Linkmeister

This wasn't supposed to continue

It would appear from this article that too many Bush appointees remain in the upper levels of Federal scientific agencies.

. . . scientists charge that the Obama administration is not doing enough to reverse a culture that they contend allowed officials to interfere with their work and limit their ability to speak out.

"We are getting complaints from government scientists now at the same rate we were during the Bush administration," said Jeffrey Ruch, an activist lawyer who heads an organization representing scientific whistle-blowers.

White House officials, however, said they remained committed to protecting science from interference and that proposed guidelines would be forwarded to Obama in the near future.

But interviews with several scientists — most of whom requested anonymity because they feared retaliation in their jobs — as well as reviews of e-mails provided by Ruch and others show a wide range of complaints during the Obama presidency.

[snip]

"Many of the frustrations scientists had with the last administration continue currently," said Francesca Grifo, the organization's director of scientific integrity. [The Union of Concerned Scientists]

There's an adage that goes like this: A new broom sweeps clean. I can't understand why we're eighteen months into the Obama Administration and there are still political appointees left over from the previous Administration, particularly since that Administration was widely known to put politics ahead of science. When Obama came into office he ordered his people to put rules in place which would guarantee scientific integrity throughout executive agencies.

"proposed guidelines would be forwarded to Obama in the near future," the White House is quoted above. Um, it's taken a year-and-a-half to develop new guidelines? Hell, I've been underemployed for about that long; I could have developed them in one-quarter of that time or less. In fact, here: "All scientific studies undertaken by Federal agencies will be peer-reviewed. If approved after those reviews, the results of those studies will take precedence over any political implications when devising rules using the studies as their basis."

Is that so hard?

Posted by Linkmeister at July 12, 2010 10:56 AM | TrackBack