Office of Sci & Technol Policy / OTA

<p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">this is a general term for fed expertise</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/1/17639314/trump-science-adviser-kelvin-droegemeier-ostp" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.vox.com/2018/8/1/17639314/trump-science-adviser-kelvin-droegemeier-ostp</font></a></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">h<span style="font-style: inherit; text-decoration-line: inherit;">w hot is America right now? So hot that</span><span style="font-style: inherit; text-decoration-line: inherit;">&nbsp;</span><a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/president-donald-j-trump-announces-intent-nominate-appoint-personnel-key-administration-posts-16/" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; font-style: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">President Trump</a><span style="font-style: inherit; text-decoration-line: inherit;">&nbsp;</span><span style="font-style: inherit; text-decoration-line: inherit;">picked a science adviser named Kelvin.</span></font></div><div class="c-entry-content " style="font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; padding: 0px; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p id="jTXdFz" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With&nbsp;<a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/18/17561266/summer-2018-heat-wave-japan-texas-weather-health" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">heat waves</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/8/1/17637026/carr-fire-california-heat-wildfire-deaths" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">wildfires</a>&nbsp;scorching the western US, meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier, an expert on extreme weather, has been nominated to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.</font></p><p id="Rht1hd" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If confirmed by the Senate, Droegemeier would end the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/2/14/17012322/trump-ostp-science-adviser-michael-kratsios" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">longest vacancy</a>&nbsp;in the 42-year history of the post. Currently, the highest-ranking science official in the White House is&nbsp;<a href="https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060073811" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">Michael Kratsios</a>, a 31-year-old political science grad who is a deputy assistant at OSTP.</font></p><p id="gah9bI" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kelvin Droegemeier is a great example of nominative determinism — where your name lines up with your job — as Kelvin is the name of a unit on the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.livescience.com/39994-kelvin.html" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">thermodynamic temperature scale</a>&nbsp;(one Kelvin is equal to one degree on the Celsius scale).</font></p><p id="bwQJ1q" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He’s also is a well-respected extreme weather scientist. The 59-year-old is currently the vice president for research at the University of Oklahoma, where he’s researched storm forecasting for 30 years. His&nbsp;<a href="http://kkd.ou.edu/Droegemeier_Full_CV_2018.pdf" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">55-page CV</a>&nbsp;lists dozens of peer-reviewed papers and presentations at scientific meetings (“Identifying key parameters for anticipating tornadogenesis in simulated mesoscale storms using data mining,” reads one title).</font></p><p id="08e0RI" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Previously, he was nominated by Presidents George W. Bush and Obama to serve on the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">National Science Board</a>, which governs the National Science Foundation. He’s also testified as an expert witness in aircraft accidents and founded a company,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.weatherops.com/" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">Weather Decision Technologies Inc.</a></font></p><p id="qeUONq" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Being the president’s science adviser isn’t a job that has precise boundaries. Mostly, it involves consulting the president on science for important policy decisions, like the future of nuclear energy in the United States or how to encourage more technology breakthroughs. The OSTP also coordinates across government, universities, and the private sector to advance the White House’s science agenda.</font></p><p id="mZL1fn" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For climate researchers, the pick was a pleasant&nbsp;</font></p><p id="mZL1fn" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-style: inherit; text-decoration-line: inherit;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">surprise</font></span></p><p id="mZL1fn" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-style: inherit; text-decoration-line: inherit;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">hayoe twwet]</font></span></p><p id="mZL1fn" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-style: inherit; text-decoration-line: inherit;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">some of Trump’s other nominees for top science-related posts in government and some of the other names rumored to have been in the running for OSTP have had far less scientific credibility.</font></span></p><p id="lVNiob" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In April, Trump selected&nbsp;<a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/4/18/17253560/nasa-administrator-jim-bridenstine-confirmation" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">Jim Bridenstine</a>, a Republican Congress member from Oklahoma who hedged on humanity’s role in rising temperatures, to lead NASA.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/stories/1060072945/" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">Kathleen Hartnett White</a>, a member of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, withdrew her nomination to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality in February. She said in a 2016&nbsp;<a href="http://trpshow.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20GOP%20Platform%20is%20Right%20Coal%20is%20Clean%21" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">radio interview</a>&nbsp;that “There’s a real dark side of the kind of paganism, this secular, elite religion, now evidently being global warming.”</font></p><p id="TuPZOf" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Previous potential picks to lead OSTP included emeritus Princeton University physicist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/stories/1060071869/" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">William Happer</a>, who has said, “<a href="https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/stories/1060071869/" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">There is no problem from CO2</a>.” Another rumored nominee was the Yale University computer scientist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/18/david-gelernter-fiercely-anti-intellectual-computer-scientist-is-being-eyed-for-trumps-science-adviser/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2cff16eda022" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">David Gelernter</a>, who downplayed humanity’s influence on global warming.</font></p><p id="ieTsY9" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So science advocacy groups breathed a sigh of relief when the White House announced Droegemeier as the pick Tuesday evening. “Dr. Droegemeier is an extreme weather expert, a knowledge base that is becoming more and more important with climate change loading the dice as extreme weather becomes more prevalent, costly, and deadly,” wrote Michael Halpern, the deputy director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the&nbsp;<a href="https://blog.ucsusa.org/michael-halpern/at-long-last-president-trump-is-expected-to-appoint-a-science-adviser" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">Union of Concerned Scientists</a>.</font></p><p id="JORTEJ" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Droegemeier’s former colleagues say his views on climate change align with those of most scientists. “I’m certain he believes in mainstream climate science,” Rosina Bierbaum, who worked on climate change issues with Droegemeier at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, told&nbsp;<a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nature.com%2Farticles%2Fd41586-018-05862-y%3Futm_source%3Dtwt_nnc%26utm_medium%3Dsocial%26utm_campaign%3Dnaturenews%26sf194640978%3D1&referrer=vox.com" rel="nofollow noopener" target="blank" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">Nature</a>.</font></p><p id="1JrViv" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If he gets the job, Droegemeier may have many opportunities to apply his extreme weather expertise in policymaking. Currently, many parts of the US are experiencing&nbsp;<a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/18/17561266/summer-2018-heat-wave-japan-texas-weather-health" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">extreme heat</a>. That’s led to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/8/1/17637026/carr-fire-california-heat-wildfire-deaths" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">expansive wildfires</a>. The heat is also becoming increasingly&nbsp;<a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/27/17611940/heat-wave-2018-cost-workers-deaths-health-climate-change" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">costly for the economy</a>.</font></p><p id="ji8tjc" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There are other scientific policy concerns that would benefit from a fully staffed OSTP, like the ongoing&nbsp;<a href="https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/7/31/17398914/opioid-epidemic-project-echo-new-mexico-addiction" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">opioid epidemic</a>.</font></p><p id="u4b35P" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But according to John Holdren, who served as science adviser to Obama, the biggest obstacle for Droegemeier may be the president himself. “He will have many challenges in his new post, not [the] least of which that there is no evidence President Trump is interested in science,” he told&nbsp;<a href="https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/stories/1060091787/" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">E&E News</a>.</font></p><p id="EKCH8J" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">His first order of business will be to staff the rest of his office, which experienced&nbsp;<a href="https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/stories/1060058414/" style="text-decoration: inherit; font-weight: 600; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; background-color: transparent !important;">major personnel cuts</a>&nbsp;to its energy and environment division last year.</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/the-trump-administration-has-launched-more-than-100-attacks-on-science-in-unprecedented-assault/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/the-trump-administration-has-launched-more-than-100-attacks-on-science-in-unprecedented-assault/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Trump administration has launched more than 100 attacks on science in unprecedented assault</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[px President Donald Trump holds up a jacket he was given by a guest, Tuesday, March 21, 2017, after signing the S-422 National Aeronautics and Space Administration Transition Authorization Act in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Paul D. Williams)]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Elliott Negin / Independent Media Institute<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>August 19, 2019</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On July 19, President Trump hosted Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins and their families, along with the family of their deceased colleague Neil Armstrong, at a White House event to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Tomorrow will represent 50 years from the time we planted a beautiful American flag on the moon,” Trump said. “And that was an achievement, possibly one of the great, considered one of the great achievements ever.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump’s fractured syntax notwithstanding, the Apollo program was indeed a stunning triumph of federal science, involving more than 34,000 National Aeronautics and Space Administration employees and 375,000 industry and university contractors. It was one of many spectacular achievements by federal and federally funded scientists over the last half-century, such as the creation of the internet, fiber optics and magnetic resonance imaging technology, not to mention the role those scientists played in providing the technical underpinning for health and environmental standards that save lives and protect critical ecosystems and wildlife habitats.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump’s lauding of the Apollo 11 mission rang a particularly discordant note given the lengths to which his administration has gone to destroy federal science by censoring scientific findings, gagging agency scientists and fostering a hostile working environment. Since taking office, the administration has launched more than 100 attacks on science, according to my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists—more than the George W. Bush administration amassed over its two four-year terms.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sidelining Science</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Just a day before Trump’s Apollo photo op, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced it would reject scientific evidence and the recommendation of its own staff scientists by not banning chlorpyrifos, the widely used agricultural pesticide shown to hamper childhood brain development. It was the agency’s second scientifically indefensible chemical-related decision of the year. In April, it overruled the advice of its own scientists who urged the agency to follow the example of 55 other countries in completely banning asbestos, a known carcinogen.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Today’s EPA offers a stark example of the Trump administration’s crusade to dismantle science-based agencies. Nearly 1,600 employees left the EPA during the first year and a half of the EPA administration, while only 400 were hired, according to data obtained by The Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request. Of 1,600 employees who left, at least 260 were scientists, 185 were “environmental protection specialists” and 106 were engineers. The total number of employees at the agency today—14,172—is the lowest in 30 years.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Besides chopping staff, the EPA has dramatically reduced the role of outside science advisers. Last fall, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, disbanded a 20-member scientific advisory committee on particulate matter, failed to convene a similar panel on ozone, and packed a seven-member advisory committee on air quality standards with industry-friendly participants.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The EPA is not the only agency pushing scientists out the door. The same day the EPA made its chlorpyrifos announcement, the U.S. Department of Agricultur<b>e (USDA)</b>announced that nearly two-thirds of 395 Washington, D.C.-based employees in its Economic Research Service, which provides analyses on a range of issues, and National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which oversees $1.7 billion in scientific funding, will quit rather than relocate to Kansas City.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The department’s dubious rationale for moving the Research Service and National Institute is placing researchers closer to farmers and cutting costs, but its ulterior motive is to hollow out their staffs, hindering their ability to carry out their missions. Mick Mulvaney, acting White House chief of staff, acknowledged as much during a speech he gave at an August 2 Republican fundraiser in South Carolina.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“You’ve heard about ‘drain the swamp.’ What you probably haven’t heard is what we are actually doing,” he said. “I don’t know if you saw the news the other day, but the USDA just tried to move, or did move, two offices out of Washington, D.C…. Guess what happened? More than half the people quit…. What a wonderful way to sort of streamline government, and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Capitol Hill Science Defenders</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some members of Congress are fighting back. Late last month, for example, the&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress—a temporary committee with an equal number of Democrats and Republicans—unanimously approved a recommendation to</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"> resurrect the Office of Technology Assessment, a congressional watchdog agency that then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich killed in the mid-1990s.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The select committee’s recommendation comes on the heels of a draft House spending bill for the 2020 fiscal year that includes $6 million to jumpstart the agency, which provided Congress with analyses on a range of topics, from acid rain to climate change to renewable energy, from 1972 to 1995.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Meanwhile, House Democrats and Republicans alike voiced their support for protecting federal science during a recent Science, Space and Technology Committee hearing on scientific integrity. Two dozen federal agencies have adopted scientific integrity policies since 2010, but they are inconsistent and difficult to enforce, so some members of Congress want to codify protections in a law.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Allowing political power or special interests to manipulate or suppress federal science hurts, and hurts all of us,” said&nbsp;<b>New York Rep. Paul Tonko</b>&nbsp;at the July 17 hearing. “It leads to dirtier air, unsafe water, toxic products on our shelves, and chemicals in our homes and environment. And it has driven federal inaction in response to the growing climate crisis.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Earlier this year, Tonko introduced the Scientific Integrity Act, which would guarantee federal scientists the right to share their findings with the public, ensure the accuracy of government science-related communications, and protect scientific research from political interference.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Federal science has taken an unprecedented beating during the Trump administration and remains a long way from its glory days half a century ago when it landed men on the moon. Tonko recognizes that protecting scientific integrity is a critical first step to rebuilding American scientific enterprise and that it deserves bipartisan support.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Scientific integrity is a longstanding concern that transcends any one party or political administration,” Tonko said. “The abuses directed by this president and his top officials have brought a new urgency to the issue, but the fact remains whether a Democrat or Republican sits in the [House] speaker’s chair or the Oval Office, we need strong scientific integrity policies.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This article first appeared on Truthout and was produced in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.</font></div></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/how-congress-got-dumb-on-tech-and-how-it-can-get-smart/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/how-congress-got-dumb-on-tech-and-how-it-can-get-smart/</font></a></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chuck Schumer, one of the most powerful people in Washington,&nbsp;<a title="uses" href="https://www.apnews.com/173927bcc2a04504a59bcfa7dfcda1be" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">uses</a>&nbsp;a flip phone. The kind of phone with a tiny screen and real buttons, designed for making actual phone calls, not writing emails. But then, the Senate minority leader rarely emails, telling the&nbsp;<i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">New York Times&nbsp;</i>a few years ago that he sends about one every four months. In case manufacturers stop making his favorite flip phone, Schumer has stockpiled ten of them.</font></p><div class="p1_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Schumer’s practically a techie compared to Lindsey Graham, though. The chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee told NBC’s&nbsp;<i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Meet the Press</i>&nbsp;in 2015, “I don’t email . . . I’ve never sent one.” The Luddite tendencies extend to other members of Congress. When Senator Richard Shelby needs to write to his staff, he favors handwritten notes. “I’ve been here a while; I’m a little older than y’all,” he told Politico,<i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">&nbsp;</i>by way of justification. When Paul Ryan paid a visit in 2014 to&nbsp;Jim Sensenbrenner, who at the time was a senior member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, he found the congressman tapping out letters on an IBM Selectric II.</font></p><div class="p2_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="alt_ad_block" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="teadsNative" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These old-fashioned habits may be charming coming from your grandparents, but your grandparents aren’t charged with legislating on cryptocurrency, regulating autonomous vehicles, or protecting consumers from data breaches. Members’ technical naïveté goes beyond their choice in phones and onto the floor of Congress. When experts&nbsp;<a title="testified" href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?445771-1/house-panel-explores-benefits-quantum-computing" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">testified</a>&nbsp;before Congress last May about the promise of quantum computing—which could radically accelerate research into everything from pharmaceuticals to machine learning to carbon sequestration—Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger admitted, half-jokingly, to the panel, “I can understand about 50 percent of the things you say.”</font></p><div class="p3_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Google CEO Sundar Pichai&nbsp;<a title="testified" href="https://www.wired.com/story/congress-sundar-pichai-google-ceo-hearing/" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">testified</a>&nbsp;before Congress last December, Texas Representative Ted Poe attempted to grill him on how the company tracks users’ location. “I have an iPhone,” said Poe, who has since retired. “If I move from here and go over there and sit with my Democrat friends . . . does Google track my movement?” Increasingly exasperated at what seemed like Pichai’s evasions, Poe repeatedly asked, “Yes or no?”&nbsp;But, of course, Apple, not Google, manufactures iPhones, and whether or not the company was tracking Poe wasn’t a yes-or-no question. It would depend on which apps he had downloaded, whether his GPS was enabled, and so on. Nailing down how Google collects user data has important policy implications, but by bungling some basic facts about the technology Poe let Pichai off the hook.</font></p><div class="p4_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This lack of tech savvy causes problems well beyond wrangling with the Facebooks and Googles of the world, for the simple reason that tech is baked into all policy areas. Regulators worry that software installed in medical devices could be hacked. Lawyers and activists are concerned about bias in the algorithms used to assess bail. Legislators who want to fight climate change need to know which renewable energy sources are ready for commercialization. But the dearth of expertise hamstrings Congress throughout the entire policy process—from deciding which issues to prioritize, to drafting bills, to exercising oversight.</font></p><div class="p5_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Of course, nobody expects members of Congress to be experts on everything—that’s why they have staff. The problem is that congressional staffers don’t always know much more than their bosses. They, too, need advice from disinterested experts to walk them through the intricacies of technical issues—and for the most part, they’re not getting it. While a recent survey&nbsp;<a title="found" href="https://congressfoundation.org/storage/documents/CMF_Pubs/cmf-state-of-the-congress.pdf" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">found</a>&nbsp;that 81 percent of senior staffers thought that access to “high-quality, nonpartisan, policy expertise within the legislative branch” was “very important,” only 24 percent were “very satisfied” with the current situation.</font></p><div class="p6_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="alt_ad_block" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This wasn’t always the case. From the 1970s through the mid-’90s, Congress had its own think tank to help it legislate on technical issues: the Office of Technology Assessment. But the OTA was killed off in 1995 by then House Speaker Newt Gingrich as part of his&nbsp;<a title="assault" href="https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/junejulyaug-2014/the-big-lobotomy/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">assault</a>&nbsp;on government expertise. Ever since, Congress has struggled to navigate science and technology issues, with occasionally disastrous results.</font></p><div class="p7_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The good news is that efforts to resurrect the agency are under way, with the newly Democratic-controlled House pushing to secure funding for it this year. Even some Republicans and conservative think tanks have warmed to the idea. Getting smart on tech is actually something this Congress could do. In the meantime, another government agency, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), is&nbsp;<a title="growing" href="https://blog.gao.gov/2019/01/29/our-new-science-technology-assessment-and-analytics-team/" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">growing</a>&nbsp;its tech team, too.</font></p><div class="p8_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But the OTA, GAO, or any other three-letter government agency will only fix half the problem of Congress’s tech brain drain. The other half has to do with the overall congressional workforce<b style="">. The Gingrich revolution not only wiped out the OTA</b>; it also decimated congressional staff ranks, and their numbers have never fully recovered. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>That’s a major reason why Congress has become so dysfunctional. </b>Staffers shape what information their bosses get, take meetings with interest groups, and participate in important negotiations. But congressional staff these days tend to be young, low-paid, and thinly spread—and those with technology backgrounds are as uncommon as, well, flip phones. To deal with an ever more technologically complex world, Congress needs a critical mass of staffers who bring science and tech experience to the table.</span></font></p><div class="p9_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="dropcap" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">T</span>he idea that Congress should have its own dedicated corps of STEM nerds goes back to the 1960s. At the time, Washington was pouring more and more research money into everything from supersonic transport to the Apollo space program. Meanwhile, the executive branch was giving itself new agencies to help with tech and science. Congress, however, lagged behind. That asymmetry gave federal agencies the upper hand when they came to the Hill asking for money. Eventually, Congress got fed up. “We are not the rubber stamps of the administrative branch of the government,” said Democratic Representative George Miller during a hearing. So, in 1972, Congress created its own nonpartisan think tank: the Office of Technology Assessment.</font></p><div class="p10_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During its heyday, the small agency conducted research on everything from&nbsp;<a title="artificial hearts" href="https://www.princeton.edu/_{ota/disk3/1982/8232_n.html}" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">artificial hearts</a>&nbsp;to&nbsp;<a title="solar technology" href="https://www.princeton.edu/_{ota/disk3/1981/8124/812403.PDF}" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">solar technology</a>, functioning as a kind of early-warning signal about emerging technologies and what policy options were available to deal with them. After an evenly split bipartisan panel approved the topic, the agency’s in-house team would select and work with top outside experts to produce the reports, which would then undergo peer review. They put the issues in terms that resonated with nonexperts. “You are sitting with your wife in the doctor’s office, waiting to be told what to do next to get your wife pregnant,” read a memorably vivid report on fertility treatments. “You are wondering how bad your sperm are.”</font></p><div class="p11_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lawmakers could also turn to the cadre of OTA wonks for help as they developed policy. As an article in the&nbsp;<i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Federal Times&nbsp;</i>put it, “In a town where unimpeachable sources are oh-so-hard to come by, OTA has managed to secure a position near the top of the list.” It even gained international respect; in an inversion of the usual dynamic, a delegation from the Netherlands came to study the OTA so they could replicate it back home.</font></p><div class="p12_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Congress’s “Defense Against the Dumb,” as one lawmaker called it, played an important behind-the-scenes role on everything from small, uncontroversial bills to landmark legislation. Sometimes it saved lives. When Richard Nixon’s defense secretary James Schlesinger pitched an intercontinental ballistic missile strategy with surprisingly low potential casualty estimates, Congress asked the OTA to run the numbers. The agency found that the Defense Department had made some overly optimistic assumptions, forcing the department to revise its estimate. A succession of OTA studies in the 1980s and ’90s found that mammograms and pap smears, among other preventative treatments, provided large health benefits for relatively low cost—so Congress decided Medicare should cover them. After an OTA report questioned the accuracy of polygraph tests, Congress banned most private employers from using them.</font></p><div class="p13_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It also paid for itself many times over by helping the federal government dodge boondoggles. When the Carter administration wanted to invest $86 billion in synthetic fuels, for example, the OTA found that the technology wouldn’t be a cost-effective alternative. Congress, persuaded in part by those findings, pulled more than $60 billion of the project’s budget, according to former OTA assistant director Peter Blair. (For comparison’s sake, you could multiply the agency’s 1995 budget by 2,000 and still<i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">&nbsp;</i>come in well under $60 billion.)</font></p><div class="p14_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the 1980s, however, the team drew the ire of conservatives by commissioning a report that raised serious doubts about the Reagan administration’s proposed “Star Wars” missile defense system. “The prospect that emerging ‘Star Wars’ technologies, when further developed, will provide a perfect or near-perfect defense system,” concluded the report’s author, Ashton Carter, a physicist who would later serve as President Obama’s defense secretary, “is so remote that it should not serve as the basis of public expectation or national policy.”&nbsp;Anger at this rebuke smoldered in conservative circles for a decade.</font></p><div class="p15_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The chance for revenge finally presented itself in the mid-’90s, when Republicans won a majority in both houses for the first time in forty years. Gingrich ascended to his role as speaker, looking to cut the size of government, centralize power under his own office, and remove any impediments to his “Contract With America” policy<br style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />agenda—especially staff experts who might raise pesky questions. Not only was the OTA unpopular with conservatives, but it also made an easy target: the agency primarily served committee chairs and their staffs, so cutting it wouldn’t directly impact too many lawmakers. Though it still had substantial bipartisan support—one attempt to save it garnered forty-eight Republican votes—Gingrich prevailed, and Congress shrank the agency’s budget to zero. Staff threw a going-away party, according to a former OTA researcher, donning T-shirts that said, “The Librarian of Congress got a new appropriation and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.” Then they gave their furniture and computers to other agencies, and turned out the lights. As one Democratic lawmaker&nbsp;<a title="said" href="https://science.house.gov/news/press-releases/ota-congresss-defense-against-the-dumb-closes-down?1" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">said</a>&nbsp;on the day it closed, “OTA proved to be too smart for a new Congress that is in love with simple answers.”</font></p><div class="p16_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="dropcap" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">R</span>ush Holt is a smart guy. He’s got a PhD in physics from New York University and helped run the largest research facility at Princeton. He served as an arms control expert for the State Department. He’s won&nbsp;<i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Jeopardy</i>&nbsp;five times, even beating IBM’s Watson supercomputer in one matchup. And when he ran for Congress, with no prior experience in public office, he became the first Democrat to win his central New Jersey district in thirty years.</font></p><div class="p17_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Holt got to the Hill in 1999, he discovered an alarming lack of awareness about science and technology. He had worked in Congress as a staffer when the OTA existed, and now that he had the legislator’s pen, he set about trying to bring the agency back. In 2001, he introduced a bill to reestablish the office. It got plenty of cosponsors, but not enough support to pass. He tried again, year after year, with the same results. “Most members of Congress didn’t—and still don’t—know what they’re missing,” he said recently.</font></p><div class="p18_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the meantime, the need for good tech advice only continued to grow. That showed in 2003, when Congress tried to do something about the threat of email spam, which was taking over inboxes. (In 2001, spam made up 7 percent of all email traffic; by December 2003, it was almost 60 percent.) The states had created a patchwork of regulations that cried out for a national solution. Congress could have decided to make spam illegal—just think where we’d be now. Instead, it took a little nibble, targeting one type of spam and leaving the rest untouched, while preempting stronger efforts by some states like California. Rates of spamming actually went&nbsp;<i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">up&nbsp;</i>in the months after the bill, not down. It was so bad that a law review article&nbsp;<a title="speculated" href="https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1257&context=lclr" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">speculated</a>, “Was Congress Actually Trying to Solve the Problem or Add to It?”</font></p><div class="p19_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2006, Holt helped organize a hearing about science advice in the House of Representatives, giving OTA opponents a chance to air their concerns. Enter longtime OTA foe Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who has&nbsp;<a title="claimed" href="https://psmag.com/social-justice/inside-the-mind-of-dana-rohrabacher" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">claimed</a>&nbsp;that climate change is a “fraud” designed to create a global government. During the hearing, Rohrabacher maintained that Congress could go to outside groups for science help. “I operate under the assumption that bureaucracy is the most effective method ever developed that can turn pure energy into solid waste,” he said, further burnishing his science credentials. Still, eventually Holt picked up allies, including a partner across the aisle, Jason Chaffetz. In 2016, the influential Republican began working on a bill to rebrand and revive the agency. But before it got far, he announced he wouldn’t be running for reelection.</font></p><div class="p20_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the meantime, Congress continued to demonstrate its ineptitude on tech. In 2016, after the FBI struggled to gain access to the iPhone data of one of the San Bernardino shooters, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr drafted legislation that effectively required tech companies to build a back door into their encryption. They seemed to be caught flatfooted by vociferous&nbsp;<a title="opposition" href="https://www.wired.com/2016/04/senates-draft-encryption-bill-privacy-nightmare/" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">opposition</a>&nbsp;from tech companies and privacy experts, who pointed out that such a back door could also be exploited by criminal hackers and rogue governments to mess with everything from our cell phones to the electrical grid. This shouldn’t have been a great revelation. Just the year before, fifteen leading computer scientists and security experts had coauthored a widely circulated white paper&nbsp;<a title="calling" href="https://www.schneier.com/academic/paperfiles/paper-keys-under-doormats-CSAIL.pdf" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">calling</a>&nbsp;this kind of back door “unworkable in practice.” “Reading that bill, there’s very little to signal that they spoke to folks with technical expertise,” said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist for the Center for Democracy and Technology. In the wake of sharp criticism, including from more tech-savvy legislators, the bill stalled.</font></p><div class="p21_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Part of the problem was that members and staff didn’t have enough in-house knowledge even to choose which outside experts to consult—a role the OTA used to play. “Staff can get any number of industry lobbyists, or think tanks, or advocacy groups, or even academics to come in and give them opinions, and I think that’s not sufficient,” said Zach Graves, an associate fellow at the right-of-center think tank R Street and the head of policy at Lincoln Network, a conservative tech nonprofit. “A lot of these experts have other motives. Think tanks have donors and ideologies, and having worked in that space for a while, the quality of work is very inconsistent.” The result is a war of experts, each with their own data and diagnosis of the problem.</font></p><div class="p22_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Not knowing who to listen to, members and staffers naturally turn to people they personally know and trust, especially former colleagues. Tech companies understand this, which is why in recent years they have vastly&nbsp;<a title="expanded" href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/03/silicon-valley-politics-lobbying-washington" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">expanded</a>&nbsp;their Washington lobbying operations and filled them with former staffers and administration officials. Of course, talking to lobbyists isn’t all bad—getting the perspective of the industry that will be impacted by a law is important. But if the industry’s representative is also your primary source of information, that’s a problem. When the Senate Intelligence Committee needed to look into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, it commissioned outside groups to analyze vast amounts of social media data. Just weeks after the Senate published the findings, an investigation by the&nbsp;<i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Washington Post</i>&nbsp;<a title="revealed" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/secret-campaign-to-use-russian-inspired-tactics-in-2017-alabama-election-stirs-anxiety-for-democrats/2019/01/06/58803f26-0400-11e9-8186-4ec26a485713_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6b1a84ebe5f5" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">revealed</a>&nbsp;that New Knowledge, a Texas-based research firm that coauthored one of the committee’s reports, had also been hired to support Doug Jones’s successful 2017 race against Roy Moore for an Alabama Senate seat. While New Knowledge’s exact role in the campaign is disputed, according to the&nbsp;<i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Washington Post&nbsp;</i>report, the effort included spreading fake evidence on social media that Russian bots were supporting Moore on Twitter, and creating a Facebook page aimed at persuading Alabama conservatives to write in a different Republican. That firms conducting research on disinformation for Congress were themselves mired in allegations of disinformation suggests that the legislative branch needs a better system for gathering information.</font></p><div class="p23_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="dropcap" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">B</span>y now the evidence that Congress needs stronger in-house capacity is so overwhelming, and the political balance of power has shifted so much, that a revival of the OTA finally seems possible. Dana Rohrabacher, the agency’s most vocal critic, lost his seat last November. Though Rush Holt left Congress in 2015, two of his Democratic allies in the House, Mark Takano and Bill Foster, have taken up the baton. Last year, Takano, supported by Foster, sponsored legislation to bring back a modest version of the OTA that lost by only twenty-three votes, with fifteen Republicans joining Democrats in support. With Democrats having gained forty seats in the midterms, the bill has a much better chance of passing the House this year. If it’s stymied by the Senate, it could be one of the first things Democrats try to pass if they gain control of both houses in 2020.</font></p><div class="p24_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the meantime, the GAO is positioning itself to be part of the solution. The agency’s primary charge is to evaluate government programs and investigate waste and fraud, but in early 2019 it announced that, with a fair amount of bureaucratic reshuffling, it was dramatically growing its tech team. In a political sense, it represents the art of the possible, but whether a team of audit-focused experts can fill Congress’s expertise gap remains to be seen.</font></p><div class="p25_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the end, however, neither a tech-savvy audit team nor a revived OTA would fully solve Congress’s tech problem. Newt Gingrich didn’t just surgically remove the OTA; he took an ax to the entire congressional nervous system. He cut the number of House committee staff—who do much of the legwork of policymaking—by more than a third. He reduced the ranks of the legislative support agencies—the GAO, Congressional Research Service, and Congressional Budget Office—by a quarter. The problem only got worse with time. By 2015, according to the most recent&nbsp;<a title="count" href="https://www.brookings.edu/multi-chapter-report/vital-statistics-on-congress/" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">count</a>&nbsp;of congressional staff by the Brookings Institution, House committee staff were still about 45 percent smaller than they were in 1993, pre-Revolution; GAO was down by 40 percent, and the CRS by about a third.</font></p><div class="p26_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With fewer staffers, the ones who remain take on unrealistically broad policy portfolios. One might be tasked with tracking transportation, defense, and foreign affairs while another has to be ready to make vote recommendations on all things criminal justice, health care, and technology. In addition to being spread thin, staff are overwhelmingly young and underpaid. If you spend a day or two hanging out in congressional office buildings, it won’t surprise you that roughly 40 percent of staffers are under the age of twenty-four. According to an&nbsp;<a title="analysis" href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/13/18139934/congress-intern-pay-ocasio-cortez-living-wage-staff" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">analysis</a>&nbsp;in Vox by two political scientists, junior staffers, like legislative correspondents, make on average a bit less than $29,500. That not only narrows down who can afford to take these jobs in the first place but also means that people don’t tend to stay in them for long. Once they pick up some experience, a higher-paying private-sector or lobbying job awaits.</font></p><div class="p27_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Staffers with technical backgrounds would have the greatest impact aiding a committee, where much of the actual business of Congress takes place. Those staffers tend to be more specialized and earn more—professional<br style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />House committee staff members made a bit less than $96,000 on average in 2015—but that pales in comparison to what someone with technical expertise could be offered by tech companies. It even lags behind the direct competition: the executive branch. To attract top technical talent, at least one executive agency is&nbsp;<a title="listing jobs" href="https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2016/10/tech-unit-stretches-federal-pay-system-recruit-cyber-talent/132332/" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">listing jobs</a>&nbsp;near the top of the government pay scale, which starts well above what these committee staffers make. That may be part of the reason there are so few staffers with technical backgrounds in Congress. Travis Moore, who runs a technology fellowship for Congress, looked into how many of the thousands of full-time congressional staffers have technical training from either academia or industry. He found nine.</font></p><div class="p28_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="dropcap" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">T</span>o really fix its tech problem, Congress needs to fix its staffing problem. The OTA is only a tool. Staff need to have the bandwidth and background to make use of it. “You could have all the reports in the world, but if the customers for those reports aren’t prioritizing utilizing that information, that’s not going to be as useful as it could be,” said Zach Graves, of the Lincoln Network. Staffers are party to situations that no OTA researcher would be. They’re in committee offices when tech lobbyists walk in and try to put the brakes on legislation by gesturing at vague or fictitious unsolvable technicalities. It’s committee staff, not civil servants from the would-be OTA, who are in all of the important budget and legislative negotiations, and it’s staff who can best talk their bosses out of making a technically ill-advised decision.</font></p><div class="p29_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even the most vocal champions of a revived OTA, including superfan Rush Holt, agree that it would be only part of the solution. There also needs to be a critical mass of staffers with some background in science and technology. “If you don’t have anybody in the initial discussions that even recognizes that there is scientific expertise to be sought, then they won’t get it,” Holt said.</font></p><div class="p30_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Committee staffers are bombarded with meeting requests from interest groups, and having even one staffer on hand who is versed in the relevant topic changes the information asymmetry. J. C. Cannon, a former Micro-<br style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />soft program manager who spent a year as a staffer for the House Ways and Means Committee through the TechCongress fellowship program, found himself in this role. “People come in and say how difficult this technology is,” he recalled. “Don’t worry about the details, I’m letting you know it’s just too hard to do.” That could be enough to stall legislation.</font></p><div class="p31_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One issue he worked on was pushing for ID numbers for medical devices, so that when a batch of, say, heart valves are defective, the patients who are using them can be notified. An industry representative paid a visit to the committee office, complaining about how hard it would be to implement the IDs. Cannon started asking about what schema and interfaces they were using. “What you’re proposing sounds like a day of work, and we can talk through that if you like,” he told the representative. According to Cannon, the lobbyist got flustered and quickly left.</font></p><div class="p32_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The problem of staff capacity is showing up in some of Congress’s most important work. In the spring of 2018, House Democrats on the Intelligence Committee who had been investigating Russia’s disinformation tactics decided to release roughly 3,500 Facebook ads bought by Russian agents. Why did they decide to release them? One factor was that they simply didn’t have the committee staff to analyze all that data. “With all the other elements of the Russia investigation, we as a small staff don’t have that capacity,” Adam Schiff, then ranking member of the committee,&nbsp;<a title="told" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/06/i-can-understand-about-50-percent-of-the-things-you-say-how-congress-is-struggling-to-get-smart-on-tech/?utm_term=.30ee4de63274" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">told</a>&nbsp;the&nbsp;<i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Washington Post.&nbsp;</i>They hoped that some independent sleuths would do the work for them.</font></p><div class="p33_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pinning down the exact value of staffers with technical backgrounds is difficult, but a good proxy is the demand for people coming to Congress on science and tech fellowships. The American Association for the Advancement of Science—which Rush Holt now leads—places thirty or more fellows, sponsored by different science organizations, in congressional offices for one-year stints. In recent years, the number of requests for fellows has been double the number of fellows available, according to the AAAS. TechCongress, a similar program run by former congressional staffer Travis Moore, places early- and mid-career technology professionals in personal and committee staffs. This year, the average TechCongress fellow received offers from eight congressional offices, and several senators reached out to fellows to make the pitch themselves, according to Moore. That lawmakers with constitutional control over the federal purse find themselves competing for a handful of privately funded tech experts tells you how out of whack the system has become.</font></p><div class="p34_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A big part of the problem is that people with science and tech expertise can command considerably higher salaries in the private sector. “After a while, it gets hard to resist,” said James Gimbi, a cybersecurity specialist who worked in Senator Rand Paul’s office as a TechCongress fellow. “You know, when some group comes along and offers you two or three times your pay.” Moore said most TechCongress fellows are taking pay cuts, some as much as 70 percent. Congress probably doesn’t need to match Google when it comes to salaries—being able to work at the epicenter of national policy has its own, strong appeal—but whatever the happy medium is, Congress is definitely not there yet.</font></p><div class="p35_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of the reasons the pay problem hasn’t already been fixed is that Congress hasn’t seen it as a political winner. “That’s a bind that we’ve been in for quite a while,” said Bill Foster, one of the OTA champions in the House. “[T]he campaign promise that I’m going to raise staff salaries, it doesn’t really sell well with the electorate.”</font></p><div class="p36_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The politics of congressional staffing, though, are starting to change. Last fall, the GOP-controlled Congress passed, and Donald Trump signed, an appropriations bill that boosted members’ allowances to run their offices. It also commissioned a study on how much Senate staffers make compared to similarly qualified professionals elsewhere, and requested a study on whether Congress has the tech and science advice it needs. In February, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez&nbsp;<a title="raised" href="https://www.rollcall.com/news/alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-call-living-wage-starts-office" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">raised</a>&nbsp;the issue of penurious staff pay when she announced that none of her staff will make less than $52,000 per year. But to achieve higher base pay, Ocasio-Cortez will have to pay her top staffers much less than other offices, maxing out at $80,000. While that egalitarian move means her junior staffers won’t have to work second jobs, it’s the opposite of a solution to the problem of recruiting and retaining staff with science and tech expertise. To do&nbsp;<i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">that</i>,<i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">&nbsp;</i>she and other lawmakers will need to allocate more funds for staffing overall.</font></p><div class="p37_38" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Boosting salaries at the top end of the pay scale is still no lawmaker’s idea of a winning political move. The temptation, as it has been for two decades, will be to kick this problem down the road, for some future Congress to deal with, in favor of addressing bigger, sexier topics that play better in the media and with constituents. But many, if not most, of those impending policy debates—like protecting privacy online, combating climate change, safeguarding the next election from hacking—are precisely the ones Congress is likely to mess up if it doesn’t have the expertise it needs. That’s something we’ll all end up paying for.</font></p><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div><div class="headline-container" style="margin-top: 10px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h1 class="headline h1" style="margin: 10px; padding: 0px; position: relative; line-height: 31px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Trump Administration Word Ban Extends to Other Federal Agencies. Its Ongoing Assault on Science Is Much Worse.</font></h1></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="js-scroll-trigger" data-target="body" data-triggers="render-rebelbar" data-toggle-class="with-floating-shares" data-loaded="true" style="margin-top: 10px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /></span></font><div id="utm_campaign" style="margin-top: 10px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="body js-expandable clearfix js-listicle-body js-update-url" data-elid="2518373473" data-authors="Union of Concerned Scientists" data-headline="The Trump Administration Word Ban Extends to Other Federal Agencies. Its Ongoing Assault on Science Is Much Worse." style="margin: 10px; line-height: 24px;"><div class="body-description"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Michael Halpern</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A word ban extends beyond the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cdc.gov/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Centers for Disease Control and Prevention</a>&nbsp;(CDC), the Washington Post&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/words-banned-at-multiple-hhs-agencies-include-diversity-and-vulnerable/2017/12/16/9fa09250-e29d-11e7-8679-a9728984779c_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-more-top-stories_hhswords-7pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&u" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">reported last night</a>, including at another, unnamed&nbsp;<a href="http://hhs.gov/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">U.S. Department of Health and Human Services</a>&nbsp;(HHS) agency that was told how to talk about the Affordable Care Act, presumably to discourage people from signing up for health care. The directive came from the White House Office of Management and Budget, which coordinates the president's budget proposal and rule-making agenda.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Friday,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cdc-gets-list-of-forbidden-words-fetus-transgender-diversity/2017/12/15/f503837a-e1cf-11e7-89e8-edec16379010_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.357451344f20" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">the Washington Post broke the news</a>, and other outlets confirmed, that CDC officials were prevented from referring to seven words when putting together the agency's budget: vulnerable, entitlement, diversity, transgender, fetus, evidence-based and science-based.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[miss info caroon]
</font><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="">If only the banning of "science-based" and "diversity" was the worst thing the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/donald-trump" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Trump administration</a>&nbsp;has done to science.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Additional terminology guidance given to the State Department suggests that the administration intends to pull funding from science-based HIV/AIDS prevention initiatives that work to<b>&nbsp;promote abstinence-only programs</b>&nbsp;instead, even though peer-reviewed research&nbsp;<a href="http://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(17)30260-4/fulltext" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">consistently finds</a>&nbsp;that abstinence-only programs do not delay sexual activity or change other sexual risk behaviors.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The CDC word ban was widely repudiated by&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/aaas/status/941879122824921089" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">scientists</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/SenJeffMerkley/status/942136932087336961" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">senators</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/cdc-ban-fetus-transgender-experts-alarmed-51837385" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">public health advocates</a>. The issue has attracted enormous attention—<a href="https://twitter.com/cher/status/942332954629599232" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">even from Cher</a>—as emblematic of a morally, scientifically and ethically corrupt style of governing.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In an email to staff last night, CDC Director Brenda Fitzgerald said that the CDC "remains committed to our public health mission as a science and evidence based institution…science is and will remain the foundation of our work."</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet recently, CDC scientists were&nbsp;<a href="https://www.axios.com/cdc-cracks-down-on-communications-with-reporters-2484371851.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">banned from responding to basic data requests from reporters without political approval</a>—a clear violation of the agency's scientific integrity policy.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sidelining Science Since Day One</font></strong></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This starts with words and communication, but it's just the tip of the iceberg.&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Just last week, Interior Sec.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/public-lands-fracking-2516878619.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Ryan Zinke</a>&nbsp;summoned the head of&nbsp;<a href="http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/364994-zinke-reprimanded-park-head-after-climate-tweets" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Joshua Tree National Park to his office for a tongue lashing</a>&nbsp;over tweets the park had sent out referencing climate change. That's right: the park director flew across the country to be reprimanded for a couple of tweets, in order to send a message to all park directors: talking about climate change is verboten.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And oh, if only word choice was the worst action this administration has taken to undermine the use of science in policy-making. They're not just trying to downplay the phrase "evidence-based." They're trying to ditch the whole idea of basing policy on evidence.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In July, we chronicled how&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ucsusa.org/center-science-and-democracy/promoting-scientific-integrity/sidelining-science-from-day-one#.WjaON0zMzUo" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">the Trump administration has sidelined science since day one</a>. And since then the abuses of evidence have continued to flow.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Treasury Secretary claimed that economists were working "around the clock" to come up with analysis justifying the tax bill.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/us/politics/treasury-analysis-tax-bill.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">They were not</a>. The EPA&nbsp;<a href="https://blog.ucsusa.org/michael-halpern/the-epa-science-advisory-board-is-being-compromised-heres-why-that-matters" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">banned scientists who receive EPA grants</a>—the ones the agency has decided do the most promising environmental and public health research—from providing science advice to the agency. The Department of Interior is&nbsp;<a href="https://www.americangeosciences.org/geotimes/23-science-organizations-urge-congress-continue-funding-usgs-library" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">trying to defund and prevent public access to</a>&nbsp;the U.S. Geological Survey library system.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>The White House has no science advisor, and the president's Office of Science and Technology Policy is a ghost town.</b>&nbsp;Numerous political appointees—including the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/12/11/new-cdc-head-faces-questions-about-financial-conflicts-of-interest/?utm_term=.bdb34ff0d9d6" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">CDC director</a>&nbsp;and the&nbsp;<a href="https://blog.ucsusa.org/andrew-rosenberg/conflicts-of-interest-noaas-nominees-accuweather-ceo-barry-myers-and-dr-neil-jacobs-of-panasonic" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">nominee for NOAA administrator</a>—have financial conflicts of interest that&nbsp;<a href="https://blog.ucsusa.org/genna-reed/trump-six-months" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">lead many to question their ability to do the jobs</a>. The administration has shut down studies where it expects it won't like the outcome: on&nbsp;<a href="https://eos.org/articles/major-federal-tropical-research-project-to-cease-7-years-early" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">climate change in the tropics</a>, on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/teen-pregnancy-researchers-regroup-after-trumps-hhs-pulls-funding/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">teen pregnancy prevention</a>&nbsp;and on the&nbsp;<b><a href="http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=8212017" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">health risks of surface coal mining in West Virginia</a>. Science agencies are targeted across the board for severe budget cuts.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An exhaustive list is, quite frankly, impossible. President Trump's attacks on science harm our environment and make all of us sicker and less safe. If the Trump administration won't allow federal agencies to do their job, it's time to ask Congress to step up its game, engage in meaningful oversight and do its job.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><em><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://blog.ucsusa.org/author/michael-halpern#.WjfEaFQ-eTc" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Michael Halpern</a>&nbsp;is an expert on political interference in science and solutions to reduce suppression, manipulation and distortion of government science.</font></em></p><div class="around-the-web" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="around-the-webheadline" style="font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</font></div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; list-style: none;"><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/health/cdc-trump-banned-words.html" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Uproar Over Purported Ban at C.D.C. of Words Like 'Fetus' - The ... ›</font></a></li><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/usda-bans-climate-change-2470565728.html" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Trump Administration's Solution to Climate Change: Ban the Term ›</font></a></li></ul></div></div></div></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">10/14 sued off of sci and technol policy about polar vortex in 2 min, FOIA'd, prsonal opinion of Holdren they say</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">==</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">see bush 43 suppression conrad burns?</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But even as the paper was being discredited, it was causing great</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">excitement in the White House. When<b>&nbsp;Kathie Olsen</b>&nbsp;of the Office of</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Science and Technology Policy forwarded the study to Cooney, he</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">responded with an enthusiastic,&nbsp;<b>"Thanks, Kathie!"</b>&nbsp;Six minutes later,</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">according to internal e-mails, the study was in the hands of Kevin</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">O'Donovan, who served as Cheney's point man on climate.</span>&nbsp;The study</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">also&nbsp;grabbed President Bush's attention, as revealed in an e-mail</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">sent two days later to a high-ranking White House official: "Bob - if</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">you din't [sic] already have, this is the study the President was</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">talking about."</font>

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<p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Associated Press November 14,<b><span style=" background-color: #FFF200;"> 2006</span></b></font></p>

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<p><span style="font-weight: 700;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Environmentalists sue Bush administration over global warming report</font></span>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">by TERENCE CHEA, Associated Press Writer</font>

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<b><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Environmentalists sued the Bush administration for failing to produce a report on global warming's impact on the United States' environment, economy and public health.</font></b>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font>

<b><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Tuesday's lawsuit seeks to compel the U.S. Climate Change Science Program to issue the national assessment, which should contain the most recent scientific data on global warming and projections for its future impacts. The plaintiffs claim the government must complete such a report every four years under the Global Change Research Act of 1990.</font></b>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"Global warming is one of the most serious threats facing humanity today," according to the complaint. Without the report, decision makers and the public "are without one of the most important tools to grapple with this complex, potentially overwhelming and yet all important issue."</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The White House <b>Office of Science and Technology Policy</b>, which was named in the lawsuit, had not received the complaint Tuesday and could not comment on it, said spokesman Ben Fallon.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But Fallon defended the administration's record on combating global warming, pointing to increased funding for alternative energy research and partnerships with other countries.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"We feel very positive about our record on climate change," Fallon said. "The president has been focused on results-driven research and looking for practical ways to address climate change in ways that aren't damaging to the economy."</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Officials at the Climate Change Science Program, also named in the complaint, did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The lawsuit was filed in <b>federal court in San Francisco</b> by the <span style=" background-color: #FFF200;">Center for Biological Diversity</span><span style=" background-color: #FFF200;">, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace.</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The assessment, which plaintiffs allege was due in November 2004, is the "first step in crafting solutions to the devastating consequences of climate change if we don't act now," said Julie Teel, an attorney for the plaintiffs.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Sen. <b>John Kerry</b>, a Massachusetts Democrat and former presidential candidate, who has also been calling on the administration to issue the assessment, expressed support for the lawsuit.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"It's the right time to push Washington to grapple with this issue," Kerry said in a statement. "For too many years, action on global climate change has been stopped dead in its tracks by government foot-dragging, hiding information and smothering science."</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Environmentalists have accused the administration of trying to suppress dissemination of the previous assessment, issued in 2000, which predicted a dramatic rise in catastrophic storms, floods, droughts and heat-related deaths.&nbsp;</font></p>

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<p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">cei</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>bs</b></font>

<font size="4"><font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font><a href="http://cei.org/blog/cei-files-lawsuit-against-office-science-and-technology-policy" class="active" style=" font-weight: 600; text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font color="#000000" face="Times New Roman">CEI Files Lawsuit against Office of Science and Technology Policy</font></a></font></p>

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<div class="blog-post"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span class="authors">By<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><a href="http://cei.org/expert/hans-bader" style="text-decoration: none;">Hans Bader</a></span><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><span class="separator">•</span><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><span class="date">May 5, <b>2014</b></span></font></div>

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<p style=" margin: 1em 0px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute</b><span class="Apple-converted-space" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>&nbsp;</b></span><a href="http://cei.org/legal-briefs/complaint-filed-cei-v-ostp" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>sued</b></a><span class="Apple-converted-space" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>&nbsp;</b></span><b style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)&nbsp;for</b><span class="Apple-converted-space" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>&nbsp;</b></span><a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/5/white-house-sued-over-officials-email-records/" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>flouting</b></a><span class="Apple-converted-space" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>&nbsp;</b></span><b><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">the</span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Freedom of Information Act.</span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> CEI's Chris Horner asked OSTP to produce work-related emails that OSTP's Director, </span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">John Holdren</span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">,&nbsp;stored in an email account at his former employer, the environmental-pressure group&nbsp;Woods Hole Research Center.&nbsp;</span></b></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">OSTP has resisted producing them. (The use of such non-official accounts for agency business frustrates federal open-government laws, and undermines government accountability,&nbsp;since such accounts&nbsp;are generally not searched in response to FOIA or congressional oversight requests seeking work-related communications or agency records. Moreover, the use of email accounts at a former employer that lobbies the federal government gives such pressure groups direct access to and control over public records, including highly&nbsp;sensitive information.)</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">What is ironic about this is that OSTP's Director, soon after taking office, lectured OSTP employees about<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><em>not</em><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>conducting official business using private email accounts, and about the need to forward&nbsp;all work-related&nbsp;communications to their agency&nbsp;email account in order to comply with federal record-keeping laws. (<em>See<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></em>May 10, 2010 Memo from OSTP Director John Holdren to all OSTP staff,<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><i>Subject: Reminder: Compliance with the Federal Records Act and the President’s Ethics Pledge</i>, at 1, available as Exhibit B to the letter<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><a href="http://cei.org/blog/www.citizensforethics.org/page/-/PDFs/Legal/Investigation/Request_for_Investigation_into_White_House_20100628.pdf?nocdn=1" style="text-decoration: none;">at this link</a>.) Apparently, the&nbsp;longer an official is in power, and the less&nbsp;he fears losing power, the less&nbsp;he cares about government transparency and the rule of law.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Meanwhile, OSTP has thumbed its nose at CEI's<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><a href="http://cei.org/legal-briefs/data-quality-act-request-ostp-about-holdrens-polar-vortex-comments" style="text-decoration: none;">request under the Information Quality Act</a><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>that it correct OSTP Director John Holdren's notoriously&nbsp;<a href="http://www.cato.org/blog/hot-air-about-cold-air" style="text-decoration: none;">false</a><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2014/01/08/polar-vortex-explained-2-minutes" style="text-decoration: none;">claim</a>,<a href="http://judithcurry.com/2014/01/07/is-global-warming-causing-the-polar-vortex/" style="text-decoration: none;">criticized</a><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>or disagreed with by<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.cato.org/blog/hot-air-about-cold-air" style="text-decoration: none;">climate</a><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><a href="http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2014/01/does-cold-wave-imply-anything-about.html" style="text-decoration: none;">scientists</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/01/08/we-geeks-polar-vortex-and-extreme-weather" style="text-decoration: none;">that</a><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>global warming is<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><a href="http://cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/matt-vespa/wh-scrambles-blame-polar-vortex-global-warming" style="text-decoration: none;">leading to more severe cold weather</a>. As of the time this blog post was published, OSTP's "Information Quality Guidelines"<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/library/compliance/infoquality" style="text-decoration: none;">website</a><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>continued to falsely claim that "OSTP has received no information quality correction requests. Any future requests will be posted on this page." It so claims&nbsp;even though CEI had submitted its most recent&nbsp;information quality request&nbsp;about a month ago (emailing it on April 13, and faxing it on April 14), and&nbsp;that same week,&nbsp;discussed that request by phone with an OSTP employee, who confirmed receipt of CEI's request, and&nbsp;stated that it would be posted on OSTP's web site.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">OSTP made this false claim on its web site even though it was blatantly wrong at the time it was made: OSTP has received not one, but two CEI data quality correction requests, including a highly-publicized 2003 request that OSTP was sued over and resulted in a correction of OSTP's earlier climate change claims.&nbsp;<em>See<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></em>Chris Mooney,&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0405.mooney.html" style="text-decoration: none;">Paralysis by Analysis</a>: Jim Tozzi's Regulation to End All Regulation</i>, Washington Monthly, May 1, 2004, at 23 ("Last August, the Competitive Enterprise Institute . . . filed suit under the Data Quality Act over a Clinton-era report on global warming, known as the National Assessment of Climate Change. Though the suit was ultimately settled out of court, government lawyers agreed to attach a disclaimer to the report.”).</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">OSTP's recent&nbsp;attempt to&nbsp;evade FOIA is&nbsp;equally disturbing. OSTP&nbsp;first claimed that CEI lawyer Chris Horner's FOIA request was not a FOIA request at all, even though it explicitly cited FOIA and&nbsp;FOIA statutory provisions and regulations. Then it interpreted&nbsp;Chris's request&nbsp;as covering only certain emails already found in Holdren's<em>official</em><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>OSTP email account. The latter contention tortured the English language, while its former contention was legally just wrong: judges have ruled that agencies have to produce records reflecting agency activities, even if they were&nbsp;“neither created by agency employees, nor&nbsp;. . .&nbsp;currently located on agency property."<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><em>Burka v. HHS</em>, 87 F.3d 508, 515 (D.C. Cir. 1996). Here, the records were exchanged with an agency employee -- indeed, the agency's director! -- and&nbsp;recent rulings affirm that FOIA can be used to request agency records, even when they are in&nbsp;an official's private email account.&nbsp;(<em>See, e.g.,<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></em><i>Landmark Legal Foundation v. E.P.A</i>., 2013 WL 4083285, *6 (D.D.C. Aug. 14, 2013) (refusing to dismiss a FOIA lawsuit,&nbsp;because EPA failed to search agency officials'&nbsp;personal email accounts);&nbsp;<em><i>CEI v. EPA,<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></i></em>No. 12-1617, 2014 WL 308093, at *14 (D.D.C. Jan. 29, 2014) (noting that a requester&nbsp;"can simply ask for work-related emails and agency records found in the specific employees’ personal accounts; requesters”&nbsp;need not even identify the non-official email addresses at issue, which&nbsp;requesters may not know)).</font></p>

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<h3 class="r" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: block; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="http://cei.org/blog/cei-files-lawsuit-against-office-science-and-technology-policy" onmousedown="return rwt(this,'','','','1','AFQjCNFLt5eklvv0R3vt2hDFGqC5NCFkOg','','0CCAQFjAA','','',event)" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" color="#000000">CEI Files Lawsuit against Office of Science and Technology<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><b>...</b></font></a></h3>

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<div class="f kv SWb" style="display: block; height: 17px; line-height: 16px; white-space: nowrap;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><cite class="Rm" style="font-style: normal;">cei.org/.../cei-files-lawsuit-against-office-...</cite>

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<div class="crl" data-async-context="res:0;ri:;site:cei.org" data-async-trigger="cra-0" jsaction="crd.tglpop" data-ved="0CCQQ5CswAA" style="cursor: pointer; display: inline-block;">Competitive Enterprise Institute</div>

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<div class="f slp" style="display: block;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="st" style=" line-height: 1.4; word-wrap: break-word;"><span class="f" style="">May 5, 2014 -<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></span>Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><em style=" font-weight: bold; font-style: normal;">sued</em><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>the White House Office of ... Act over a<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><em style=" font-weight: bold; font-style: normal;">Clinton</em>-era report on global warming, known as the National ...<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><em style=" font-weight: bold; font-style: normal;">OSTP</em>first claimed that CEI lawyer<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><em style=" font-weight: bold; font-style: normal;">Chris Horner's</em><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>FOIA request was not a&nbsp;...</span>

</font><div class="_Tib" style=""><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span>Missing:</span><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><s>nstc</s></font></div>

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<h3 class="r" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: block; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="http://cei.org/legal-briefs/complaint-filed-cei-v-ostp" onmousedown="return rwt(this,'','','','2','AFQjCNGP0pz-PfUrV-Cyw51S7eNEPuO92g','','0CCgQFjAB','','',event)" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" color="#000000">Complaint filed in CEI v.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><em style=" font-weight: bold; font-style: normal;">OSTP</em><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>| Competitive Enterprise<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><b>...</b></font></a></h3>

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<div class="f kv SWb" style="display: block; height: 17px; line-height: 16px; white-space: nowrap;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><cite class="Rm" style="font-style: normal;">cei.org/legal.../complaint-filed-cei-v-<b>ostp</b></cite>

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<div class="crl" data-async-context="res:1;ri:;site:cei.org" data-async-trigger="cra-1" jsaction="crd.tglpop" data-ved="0CCwQ5CswAQ" style="cursor: pointer; display: inline-block;">Competitive Enterprise Institute</div>

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<div class="f slp" style="display: block;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="st" style=" line-height: 1.4; word-wrap: break-word;">... filed in CEI v.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><em style=" font-weight: bold; font-style: normal;">OSTP</em>. By Hans Bader,<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><em style=" font-weight: bold; font-style: normal;">Christopher</em><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>C.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><em style=" font-weight: bold; font-style: normal;">Horner</em><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>• May 5, 2014 ... CEI v<em style=" font-weight: bold; font-style: normal;">OSTP</em><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>No 14-765 Complaint FILED re Holdren Non Official Acct FOIA.pdf&nbsp;...</span>

</font><div class="_Tib" style=""><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span>Missing:</span><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><s>clinton</s><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>‎<s>nstc</s></font></div>

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<h3 class="r" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: block; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/08/white-house-science-advisor-john-holdren-sued-over-emails/" onmousedown="return rwt(this,'','','','3','AFQjCNGJxO4DFLnBWBQ1p1voSp5yaWycug','','0CC8QFjAC','','',event)" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" color="#000000">White House Science Advisor John Holdren<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><em style=" font-weight: bold; font-style: normal;">sued</em><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>over emails</font></a></h3>

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<div class="f slp" style="display: block;"><span class="st" style=" line-height: 1.4; word-wrap: break-word;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span class="f" style="">May 8, 2014 -<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></span><em style=" font-weight: bold; font-style: normal;">OSTP</em><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>first claimed that CEI lawyer<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><em style=" font-weight: bold; font-style: normal;">Chris Horner's</em><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>FOIA request was not ..... White House involvement as<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><em style=" font-weight: bold; font-style: normal;">Clinton's</em><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>PCAST advisor regarding the&nbsp;..</font></span></div>

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