White House and Scientists

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Rahul Tongia <tongia () andrew cmu edu>
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 12:22:13 -0400
To: dave () farber net
Subject: [IP] White House and Scientists

Dave,

For IP consideration.

An interesting article pointed out by colleagues on how the White House
ignores Science (and scientists).

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0307.thompson.html

Rahul
 tongia () cmu edu



------ End of Forwarded Message
Respond  to           this Article
July/August 2003 

Science Friction 
The growing--and dangerous--divide between scientists and the GOP.

By Nicholas Thompson

Not long ago, President Bush asked a federal agency for evidence to support
a course of action that many believe he had already chosen to take on a
matter of grave national importance that had divided the country. When the
government experts didn't provide the information the president was looking
for, the White House sent them back to hunt for more. The agency returned
with additional raw and highly qualified information, which the president
ran with, announcing his historic decision on national television. Yet the
evidence soon turned out to be illusory, and the entire policy was called
into question. 

Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, you say? Actually, the above scenario
describes Bush's decision-making process on the issue of stem cell research.
In August 2001, Bush was trying to resolve an issue he called "one of the
most profound of our time." Biologists had discovered the potential of human
embryonic stem cells--unspecialized cells that researchers can, in theory,
induce to develop into virtually any type of human tissue. Medical
researchers marveled at the possibility of producing treatments for medical
conditions such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and spinal cord injuries;
religious conservatives quivered at the fact that these cells are derived
from human embryos, either created in a laboratory or discarded from
fertility clinics. Weighing those concerns, Bush announced that he would
allow federal funding for research on 60-plus stem cell lines already taken
from embryos, but that he would prohibit federal funding for research on new
lines. 

Within days, basic inquiries from reporters revealed that there were far
fewer than 60 viable lines. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has so
far confirmed only 11 available lines. What's more, most of the existing
stem cell lines had been nurtured in a growth fluid containing mouse tumor
cells, making the stem cells prone to carrying infections that could highly
complicate human trials. Research was already underway in the summer of 2001
to find an alternative to the mouse feeder cells--research that has since
proven successful. But because these newer clean lines were developed after
Bush's decision, researchers using them are ineligible for federal funding.

At the time of Bush's announcement, most scientists working in the field
knew that although 60 lines might exist in some form somewhere, the number
of robust and usable lines was much lower. Indeed, the NIH had published a
report in July 2001 that explained the potential problems caused by the
mouse feeder cells and estimated the total number of available lines at 30.
Because that initial figure wasn't enough for the administration, according
to Time magazine, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson asked
the NIH to see if more lines "might conceivably exist." When NIH
representatives met with Bush a week before his speech with an estimate of
60 lines scattered around the world in unknown condition, the White House
thought it had what it wanted. In his announcement, Bush proclaimed, without
qualification, that there were "more than 60 genetically diverse stem cell
lines." 

After his speech, then-White House Counselor Karen Hughes said, "This is an
issue that I think almost everyone who works at the White House, the
president asked them their opinion at some point or another." However, Bush
didn't seek the advice of Rosina Bierbaum, then-director of the White
House's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Hughes claimed that
Bush had consulted other top federal scientists, including former NIH
director Harold Varmus. That was partly true, but the conversation with
Varmus, for example, took place during a few informal minutes at a Yale
graduation ceremony. Later press reports made much of Bush's conversations
with bioethicists Leon Kass and Daniel Callahan. Yet neither is a practicing
scientist, and both were widely known to oppose stem-cell research. Evan
Snyder, director of the stem-cell program at the Burnham Institute in La
Jolla, Calif., says, "I don't think science entered into Bush's decision at
all." 

The administration's stem-cell stand is just one of many examples, from
climate change to abstinence-only sex-education programs, in which the White
House has made policies that defy widely accepted scientific opinion. Why
this administration feels unbound by the consensus of academic scientists
can be gleaned, in part, from a telling anecdote in Nicholas Lemann's recent
New Yorker profile of Karl Rove. When asked by Lemann to define a Democrat,
Bush's chief political strategist replied, "Somebody with a doctorate."
Lemann noted, "This he said with perhaps the suggestion of a smirk."
Fundamentally, much of today's GOP, like Rove, seems to smirkingly equate
academics, including scientists, with liberals.

In this regard, the White House is not necessarily wrong. Most scientists
today do lean Democratic, just as most of the uniformed military votes
Republican--much to the annoyance of Democrats. And like the latter cultural
divide, the former can cause the country real problems. The mutual
incomprehension and distrust between the Pentagon and the Clinton White
House, especially in its early years, led to such debacles as Somalia and
the clash over allowing gays to serve openly in the military.  The Bush
administration's dismissiveness toward scientists could also have serious
consequences, from delaying vital new medical therapies to eroding America's
general lead in science. The Clinton administration quickly felt the sting
of the military's hostility and worked to repair the relationship. It's not
clear, however, that the Bush administration cares to reach out to
scientists--or even knows it has a problem.

Mad Scientists 

The GOP has not always been the anti-science party. Republican Abraham
Lincoln created the National Academy of Sciences in 1863. William McKinley,
a president much admired by Karl Rove, won two presidential victories over
the creationist Democrat William Jennings Bryan, and supported the creation
of the Bureau of Standards, forerunner of today's National Institutes of
Science and Technology. Perhaps the most pro-science president of the last
century was Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former West Point mathematics
and engineering student, and later president of Columbia University.
Eisenhower established the post of White House science adviser, allowed top
researchers to wander in and out of the West Wing, and oversaw such critical
scientific advances as the development of the U2 spy plane and federally
funded programs to put more science teachers in public schools. At one
point, he even said that he wanted to foster an attitude in America toward
science that paralleled the country's embrace of competitive sports.
Scientists returned the affection, leaning slightly in favor of the GOP in
the 1960 election. 

The split between the GOP and the scientific community began during the
administration of Richard Nixon. In the late 1960s and early 1970s,
protests against the Vietnam War captured the sympathy of the liberal
academic community, including many scientists, whose opposition to the war
turned them against Nixon. The president characteristically lashed back and,
in 1973, abolished the entire White House science advisory team by executive
order, fuming that they were all Democrats. Later, he was caught ranting on
one of his tapes about a push, led by his science adviser, to spend more
money on scientific research in the crucial electoral state of California.
Nixon complained, "Their only argument is that we're going to lose the
support of the scientific community. We will never have their support." The
GOP further alienated scientists with its "Southern strategy," an effort to
broaden the party's appeal to white conservative Southerners. Many
scientists were turned off by the increasing evangelical slant of
Republicans and what many saw as coded appeals to white racists.

Scientists also tended to agree with Democrats' increasingly
pro-environmental and consumer-protection stances, movements which both
originated in academia. Gradually, as John Judis and Ruy Teixeira show in
their recent book The Emerging Democratic Majority, professionals, the group
of highly skilled workers that includes scientists, moved from the
Republican camp to the Democratic. Yet that transition took a while, in
large part because most professionals were still fiscally conservative, few
sided with pro-union Democrats, and the Republican Party had not yet been
overtaken by its more socially conservative factions. In the mid 1970s, for
example, Republican President Gerald Ford showed a moderate streak while in
the White House and reinstated the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Ronald Reagan oversaw a widening gulf between the Republican Party and
academic scientists. During the 1980 campaign, he refused to endorse
evolution, a touchstone issue among scientists, saying, "Well, [evolution]
is a theory--it is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been
challenged in the world of science and is not yet believed in the scientific
community to be as infallible as it was once believed."  Though he
aggressively funded research for military development, he alienated many in
academia with his rush to build a missile defense system that most
scientists thought unworkable.

George H.W. Bush tried to walk the tightrope. He pushed the Human Genome
Project forward and elevated the position of chief science adviser from a
special assistant to assistant. Yet he served during an acrimonious public
debate about global warming, an issue that drove a wedge between academic
scientists and the interests of the oil and gas industry--an increasingly
powerful ally of the GOP. He generally sided with the oil industry and
dismissed environmentalists' appeals for the most costly reforms. Yet he
also tried to appease moderates by signing the landmark Framework Convention
on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro and helping pass the Clean Air Act,
which aimed to reduce smog and acid rain. In the end, his compromising did
him little good; environmentalists attacked him, and his rapprochement with
liberal academic elites won him few friends with social conservatives. Bush
faced a surprisingly tough primary challenge from Pat Buchanan in the 1992
election campaign, saw his support among evangelicals in the general
election decline compared with 1988, and lost to the Democratic underdog
Bill Clinton. 

Newt Gingrich didn't make the same mistakes. When he became the House
Speaker in 1995, Gingrich worked vigorously to cut budgets in areas with
Democratic constituents--and he knew that by the time he came to office most
scientists were supporting Democrats. The speaker took aim at research
organizations such as the U.S. Geological Survey and National Biological
Survey and dismissed action on global warming. He even abolished the
Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, which served as the main
scientific research arm of Capitol Hill. Gingrich claimed that OTA was too
slow to keep up with congressional debates; agency defenders argued that the
cut was fueled by partisan dislike of an agency perceived as a Democratic
stronghold. Indeed, several years prior, OTA had published a report harshly
critical of the predominantly GOP-backed missile defense project, the
Strategic Defense Initiative.

By the mid 1990s, the GOP had firmly adopted a new paradigm for dismissing
scientists as liberals. Gingrich believed, as Nixon did, that most
scientists weren't going to support him politically. "Scientists tend to
have an agenda, and it tends to be a liberal political agenda," explains
Gingrich's close associate former Rep. Robert Walker (R-Pa.), the former
chairman of the House Science Committee. In 1995, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher
(R-Calif.), then-chairman of the House committee dealing with global
warming, called climate change a "liberal claptrap." In interviews with The
Washington Post in 2001, Texas Republican Tom DeLay dismissed evolution as
unproven, said that we shouldn't need an EPA because "God charges us to be
good stewards of the Earth," and denigrated scientific Nobel Prize winners
as "liberal and extremist."

Ph.D. Phobia 

George W. Bush embodies the modern GOP's attitude toward science. He hails
from a segment of the energy industry that, when it comes to global warming,
considers science an obstacle to growth. He is strongly partisan, deeply
religious, and also tied to evangelical supporters. And, like Reagan, he has
refused to endorse the scientific principle of evolution. During the 2000
campaign, a New York Times reporter asked whether he believed in evolution.
Bush equivocated, leading the Times to write that he "believes the jury is
still out." 

Bush has also learned from his father's experience that siding with
scientists gains him little politically, and often alienates conservatives.
Bush and Rove have tried to woo portions of other groups that traditionally
trend Democratic--steel tariffs for unions, faith-based grants for
African-American ministers--but scientists are different. They aren't a big
voting bloc. They are generally affluent, but not enough so to be major
donors. They are capable of organizing under the auspices of a university to
lobby for specific grants, but they aren't organized politically in a
general way. In short, scientists aren't likely to cause the GOP problems if
they are completely alienated. Scientists have almost never turned
themselves into anything like a political force. Even Al Gore, the
apotheosis of many scientists' political hopes, received little formal
support from them during the 2000 campaign.

Consequently, the White House seems to have pushed scientific concerns down
toward the bottom of its list of priorities. Bush, for instance, has half as
many Ph.D.s in his cabinet as Clinton had two years into his term. Among the
White House inner circle, Condoleezza Rice's doctorate distinguishes her as
much as her race and more than her sex. Consider also the length of time the
administration left top scientific positions vacant. It took 20 months to
choose an FDA director, 14 months to choose an NIH director, and seven
months to choose a White House science adviser for the Office of Science and
Technology Policy. Once Bush had appointed a head of OSTP, he demoted the
rank of the position, moved the office out of the White House, and cut the
number of associate directors from four to two. An OSTP spokeswoman argues
that the administration's decision to move OSTP was inconsequential and that
reducing the number of associate directors was just a way of "reducing the
stovepipes." But geography and staff equal clout in Washington, and
unarguably signal how much the people in power care about what you do.

Moreover, Bush appointed to one of the two associate director positions
Richard Russell, a Hill aide credentialed with only a bachelor's degree in
biology, and let him interview candidates for the job of director. "It
bothers me deeply [that he was given that spot], because I don't think that
he is entirely qualified," says Allen Bromley, George H. W. Bush's science
adviser, who worked for some of his tenure out of prime real estate in the
West Wing of the White House. "To my astonishment, he ended up interviewing
some of the very senior candidates, and he did not do well. The people he
interviewed were not impressed."

Cynical Trials 

When required to seek input from scientists, the administration tends to
actively recruit those few who will bolster the positions it already knows
it wants to support, even if that means defying scientific consensus. As
with Bush's inquiry into stem-cell research, when preparing important policy
decisions, the White House wants scientists to give them validation, not
grief. The administration has stacked hitherto apolitical scientific
advisory committees, and even an ergonomics study section, which is just a
research group and has no policy making role.

Ergonomics became a politicized issue early in Bush's term when he
overturned a Clinton-era rule requiring companies to do more to protect
workers from carpal tunnel syndrome and other similar injuries. Late last
year, the Department of Health and Human Services rejected, without
explanation, three nominees for the Safety and Occupational Health Study
Section who had already been approved by Dana Loomis, the group's chair, but
who also weren't clearly aligned with the administration's position on
ergonomics. Loomis then wrote a letter saying that "The Secretary's office
declined to give reasons for its decision, but they seem ominously clear in
at least one case: one of the rejected nominees is an expert in ergonomics
who has publicly supported a workplace ergonomics standard." Another
nominee, who was accepted, said that she had been called by an HHS official
who wanted to know her views on ergonomics before allowing her on the panel.

The administration has further used these committees as places for religious
conservatives whose political credentials are stronger than their research
ones. For example, on Christmas Eve 2002, Bush appointed David Hager--a
highly controversial doctor who has written that women should use prayer to
reduce the symptoms of PMS--to the FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory
Commission. 

Bush has also taken to unprecedented levels the political vetting of
nominees for advisory committees. When William Miller, a professor of
psychology at the University of New Mexico, was considered as a candidate
for a panel on the National Institute of Drug Abuse, he was asked his views
on abortion, the death penalty, and whether he had voted for Bush. He said
no to the last question and never received a call back. "Not only does the
Bush administration scorn science; it is subjecting appointments to
scientific advisory committees and even study sections to political tests,"
says Donald Kennedy, editor in chief of Science, the community's flagship
publication. 

Control Group Politics

Any administration will be tempted to trumpet the conclusions of science
when they justify actions that are advantageous politically, and to ignore
them when they don't. Democrats, for instance, are more than happy to tout
the scientific consensus that human activity contributes to climate change,
but play down evidence that drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
(which they oppose) probably will have little impact on the caribou there.
But Democrats will only go so far down the path of ignoring scientific
evidence because they don't want to alienate their scientific supporters.
Increasingly, the Republicans feel little such restraint. Hence the Bush
administration's propensity to tout scientific evidence only when it suits
them politically. For instance, though numerous studies have shown the
educational benefits of after-school programs, the Bush administration cited
just one recent report casting doubt on those benefits to justify cutting
federal after-school funding. Meanwhile, the White House has greatly
increased the federal budget for abstinence-only sex education programs
despite a notable lack of evidence that they work to reduce teen pregnancy.
The administration vigorously applies cost-benefit analysis--some of it
rigorous and reasonable--to reduce federal regulations on industry. But when
the National Academy of Sciences concluded that humans are contributing to a
planetary warming and that we face substantial future risks, the White House
initially misled the public about the report and then dramatically
downplayed it. Even now, curious reporters asking the White House about
climate change are sent to a small, and quickly diminishing, group of
scientists who still doubt the causes of global warming. Many scientists
were shocked that the administration had even ordered the report, a
follow-up to a major report from the 2,500-scientist Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, the world's leading climate research committee. Doing
that was like asking a district court to review a Supreme Court decision.

Experts in Exile 

This White House's disinclination to engage the scientific community in
important policy decisions may have serious consequences for the country.
One crucial issue that Congress and the Bush administration will likely have
to confront before Bush leaves office is human cloning. Researchers
distinguish between "reproductive cloning," which most scientists abhor, and
"therapeutic cloning," which may someday allow researchers to use stem cells
from a patient's cloned embryo to grow replacement bone marrow, liver cells,
or other organs, and which most scientists favor. When the President's
Council on Bioethics voted on recommendations for the president, every
single practicing scientist voted for moving therapeutic cloning forward.
Bush, however, decided differently, supporting instead a bill sponsored by
Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) to ban all forms of embryonic cloning.

John Marburger, the president's current scientific adviser--a longtime
Democrat who says that he has good relations with Bush and is proud of the
administration's science record--wrote in an email statement which barely
conceals his own opinion: "As for my views on cloning, let me put it this
way. The president's position--which is to ban all cloning--was made for a
number of ethical reasons, and I do know that he had the best, most
up-to-date science before him when he made that decision." Jack Gibbons, a
former head of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, calls
Bush's proposed ban "an attempt to throttle science, not to govern
technology." Harold Varmus, the former NIH director, believes that "this is
the first time that the [federal] government has ever tried to criminalize
science." 

Another potentially costly decision is the Bush administration's
post-September 11 restrictions on the ability of foreign scientists to
immigrate to the United States--restrictions which many scientists argue go
far beyond reasonable precautions to keep out terrorists. In December 2002,
the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering, and
the Institute of Medicine issued a statement complaining that "recent
efforts by our government to constrain the flow of international visitors in
the name of national security are having serious unintended consequences for
American science, engineering and medicine." Indeed, MIT recently abandoned
a major artificial-intelligence research project because the school couldn't
find enough graduate students who weren't foreigners and who could thus
clear new security regulations.

Unscientific Method

Like Gingrich, Bush favors investments in scientific research for the
military, health care, and other areas that garner strong public and
industry support. Indeed, the White House quickly points to such funding
increases whenever its attitude toward science is questioned. But for an
administration that has boosted spending in a great number of areas, more
money for science is less telling than how the Bush administration acts when
specific items on its agenda collide with scientific evidence or research
needs. In almost all of those cases, the scientists get tuned out.

Ignoring expert opinion on matters of science may never cause the
administration the kind of political grief it is now suffering over its WMD
Iraq policy. But neither is it some benign bit of anti-elitist bias.
American government has a history of investing in the capabilities and
trusting the judgments of its scientific community--a legacy that has
brought us sustained economic progress and unquestioned scientific
leadership within the global intellectual community. For the short-term
political profits that come with looking like an elite-dismissing friend of
the everyman, the Bush administration has put that proud, dynamic history at
real risk. 

Nicholas Thompson is a Washington Monthly contributing editor.

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