Bush Misuses Science, Report Says
Democrats Say Data Are Distorted to Boost Conservative Policies
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post
EXCERPT:
• The administration altered a National Cancer Institute Web site
in a way that wrongly implied there was good evidence linking
abortions to breast cancer.
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Friday 08 August 2003
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.
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. "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.
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