Analysis: Trump Administration Attacks Science, As Environment Suffers

Cuts are being made at the Energy Department, which conducts extensive research, much of it on climate and environment, at its network of national labs. Above, a scientist examines a specialized catalyst designed to help convert solar energy into fuel. Photo: U.S. Department of Energy/Brookhaven National Laboratory via Flickr Creative Commons (United States government work).

Backgrounder Analysis: Trump Administration Attacks Science, As Environment Suffers

By Joseph A. Davis

Lee Zeldin, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is abolishing the agency’s Office of Research and Development. That’s the plan — although the agency has been secretive about it, and hasn’t quite finished doing it.

And in a Friday news dump in late May, the Trump White House dropped a new executive order requiring all agencies to rewrite their science integrity policies — the ones most of them just rewrote during the Biden administration.

And if you think Trump agencies want the public — or other scientists — to know about the science they do, get this. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has threatened to prohibit government scientists from publishing articles in major medical journals, like The New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet. Kennedy said his agencies could publish their own journals. Except that one of the few government journals, Environmental Health Perspectives (may require subscription), is about to die from lack of funding.

Why end science at the EPA? Why change science integrity policies yet again? How can the EPA make intelligent decisions about obscure toxic chemicals and their health effects without science?

We might well ask. It’s about truth and money. It’s also about ideology and religion. It’s about the power of human ignorance. Power? It’s about clearing the way for falsehood in order to control, silence and defeat political opponents.

Journalists and scientists share a commitment to the truth. At least the best ones do, most of the time. The public, and the environmental scientists who protect them, need to know about threats to human health and the environment that sustains us, if regulators are to protect us. Or if we are to protect ourselves. Journalists help.

 

Science is crucially important to

journalists trying to help the public

understand the facts about the

environmental threats we all face.

 

Science is crucially important to journalists trying to help the public understand the facts about the environmental threats we all face. Scientists can be great sources. Talking to scientists is often necessary to understand the complex and controversial issues going into environmental decisions at the EPA and elsewhere.

For decades, the Society of Environmental Journalists has urged the agency to give reporters free access to agency scientists. But the EPA has mostly resisted letting scientists talk freely to reporters. Freely means without press office minders.

Now the EPA has come up with the ultimate fix: Abolish science itself. Or worse yet: Leave the answers solely in the hands of regulated industries. Even if many laws require the EPA to rely on the best available science. All too often, the only answers available are from scientists paid by industry. Talk about science integrity.

 

Why censor science?

But why the censorship? In the early 1600s, the Church of Rome put Galileo on trial for blabbing about the heliocentric planets. Heresy. In 1925, the Scopes trial tried to censor all this Darwinian monkey business. Even today, there are flat-earthers. And over 25% of Americans still believe astrology influences their lives.

Start with the quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson: “The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.”

Yes indeed. But science is not so much about absolute, unarguable belief in truth as it is a way of discovering truths. A method. In science, the truth is usually tentative.

 

Good science journalists

like error bars. It’s about

knowing what you don’t know.

 

Good science journalists like error bars. It’s about knowing what you don’t know. There is uncertainty — even in a world where journalists must contend with skeptical editors and gimlet-eyed fact-checkers.

But uncertainty can also be a weapon for truth-deniers. It certainly has been for climate change deniers.

In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen told Congress (may require subscription) that climate change was already happening. It was news because during previous decades, scientists had lacked full certainty.

Two things happened within a year. One: Nations of the world formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a huge scientific effort.

Two: Fossil energy companies formed the Global Climate Coalition, which amplified doubt and uncertainty and opposed climate action. The group disbanded in 2001, but the climate denial movement took other forms.

The coalition, in the end, kept the United States out of the Kyoto Treaty. Science denial worked to that extent. So, one reason for science denial is that it works. Or seems to. Short term, anyway. Or could, if we let it.

 

The Trump-era attacks on science

The Trump 2.0 administration has launched a massive effort to destroy science on many fronts. Of course, you can’t have science without scientists at the EPA or anywhere else.

One of the first things the Trump 2.0 administration did at the EPA was to fire most of the science advisers. Many of the committees these nongovernmental experts sit on are required by law. The incoming Biden administration did something similar. Too often, it seems, science conforms to politicians’ biases.

Eliminating scientists’ jobs, grants and contracts also works. By all accounts, Trump cuts to environmental health and science agencies are huge. They say it’s about saving money, but it’s not. If it were, Trump would not be cutting trillions in taxes for billionaires.

 

But the EPA may be the

least of the agencies where

science is being fired.

 

But the EPA may be the least of the agencies where science is being fired. Scientific research to protect health and the environment actually goes on at (or is funded by) many federal agencies beyond the EPA.

Look at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (big cuts), the Food and Drug Administration (disabling cuts) and the U.S. Geological Survey (serious cuts).

Even more science funding (a lot of it environment-related) comes from megabuck agencies like the National Institutes of Health (which contains the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences). Those cuts (may require subscription) were even bigger, because the NIH disburses an even huger amount of science grant money.

Researchers normally submit proposals, which are reviewed and approved by panels of experts in each field. But the Trump cuts were made by non-expert Department of Government Efficiency kids.

The National Science Foundation is another big federal funding agency that includes some environmental science. It got cut bigly. Few people are aware of how much research is done or funded by the Energy Department, which runs a huge network of national labs that often work on climate and environmental issues. More cuts there.

But that’s hardly the end of it.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA study the Earth and its effects on people in many ways — although satellites provide huge perspective. We can’t “save the planet” without the earth sciences. NOAA faces even more cuts: It works on climate change as well as hurricanes.

 

Political battleground

Environmental journalists may recognize that science has been a political battleground for a long time. We already mentioned climate — a subject that draws in chemistry, physics, biology and dozens of earth and other sciences.

The environmental beat is littered with other science issues. Toxic chemicals are another example. The original Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 didn’t work. It did not require companies to test or provide data about chemicals they were putting on the market and was impossible to enforce. The long-awaited 2016 revision of TSCA was better but far from perfect. Companies were still able to subvert it.

It has been the same with the nation’s main pesticide law, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act. The EPA still depends on chemical manufacturers to do the health testing of their own products — a recipe for cheating. Although FIFRA requires health testing data to be submitted to the EPA, it does not allow news media to republish all of this data.

In fact, several environmental laws in addition to FIFRA force the EPA to rely on data or assertions made by regulated parties. That includes the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. That’s hardly a recipe for science integrity. It’s a recipe for conflict of interest. The often-heard argument is that it would be too expensive for the EPA. But firing all the EPA scientists makes that moot.

 

Having scientists at the EPA

does not necessarily solve

the problem, if they have been

‘captured’ by regulated industries.

 

Having scientists at the EPA does not necessarily solve the problem, if they have been “captured” by regulated industries. We learned that from extensive reporting by prizewinning journalist Sharon Lerner. Lerner documented how EPA’s toxicologists fell under the sway of regulated industries.

The whole issue of scientific integrity has never been more important. The SEJournal has dwelled on this for years. (In part, because the EPA’s scientific integrity policy contains its only policy for news media access.) The Society of Environmental Journalists has long urged the EPA to allow reporters unfettered access to its scientists.

The big issue is whether political appointees (or their minions) should be the only ones allowed to speak to the media about EPA science. Different administrations of different political parties have seesawed on this over the years.

Trump’s newest order on scientific integrity at all agencies comes down heavily against true science integrity. It presumes scientists are lying.

“This is the warning shot,” said Gretchen Goldman, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “While couched in science-supporting rhetoric, this executive order reveals how the Trump administration intends to weaponize science to undermine public health and safety protections. We've seen these moves before, and if carried out at federal agencies, this order could leave the nation less responsive to scientific evidence and more exposed to harmful pollution.”

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. who has been writing about the environment since 1976. He writes SEJournal Online's TipSheet, Reporter's Toolbox and Issue Backgrounder, and curates SEJ's weekday news headlines service EJToday and @EJTodayNews. Davis also directs SEJ's Freedom of Information Project and writes the WatchDog opinion column.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 10, No. 22. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.