Why US scientists fear a second Trump term, and what they are doing about it: Several federal agencies are working to safeguard research, including climate science, from future political meddling.
Why US scientists fear a second Trump term, and what they are doing about it: Several federal agencies are working to safeguard research, including climate science, from future political meddling.
Several federal agencies are working to safeguard research, including climate science, from future political meddling.
The Washington Post has recently started asking people to register in order to access gift links. You can put in a completely made-up email address, as there is no verification of the email address.
This is a real concern. When Stephen Harper was elected in Canada he silenced government scientists, shut down government libraries, and ordered that climate and other research be destroyed. Neo-fascists will burn the country to the ground to push their political agenda.
As soon as repubes step into the office, they will kill NIH and CDC just as a revenge for their dear convict fucking up the Covid response
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Soon after President Biden took office, his administration began imposing scientific integrity policies across the federal government, setting rules that protect research from political interference or manipulation. Many such policies are in place — though research advocates say they aren’t durable because they aren’t enshrined in federal law, and could be undone with new executive actions.
At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where a 2020 investigation found that agency leaders violated its scientific integrity policy after Trump showed a doctored hurricane forecast map, stricter standards took effect in March. A similar policy will soon be extended to the Commerce Department, including to the political appointees whose violations were detailed in the 2020 probe.
At the EPA, the new scientific integrity provision is part of a four-year contract with the agency. The provision ensures that workers’ complaints will be assessed by an independent investigator, rather than a political appointee.
Powell said the Trump administration especially targeted climate researchers at the agency. Trump has called global warming a “hoax,” and during his first year in office, his political appointees barred three EPA scientists from speaking about climate change at a conference in Rhode Island.
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The Interior Department — which manages vast swaths of public land and federal waters and oversees everything from offshore oil drilling to endangered species protections — could come under intense scrutiny in a second Trump administration.
In the interview with “Fox & Friends,” Trump was asked about government programs that he would slash in a second term. “We’re going to do, like, Department of Interior,” he said in response.
In April, the Office of Personnel Management finalized a rule that will allow federal employees to keep their existing job protections and right to due process, including the right to appeal a reassignment or firing. The rule overturns a Trump directive, known as Schedule F, that allowed his administration to force out thousands of career employees by changing their status to at-will workers who could be fired without due process.
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NOAA leaders and observers said the agency is better equipped to withstand the sort of pressure scientists faced when Hurricane Dorian was approaching the U.S. coast in 2019, and Trump used a marker to extend the hurricane forecast cone to include Alabama.
These updates are important because they set “that moral and intellectual compass to remind people where the curbs are in the road,” said Craig McLean, a 40-year veteran of NOAA who served as the agency’s acting chief scientist during the Trump administration.
With such a law in place, “the next president can’t say, ‘No, I don’t care,’” when violations of scientific integrity arise, said Andrew Rosenberg, a former NOAA official and a senior adviser at the Center for Ocean Leadership at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.