WASHINGTON (April 23, 2020)—A new peer-reviewed study in PLOS ONE shows that, long before the COVID-19 crisis, scientists and experts within the federal government worried that the administration was undermining scientific capacity and making it harder for scientists to carry out their work and share it with the public.
The study analyzes a 2018 survey of thousands of federal scientists across 16 federal agencies. The survey was conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and Iowa State University’s Center for Survey Statistics & Methodology. It was the ninth survey UCS has conducted of federal scientists since 2005 and the first conducted during the Trump administration.
“We found a pattern of neglect and political interference across the administration,” said Dr. Gretchen Goldman, research director at the Center for Science and Democracy (CSD) at UCS and a co-author of the study. “Half of the survey’s respondents said that it was harder for their agencies to make science-based decisions because of political appointees’ involvement. Scientists within the government were raising the alarm well before COVID-19 appeared on the horizon.” These scientists pointed out numerous problems, including workforce reductions, restrictions on their ability to communicate publicly, and a disregard for their work during the policymaking process.
While scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of the Interior reported the worst problems in the survey, serious concerns came from scientists across all 16 agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC’s ability to carry out its work and communicate with the public is critical to containing and fighting infectious disease outbreaks, and CDC scientists predicted years ago that political interference would undermine their work. “The idiotic myopia of not wanting to fund ‘global health’ work will certainly come home to roost,” noted one scientist responding to the survey, and others echoed these fears, specifically pointing to the way the administration’s cutbacks would weaken the state, local, and international collaboration necessary to monitor and respond to epidemics.
“We can’t solve problems that we can’t understand or won’t research, and we can’t let political messaging override the evidence,” said study co-author Dr. Jacob Carter, a CSD research scientist and former EPA scientist. “The COVID-19 pandemic has made painfully clear how much the federal government needs scientific resources and how much all of us need reliable, trustworthy information coming straight from the experts, without political oversight or censorship.”
The Union of Concerned Scientists has tracked more than 130 incidents of the administration attacking, manipulating, or sidelining science.