatory powers entails going to battle against empirical
reality, rationality, knowledge, and expertise—in short, they have
declared war against science.
The deregulation of corporate activities that have compromised the
credibility of American science did not begin with Trump. Nor was it
exclusively a Republican political project; the Carter, Clinton, and
Obama administrations all likewise furthered the deregulation agenda.
It should not be forgotten that many of the environmental rules and
regulations Trump’s team has rescinded were only put in place by Obama
in the closing days of his eight-year tenure as president. All they
accomplished was to provide easy targets for Trump to knock over. The
tawdry assemblage of antiscience policymakers appointed by Trump,
however, amounts to a reductio ad absurdum of the whole process.
The Big Three: Scott Pruitt, Rick Perry, Ryan Zinke
If Trump is Commander-in-Chief of the war against science, its field
commanders are those he has appointed to key scientific posts. A few
examples, beginning with the Big Three of environmental and energy
policy—Scott Pruitt, Rick Perry, and Ryan Zinke—make that clear:
• Scott Pruitt is the very model of an administrator appointed to
undermine the agency he administers. Trump has on numerous occasions
called for the elimination of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Pruitt, as Attorney General of Oklahoma, had sued the EPA thirteen
times, challenging regulations protecting air and water quality. In
choosing Pruitt to lead the agency, Trump’s motives were transparent.
As an opening gambit, Trump instructed Pruitt to rescind the Obama
administration’s Clean Power Plan, which regulated CO2 emissions from
coal-burning power plants. Pruitt, an outspoken climate change denier
with close ties to the fossil-fuel industries, was just the man for the job.
Pruitt systematically weakened the EPA’s scientific capabilities by
purging dozens of members of its scientific advisory committees. In May
2017 he dismissed five of the 18 members of its Board of Scientific
Counsellors and suggested that he might replace them with
representatives of the industries the EPA regulates—for “balance,” of
course. A spokesman for Pruitt declared, “We should have people on this
board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated
community.” In June the agency’s 47-member Science Advisory Board was
likewise vitiated.
• Rick Perry publically proclaimed that he would dismantle the
Department of Energy if he had the authority to do so. He made that
declaration in 2012 while campaigning for a presidential nomination. In
March 2017 he became the Trump administration’s Secretary of Energy,
making him head of the department he had vowed to eliminate.
When he accepted the position, he did not understand what it entailed.
He thought, “he was taking on a role as a global ambassador for the
American oil and gas industry.” Only later was he made aware that as
Secretary of Energy, “he would become the steward of a vast national
security complex he knew almost nothing about, caring for the most
fearsome weapons on the planet, the United States’ nuclear arsenal” (The
New York Times, Jan. 18, 2017).
Among this buffoon’s responsibilities with regard to the nuclear
stockpile, he would be in charge of national laboratories that have been
called the “crown jewels of government science.” The two previous
Secretaries of Energy had been legitimate scientists: Ernest J. Monitz,
chairman of MIT’s physics department, and Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate
in physics.
Perry’s record as a major political voice of climate change denial stems
from his extensive connections to the fossil-fuels industries, from
which as governor of Texas he took more than $14.3 million in campaign
donations. Big Oil and Big Gas were also the primary financial backers
of his two presidential campaigns. At the time of his nomination, Perry
was a member of the board of directors of Energy Transfer Partners, the
company building the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline.
• Ryan Zinke began his tenure as Secretary of the Interior by rolling
back a federal regulation reducing the amount of methane that vents from
natural gas wells. This was the opening shot in a campaign against what
he called “job-killing regulation that is not based on sound
science”—Orwellian doublespeak for the science-based rules that underpin
federal climate policy.
Dec. 2017 Ryan Zinke Bears Ears
Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke tours the Bears Ears National
Monument while deciding how much to decrease the size of its protected
lands.
He followed that up with an order to cancel a study of the health risks
of an environmentally destructive coal-mining practice in which the tops
of mountains are blown off. The study was being conducted by the
National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. The
cancellation was condemned by public-interest environmental groups but
cheered by the National Mining Association.
Zinke proclaimed his intention to oversee “probably the greatest
restructuring in the history of the Department of the Interior.” His
plan would reduce the DOI budget by $1.6 billion and eliminate 4000 jobs
in the department. It also included transferring leading scientists to
positions where their climate-related research would not conflict with
the denialist mantra. Among them were Virginia Burkett and Joel Clement.
Dr. Burkett was reassigned from a position in which she had contributed
to a Nobel Peace Prize–winning report on climate change to an office
under the control of Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt, who, as a former
lobbyist, had sued the DOI. Joel Clement, who had been the DOI’s chief
climate policy expert, was also reassigned, but he did not go quietly.
Instead, he resigned and publicly challenged Zinke’s attempt to silence
and intimidate him, invoking the protections of the whistleblower law.
In his letter of resignation, Clement declared, “If the Trump
administration continues to try to silence experts in science, health
and other fields, many more Americans, and the natural ecosystems upon
which they depend, will be put at risk.”
Pruitt, Perry, and Zinke top the list of industry hacks and global
warming deniers appointed by Trump to positions of influence over
science policy, but several more are worth noting:
• Kathleen Hartnett White was named head of the White House Council on
Environmental Quality, making her Trump’s senior advisor on
environmental policy. She has no scientific credentials but was a
“Distinguished Senior Fellow-in-Residence” at a crackpot libertarian
think tank, the Texas Public Policy Foundation. She once characterized
the scientific consensus on global warming as a “kind of paganism” for
“secular elites,” and denied that CO2 is a pollutant, calling it “the
gas of life on this planet.” She has also called renewable energy
“unreliable and parasitic.”
• William Wehrum—a man who had spent his career challenging the EPA’s
clean air protections—has been chosen to head the EPA office in charge
of ensuring clean air in the United States. As a lawyer and lobbyist
representing polluting industries, Wehrum has sued the EPA at least 77
times on behalf of clients such as the American Petroleum Institute, the
Gas Processors Association, and the American Chemistry Council.
It would be a major task to list all of the potential conflicts of
interests the new director of the Office of Air and Radiation will face
as he rules on matters involving his former clients. One timely example
will have to suffice. One week before his Nov. 9 confirmation by the
Senate, Wehrum was in federal court arguing against Occupational Safety
and Health Administration standards protecting workers from airborne
silica dust. In his oral arguments, he declared: “People are designed to
deal with dust. People are in dusty environments all the time and it
doesn’t kill them.”
• Michael Dourson, Trump’s nominee to head the EPA’s chemical safety
office, would be an ideal poster boy for the corporatization of American
science. The New York Times editorial board explained why his nomination
should be opposed: “Mr. Dourson is a scientist for hire. Dec. 2017
Dourson cartoonA toxicologist and a professor at the University of
Cincinnati, he has a long history of consulting for chemical companies
and conducting studies paid for with industry money. He frequently
decided that the compounds he was evaluating were safe at exposure
levels that are far more dangerous to public health than levels
recommended by the E.P.A., the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention and other agencies. His nomination is enthusiastically
endorsed by the chemical industry” (The New York Times, Oct. 17. 2017).
The EPA triumvirate of Pruitt, Wehrum, and Dourson constitutes a clear
and present danger to public health.
• Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who became head of the Food and Drug
Administration in May 2017, is yet another scientist-for-hire in charge
of a science-based agency. Having made millions of dollars consulting
for and investing in Big Pharma, he is now responsible for regulating
that industry and overseeing the research into the safety of its products.
Gottlieb is a career wheeler-dealer in the drug and health-care
industries, where he has held seats on numerous corporate boards.
GlaxoSmithKline paid him $87,153 as a consultant from January 2016
through February 2017, a period in which he received $3 million in
consulting and retainer fees. At the time of his nomination, he was CEO
of a biotech company named Cell Biotherapy, a partner at a large venture
capital firm, New Enterprise Associates, which speculates on medical
research start-ups, and managing director of banking and brokerage firm
T.R. Wilson & Co.
On top of all that, Gottlieb found time to ideologically justify his
policies as a Resident Fellow at a venerable right-wing think tank, the
American Enterprise Institute. In his writings, he has criticized the
agency he now runs for being too worried about drug safety, complaining
that FDA regulators “prioritize safety over speed” and demand research
studies that “take too long and cost too much.”
As FDA director, Gottlieb will be in a position to facilitate rushing
highly profitable drugs to market. One way he aims to accomplish that is
by cutting back critical Phase III drug safety testing, the clinical
trials large enough to provide trustworthy results.
• Sam Clovis will not be the Department of Agriculture’s top scientist
after all. After accepting the nomination, he withdrew to avoid further
scrutiny of his involvement with Russian agents on behalf of Trump’s
presidential campaign. But the fact that a right-wing talk radio host
and Tea Party activist with no scientific credentials could even be
considered as the chief scientist overseeing the country’s food
production, food safety, and nutrition shows the disdain with which the
Trump administration regards science. It also reveals its disregard for
the law, because the position for which Clovis was nominated is legally
required to be filled by someone chosen “from among distinguished
scientists with specialized training or significant experience in
agricultural research, education, and economics” (U.S. Congress,
H.R.2419, §6971).
• Rebeckah Adcock heads a clandestine “deregulation team” at the
Department of Agriculture. In February 2017, Trump ordered a number of
federal agencies to set up such teams, but has resolutely refused to
identify their members. Investigative reporters for The New York Times
and ProPublica, however, were able to confirm that, as suspected, many
of them are “former employees of industry-financed organizations that
oppose environmental regulations” (The New York Times, Nov. 13, 2017).
Adcock herself was found to be among the worst of the
conflict-of-interest offenders. From 2010 to April 2017, Adcock had been
a lobbyist for the pesticide industry’s main trade group, CropLife
America, which represents agro-giants Syngenta and Monsanto, among
others. By the end of April, she was a top official at the Department of
Agriculture, and by May she was meeting behind closed doors with
CropLife and Syngenta representatives. Their joint mission was to
overturn science-based regulations previously imposed by the Department
of Agriculture to protect farm families, farmworkers, and the public
from the well-established dangers of pesticide use.
• Jim Bridenstine has been nominated to be the top official at one of
the premier scientific agencies of the United States, the National
Aerospace and Space Administration. Although best known for space
exploration, NASA has also played a major role in climate change
research. The agency’s budget request for 2018 projected $1.8 billion
for its Earth Science program.
NASA launches the satellites that measure changes in the Earth’s climate
and ocean temperatures. The data they gather are used by the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other climate researchers all
over the world. Although an estimated one-third of the American economy
relies on such data, Trump has called for deep cuts in funding for
climate research while demagogically dismissing global warming as a “hoax.”
Unlike previous NASA directors, Bridenstine has no qualifications,
educational or otherwise, as a scientist. As a member of the far-right
congressional Freedom Caucus, however, he has sterling credentials as a
climate change denier. Bridenstine is purely a political hatchet man
selected to oversee the reduction of NASA’s research mission.
• Barry Lee Myers, a wealthy businessman, has been chosen to run the
country’s number-one climate research agency, the aforementioned
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In addition to
satellite climate data, the NOAA also oversees fisheries, marine
sanctuaries, and endangered species. Its directors have traditionally
had strong science backgrounds.
Myers’ experience, however, has been corporate rather than scientific;
he is CEO of AccuWeather, a for-profit weather forecasting company. That
creates an obvious conflict of interest because the NOAA oversees the
National Weather Service, which provides high-quality weather forecasts
free of charge.
Myers has clashed with the federal agency in the past, complaining that
it represents “unfair competition” to his company. He supported a bill
sponsored by Senator Rick Santorum that would have barred the National
Weather Service from offering a service “that is or could be provided by
the private sector.”
The unionized National Weather Service employees have vigorously
protested Myers’ appointment. A union rep charged Myers with wanting “to
turn the Weather Service into a taxpayer-funded corporate subsidy of
AccuWeather.”
Myers, like many of Trump’s choices, will oversee a shrinking agency.
The White House’s projected national budget for 2018 slashes NOAA’s
funding by 17%, with particular emphasis on reducing climate and ocean
research.
• Betsy DeVos, a libertarian opponent of public schools, was the Trump
administration’s ideal candidate for Secretary of Education. Her
hostility to public education aligned perfectly with Trump’s belittling
of what he demagogically calls “failing government schools.” In his book
“Great Again, How To Fix Our Crippled America,” he wrote: “A lot of
people believe the department of education should just be eliminated.
Get rid of it. If we don’t eliminate it completely, we certainly need to
cut its power and reach.”
Although holding no qualifications in the field of education, DeVos is
eminently qualified to fulfill Trump’s expectations. Being in charge of
the Department of Education gives her, among other things, a bully
pulpit from which to further demoralize American science education.
For at least the past two decades, DeVos has campaigned for charter
schools as alternatives to public schools, and for publicly funded
voucher schemes to fund private schools. Success in those endeavors
would result in federal taxpayer dollars supporting the anti-Darwinist
and climate-change-denial curricula of religious academies.
The Secretary of Education and her family have furthered that agenda by
donating millions of dollars to organizations like Focus on the Family
and the Family Research Council, which promote creationism and
intelligent design. The Family Research Council, it should be noted, has
been designated as an “anti-LGBT hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law
Center.
DeVos and her husband funnel their philanthropy through their personal
tax shelter, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation, which gave Focus on
the Family $275,000 from 1999 to 2001. From 2001 to 2013 her parents’
Elsa and Edgar Prince Foundation (of which Betsy was a vice president)
gave Focus on the Family $5.2 million and the Family Research Council
$6.2 million. Since the 1970s, the DeVos clan has donated at least $200
million to extreme right-wing think tanks (like the Acton Institute for
the Study of Religion and Liberty) and political action groups (like the
Foundation for Traditional Values) that seek to destroy public education
and undermine the separation of church and state.
Science education in the United States was not in admirable shape before
Trump took office. In 2015 rankings by country of student performance in
mathematics and science, the United States placed 40th in math and 25th
in science on the list of 72 countries. (Source: OECD.) With Betsy DeVos
at the helm of the federal agency responsible for education policy, the
future of American scientific education appears bleak indeed.
The preceding rogue’s gallery depicts a cast of characters in positions
of authority devoted to undermining the integrity of American science.
Their purpose is Robin Hood’s in reverse—to transfer the vast wealth of
the American economy from the households of the many to the coffers of
the few. Already the greatest heist in human history—a robbery of
trillions upon trillions of dollars—its perpetrators are not yet
satisfied. And they are still at large.
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November 27, 2017 in Environment, Health care, Trump / U.S. Government.
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