Washington

A prominent Congressman has accused the Bush administration of interfering with US science to such an extent that it is threatening public trust in both science and government.

Henry Waxman (Democrat, California) says that the administration has blocked the dissemination of scientific information, interfered with research results or sought undue influence in the composition of advisory panels, in its handling of a range of issues including AIDS and climate change.

On 7 August, Waxman's staff released a 33-page report, Politics and Science in the Bush Administration, detailing claims that President George Bush and his officials were improperly involving themselves in a variety of aspects of the scientific process.

The report covers allegations of interference at agencies including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency. The report alleges that most of this has catered to a conservative or pro-business agenda. For instance, it recounts an attempt by the Department of Health and Human Services to appoint a doctor who opposed abortion to a key FDA committee on reproductive health.

“This report shows there is a pattern here that cannot be ignored,” Waxman says. “What we're talking about here is unprecedented.”

Kathryn Harrington, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, says that the report is unfair. “This administration does indeed look at the facts and reviews the best available science to make decisions based on what is best for the American people,” Harrington says.

“We rely on people we elect not to use their power in ways that inappropriately distort knowledge,” says Sheila Jasanoff, author of The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990) and a historian at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. “The strongest critique of the Bush administration is that this idea of delegation is being violated.”

Critics say that the Bush administration's cavalier treatment of science has emboldened others to try to influence the scientific process. Last month, for example, Congress narrowly defeated a proposal by a Republican representative that would have blocked the NIH from funding five grants dealing with aspects of HIV, sexual health and behaviour, and wild animal populations. “The interference is now down to the grant level, and that should really be a cause of concern to the scientific community,” says Gregg Gonsalves of New-York-based Gay Men's Health Crisis.

Scientists who have spoken out welcomed the report. They claim that the Bush administration's attempts to influence science put it in danger of becoming irrelevant on major issues related to science.

“After a while, people just won't believe the administration because, again and again, the policies are flying in the face of the facts,” says Phil Coyle, assistant defence secretary until 2001, and now a consultant at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information.

→ http://www.politicsandscience.org