Here are my remarks as prepared for delivery at 10AM today at the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee. They might still change. They are pretty brief, as I only have 5 minutes. Here is the fully referenced written testimony [pdf], which goes into a lot more detail.


I thank the Chairman and the Committee for the opportunity to offer testimony this morning. I am a professor at the University of Colorado and also director of the university’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. A short biography with more details can be found at the end of my written testimony.

My main point today is that politics and science cannot in practice be separated. Consequently, policies for the production, promotion, and use of information in decision making should be based on the realities of science in politics, and not on the mistaken impression that they can somehow be kept separate. Efforts to separate them will in most case only contribute to the pathological politicization of science.

Imagine the following situation:

The president has in his administration a range of scientific experts on the most important policy issue of the day. However, the president is denied access to that advice by the manipulative actions of one of his primary advisors, who we’ll call “the Admiral.” It turns out that the Admiral has the president’s ear on matters of science but he himself has in fact never had any formal scientific training. He justifies his actions on the belief that United States is engaged in a fundamental religious, political, and economic conflict between good and evil. When two leading government scientists seek to provide advice to the president that differs from that being offered by the Admiral, the Admiral asks the FBI to open investigations of these scientists. One of the scientists subsequently faces hearings to consider his lack of loyalty to the United States and he never again works as a government scientist. The other scientist warns that this case indicated to scientists that

“scientific integrity and frankness in advising government on policy matters of a technical nature can lead to later reprisals against those whose earlier opinions have become unpopular.”

One of the nation’s leading scientist writes that the relationship between government and scientists has been “gravely damaged” because the government has given the impression that it would “exclude anyone who does not conform to the judgment of those who in one way or another have acquired authority.”

The year? 1954
The President? Dwight Eisenhower
The Admiral? Lewis Strauss
The Scientists? Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, and Vannevar Bush

This vignette drawn from Benjamin Green’s excellent new book Eisenhower, Science Advice, and the Nuclear Test-Ban Debate, 1945-1963 (Stanford University Press, 2007), along with the other examples recounted in my written testimony discussing issues of science and politics from presidential administrations from Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton, show that science and politics have always been issues of concern for policy makers. And the subject of today’s hearing indicates that today is no different.

There are however reasons why today’s conflicts are receiving more attention from scholars, political advocates, and politicians.

1. There are an increasing number of important issues which are related to science and technology in some way.
2. Policy makers increasingly invoke expertise to justify a course of action that they advocate.
3. Advocacy groups increasingly rely on experts to justify their favored course of action.
4. Congress, at least for the past six years, and perhaps longer has been derelict in its oversight duties, particularly related to issues of science and technology.
5. Many scientists are increasingly engaging in political advocacy.
6. Some issues of science have become increasingly partisan as some politicians sense that there is political gain to be found such as on stem cells, teaching of evolution, and climate change.
7. The Bush Administration has engaged in hyper-controlling strategies for the management of information.

I’ll now give just several very short vignettes which illustrate how fundamentally science and politics are inter-related.

The language of science in public discussions lends itself to politicization. For instance, The New York Times reported last year that scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had complained because they had been instructed to use the phrase “climate change” rather than the phrase “global warming.” A Republican strategy memo did recommend use of the phrase “climate change” over “global warming”” and environmental groups have long had the opposite preference. Another federal scientist, at NOAA, described how he was instructed by superiors not to use the word “Kyoto” or “climate change.”

To cite another example, several years ago the Union of Concerned Scientists, as part of its advocacy campaign on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, recommended the use of the word “harbinger” to describe current climate events that may become more frequent with future global warming. Subsequently scientists at NOAA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Polar Bear Project began to use the phrase in their public communication in concert with advocacy groups like Greenpeace. The term has also appeared in official government press releases. Policy makers and their staff are of course intimately familiar with these dynamics : we have just recently seen them in practice as Republicans and Democrats have battled over framing President Bush’s proposed troop increases in Iraq as a “surge” or as an “escalation.”

An example of how easy it is to misrepresent science in a political setting, consider the memorandum prepared last week by the majority staff of this Committee to provide background information on this hearing. The memorandum states, quite correctly, that “a consensus has emerged on the basic science of global warming.” It then goes on to assert that:

“. . . recently published studies have suggested that the impacts [of global warming] include increases in the intensity of hurricanes and tropical storms . . ..”

It supports this claim by citing three papers. But what the memorandum does not relate is that authors of each of the three cited studies recently participated with about 120 experts from around the world to prepare a consensus statement under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) which concluded that “no consensus has been reached on this issue.”

The WMO Statement was subsequently endorsed by the Executive Council of the American Meteorological Society. Thus, the science cited in the Committee memo is incomplete and misleading. Such cherry picking and misrepresentations of science are endemic in political discussions involving science.

What has occurred in the preparation of this memorandum is in microcosm exactly the same sort of thing that we have seen with heavy-handed Bush administration information management strategies which include editing government reports and overbearing management of agency press releases and media contacts with scientists. Inevitably, such ham-handed information management will backfire, because people will notice and demand accountability. This oversight hearing today is good evidence for that.

My written testimony goes into far more detail on issues of press releases, agency media policies, empanelment of federal advisory committees, and other subjects which I would be happy to discuss with you further,

Thank you.