"When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service invited Wyatt Hoback and Douglas Leasure late last year to help it assess the threat farming posed to an endangered beetle they spent years studying, the two biologists jumped at the opportunity.

But the job did not turn out as they expected.

The two scientists say that federal wildlife officials pressured them to work on a rushed timeline at odds with what they saw as good science and to meld a meticulous map they made of the insect's habitat with another data set from a completely different region of the country. The pair ended their work with the agency worried the government may use their research to unduly downplay the threat big business poses to an endangered insect, called the American burying beetle."

Dino Grandoni reports for the Washington Post September 3, 2018. [2]