pureheart

Political Science Why government isn't the best place to look for
unbiased science

Ronald Bailey

"The Bush administration is, to an unprecedented degree, distorting
and manipulating the science meant to assist the formation and
implementation of policy," declared a much ballyhooed report,
Scientific Integrity in Policymaking, issued last week by the Union of
Concerned Scientists (UCS)—a group not so much purely scientific
as dedicatedly liberal-activist. The report was supported by an
accompanying letter signed by 60 leading scientists, including 20
Nobel laureates.

The UCS report offers a litany of alleged abuses of science by the
Bush administration, including ignoring the conclusions of a National
Academy of Sciences National Research Council report on the scientific
evidence for climate change; suppressing a chapter on climate change
from the Environmental Protection Agency's annual report on air
pollution; censoring EPA information on air quality; distorting
information about reproductive health issues; suppressing information
about the danger of airborne bacteria near hog confinement operations;
manipulating science concerning the Endangered Species Act and forest
management; and appointing unqualified and industry-linked scientists
to federal scientific advisory panels.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that the Bush administration
has done all that UCS accuses it of doing. This problem is not
particular to Republican administrations—the very linkage of
government and science almost guarantees some chicanery. Let's recall
the halcyon days of the Clinton administration. In 1993, Princeton
University physicist William Happer was fired from the Department of
Energy because he disagreed with Vice President Al Gore's views on
stratospheric ozone depletion. In 1994, President Bill Clinton
rejected the finding from the Embryo Research Panel of the National
Institutes of Health which declared that the intentional creation of
human embryos for genetic research was ethical. Clinton simply banned
any federal funding for such research.

And in 1993, the EPA used a meta-****ysis of a number of studies to
find that second-hand smoke caused lung cancer in adult non-smokers
and serious respiratory problems in children. That may well be, but
the EPA had to put its thumb on the scales in order to get the result
it wanted. The agency included just 11 out of 30 known studies on
second-hand smoke in its meta-****ysis, and even then found no
increased risk to non-smokers at the 95 percent confidence level that
had been the traditional agency standard. So the agency simply moved
the confidence level from 95 percent to 90 percent in order to get the
result it wanted.

At the time, I talked to a member of the EPA's scientific advisory
board, an epidemiologist working at a leading east coast university
who requested anonymity. He told me that he knew it was inadvisable to
change the confidence level. He didn't oppose the change, though,
because he was afraid he would be kicked off the board if he didn't go
along. "I wanted to remain relevant to the policy process," he
explained. He was also an EPA grant recipient.

The UCS report did not cite a single instance of where science was
"abused" in furtherance of a policy that it favored. To its mind only
political conservatives misuse science. But it's not that quite that
simple. Consider two current cases pending before the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA).

The FDA has delayed approving Plan B contraception even after its
scientific advisory board (SAB) voted 24 to 3 that it could be sold
safely as an over-the-counter medication. Instead of adopting the
SAB's recommendation as it normally does, the FDA decided to delay
approval for 90 days. Why? Because some conservatives in Congress are
afraid that it will encourage ****age promiscuity. (The same argument
could be used to argue for a ban on condoms.) This shows how the FDA
caves in to conservative political pressure, right? Well, the agency
also recently overruled an SAB vote of 9 to 6 declaring that silicone
breast implants were safe—this overruling at least in part
because of pressure exerted by liberal women's groups.

Such politicization of science, in response to ideological pressue
from all directions, is perhaps an inevitable result of government
funding of science. And it is dangerous. As the old adage says:
Everyone's entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. As
Jonathan Rauch outlines in his superb book Kindly Inquisitors: The New
Attacks on Free Thought, liberal societies rest on three pillars:
democracy, whereby we decide who gets to wield legitimate coercive
power; capitalism, whereby we decide who gets what; and liberal
science, whereby we decide what is true. In a liberal secular society,
science is the one standard of truth that most citizens can agree on.
Thus everyone tries to show that "science" supports his or her point
of view, pet project, or preferred policy. This makes the kind of
distortions UCS points out—as well as the kind of distortions it
doesn't point out—inevitable when government funds science.

The UCS's recommendations are naïve, given the above realities of
political science. It recommends that the president issue executive
orders directing an end to efforts to distort science. It declares
that Congress should require that all appointees to scientific panels
meet high professional standards and pass laws that protect against
the domination of such panels by individuals tied to entities with a
vested interest at stake. It also wants Congress to guarantee public
access to government scientific studies and the findings of scientific
advisory panels.

Various steps have already been taken to improve the quality of the
scientific information available to policy makers. For example, in
1997 the EPA set new clean air standards based largely on research
done by Harvard epidemiologists. However, the researchers refused to
release their data to other scientists for review. Making regulatory
policy on the basis of secret science is a bit problematic to say the
least.

This situation provoked Congress to pass the Federal Data Quality Act
(FDQA) in 1999. This act directed the Office of Management and Budget
(OMB) to "issue guidelines...that provide policy and procedural
guidance to federal agencies for ensuring and maximizing the quality,
objectivity, utility, and integrity of information (including
statistical information) disseminated by federal agencies."

Last November, under the FDQA, the OMB issued proposed regulations for
peer review and information quality of agency science. The proposed
rules would require public access to all data used to make regulatory
decisions, and would require that scientific advisors disclose
possible conflicts of interest, including the fact that they are
recipients of grants from interested federal agencies.

Still, some fear that creating an official peer-review process may
actually shield regulatory agencies from legitimate and needed
scrutiny, especially from courts asked to review the adequacy of rule
making processes. As regulatory experts Brian Mannix from the Mercatus
Institute and Jeff Kueter from the Marshall Institute note in their
comments on the proposed OMB peer-review guidelines, "Whether they
involve human medicines, endangered species, air and water quality,
industrial chemicals, transportation safety, or consumer products, the
stakes involved in federal regulatory decisions are enormous. OMB's
periodic reports on the benefits and costs of federal regulation show
that hundreds of billions of dollars turn on these decisions, but it
is also true that lives are at stake, on both sides of the equation.
It is important to get these decisions right, within the limits of
human knowledge and ****ytical and policy development processes."

The UCS report has to admit, "No administration has been above
inserting politics into science from time to time." In the end, the
best we can probably do is to continue to muddle through the great
society-wide peer-review process that encompasses the most biased
activist pamphlets as well as the first drafts of history offered in
our daily newspapers all the way through the formal academic
peer-review process in our leading scientific journals. The UCS report
is best thought of as just another input to that vast ongoing process
of peer review.

Ronald Bailey, Reason's science correspondent, is the editor of Global
Warming and Other Eco Myths (Prima Publishing) and Earth Report 2000:
Revisiting the True State of the Planet(McGraw-Hill). His new book,
Liberation Biology: An Ethical and Scientific Defense of the Biotech
Revolution will be published by Prometheus later this year.

http://www.reason.com/rb/rb030304.shtml