Imagine you’re a scientist tasked with testing children’s lunchboxes for lead residue. (The very same stuff that led to a mass recall of Chinese-made toys last year.) In a simulation of the action of a child handling the lunchbox, you swab one, and discover unacceptably high concentrations of lead in the resulting sample. Red flag, right? Raise the alarms and alert the media — a federal ban or at least a manufacturer’s recall is on its way… right?
Then your supervisor does something peculiar: he asks you what would happen if you kept swabbing the lunchbox. You report that the amount of lead residue on each successive swab would eventually drop to zero, because you would have wiped all the lead off the lunchbox. The supervisor responds:
“Just keep swiping. And when you’ve swiped it down to zero, take an average and use that — because then it will be at a safe level.”
According to Francesca Grifo, director of the Scientific Integrity Program for the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), this actually happened. This revelation came out just yesterday, in an interview with Janet Raloff, the Science & The Public blogger / reporter for Science News.
Janet’s original reporting, while excellent, buries this finding amidst a discussion of a much larger issue — the Obama administration’s near-revocation of the far-reaching power given to the federal agency that was involved in this incident. The agency, known as the Office of Management and the Budget (OMB), which is tasked with assuring that all rules issued by other federal bodies are in accord with budget and white house priorities, was apparently used by the Bush administration not only to edit and quash rules issued by other agencies within the federal government, but also, in some cases, to meddle with scientific findings themselves.
“We’re talking about the falsification, fabrication, suppression and censorship of science. We’re not talking about the role of science in public policy. We’re talking about the way that science is changed on its way to that arena. It’s altering science to arrive at a preconceived outcome,” said Grifo.
How could this have come about? It turns out that in 2002, administration appointee Tommy Thompson, then secretary of Health and Human Services, intervened in the Centers for Disease Control Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention.
According to the UCS, just a few weeks before the committee was to rule “in favor of a more stringent federal standard for lead poisoning, reflecting the latest research linking ever-smaller amounts of lead exposure to developmental problems in children,” Thompson “took the unusual step of rejecting nominees selected by the staff scientists of a federal agency under his own jurisdiction.”
…this was the first time an HHS secretary had ever rejected nominations by the committee or CDC staff. In place of the respected researchers the CDC staff had recommended, Thompson’s office appointed five individuals who were all distinguished by the likelihood that they would oppose tightening the federal lead poisoning standard.
Furthermore, a review by congressional staff members soon uncovered the fact that at least two of the new appointees had financial ties to the lead industry.
The rest of the account of this incident can be found in the UCS’s report on administration interference in this committee — it includes the dismissal of a highly-respected pediatrician and expert on childhood lead poisoning who had sat on the panel for four years, in order to make room for Thompson’s industry-linked appointees. It’s worth a read.
It’s also worth noting that this account of interference in science conducted by the federal government is but one of dozens in what the UCS calls its “A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science.”
Fortunately, the current administration appears to be actively questioning the role of the OMB. According to Raloff:
That’s why a new directive by Barack Obama is so interesting. He’s issuing an executive order, due out tomorrow in the Federal Register, that revokes OMB’s old charter, as pertains to regulatory review. A substitute should be available by summer. Toward that end, the president has, in a separate directive, given the head of OMB, Peter Orszag, 100 days to submit a set of recommendations “for a new Executive Order on federal regulatory review.”
Specifically, the administration has asked the OMB to “address the role of . . . fairness and concern for the interests of future generations.” In short, the administration is trying to re-engineer the OMB so that this sort of meddling won’t be possible in the future, or at leas much less likely. It’s worth reading Raloff’s full analysis of the directive.
It’s perhaps telling that the OMB was re-organized into its current form under the supervision of the Nixon administration.
(Lunchbox image cc Flickr user hyku)
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