The Anti-Science Obama Administration

For a couple of years I was a participant in a national online meeting on open government.  All over the country groups convened and logged into the national meeting, and we watched a video and listened to a panel of national figures discuss the subject.  Then our local panel discussed before a small audience.  The first year it was quite good.   But the second year the event got hijacked by global warming zealots, including NPR Science Friday host Ira Flatow. 

The theme of that second annual meeting was that the Bush Administration was anti-science because it suppressed the truth about global warming.  The evidence of this was that the Administration didn’t sufficiently publicize the views of individuals working for the various branches of government who thought that global warming was a serious threat.  That theme, that the Bush Administration was anti-science, became a major meme in left wing discourse. 

Well now the executive show is on the other foot, and guess what?  The Obama Administration is doing the exact same thing.  From CBSNews:

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."

Why was the report “quashed”?  An EPA center director, Al McGartland, wrote this in an e-mail to the author of the skeptical report, Alan Carlin. 

“The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for
this round. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. …. I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”

Well, there you have it.  Arguments and information that do not “help the legal or policy case” the Administration wants to make will be suppressed.  It is likely that the suppression of this report is a violation of administrative law.  When a Federal Agency is preparing a finding, it is supposed to make available “the evidence relied upon and the evidence discarded.” 

But the legal point is not the important point here.  I think the Administration has every right to make up its mind on this matter, and present its policy preferences.  But so did the Bush Administration.  If in doing so Bush was anti-science, then so is Obama.  This is one more example of the Obama Administration working to rehabilitate Bush’s legacy.  Imitation may not be the sincerest form of flattery, but it is flattery.