The Biden administration has opened a wide-ranging investigation of political interference in science-tied policy processes during the Trump era, providing an opportunity for the Biden team to develop a plan of action to help prevent similar abuses of power from unfolding in the future. As summarized by The New York Times, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has “announced… the formation of a task force aimed at identifying past tampering in scientific decisions,” and this task force “will review the effectiveness of policies that were supposed to protect the science that informs policy decisions from inappropriate political influence and develop policies for the future.”
Jane Lubchenco, who serves as deputy director for climate and the environment at the White House office leading the effort, noted how during the Trump era “[we] know that there were blatant attempts to distort, to cherry pick and disregard science — we saw that across multiple agencies.” Now, the Biden team is “ushering in a new era,” she says.
As summarized by the Times, scientists working on federal policy plans have revealed how Trump and his top allies “routinely sidelined researchers who worked on issues the administration disliked, like climate change; disregarded studies that identified serious health risks from certain chemicals; and meddled in scientific decision making, particularly around the response to the Covid-19 pandemic.” In public, of course, Trump also routinely derided science-tied decision-making processes, from his refusal to regularly promote mask-wearing during the pandemic to his insistence at one point that he simply did not believe a report produced by his own administration about the looming impacts of climate change.
Towards the very end of the Trump era, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy was involved in a serious scandal after Trump appointees David Legates and Ryan Maue were involved in the development of papers that cast doubt on climate science and claimed to be copyrighted by the White House science office but were not actually official federal government documents. Dr. Kelvin Droegemeier, who led the office at the time, was “outraged” over the material, according to an office spokeswoman.
Among other questionable points, the papers included an allegation that a “large measure of faith” underlies claims that human activity is driving climate change, but the science to the contrary outlining the human role in climate change isn’t in question. Legates himself wrote in an introduction for the material that the “Office of Science and Technology Policy is pleased to bring you these briefs,” but again — the documents were not actually official government reports. The connection to the White House was presented under false pretenses.
