The Partial Observer by Ronald E. Bishop
The Dismantling of Science
From July 21–24, I participated in a Science Defense Fly-In hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Earthjustice. Teams of scientists from across the U.S. met with a bipartisan mix of House members, senators, and/or their staff people. Our primary objectives were to increase co-sponsorship of H.R. 1106: the Scientific Integrity Act, to help the launch of a Senate version of that bill, and to rescue what’s left of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research & Development (with its vital Integrated Risk Information System) and the Centers for Disease Control’s National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health.
The Scientific Integrity Act is designed to ensure that agencies use robust and independent science in their decision-making processes, and that federal science and scientists are properly protected from inappropriate political influence. It would codify scientific integrity protections at the national level, establishing the strongest protections for federal scientists and their work that we have seen in modern history. Most importantly, the act vests Congress, not the Executive Branch, with authority over the conduct of federal science.
The EPA’s July 18 announcement of its plans to close the Office of Research and Development and the Health and Human Services restructuring plan that pushed out practically everyone staffing the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health give evidence that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. have rarely, if ever, met a polluter or workplace abuser they could not support, all politspeak notwithstanding. Their actions were not only illegal (as these specific entities are mandated by Congress), but they are also guaranteed to hurt fence-line community folks and working people.
The second Trump administration set a record in its first six months by openly attacking American science and scientists more than 400 times. Some of those assaults, like forcing thousands of dedicated workers out of the National Weather Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the U.S. Forest Service, produced immediate impacts on U.S. families in our severe weather and fire season. Executive appointments of unqualified leaders, disbanding of federal advisory committees, suppression of agency scientists’ voices, distortion or deletion of heavily used government web sites, and wholesale slashing of funds for peer-reviewed research projects are also on full display. Mr. Trump and his associates obviously can’t stand inconvenient truths and the people who expose them—in many areas.
That’s reason enough to organize a science defense fly-in, but what compelled me to go to Washington last week? As a baby boomer who started college in 1975, I was in the first generation of students who could major in chemistry without minoring in German. Why was that? German scientists had so dominated the field for more than a century that students before me had to read German to study chemistry. The Third Reich brought that dominance to an end by employing many of the tactics we see used by the Trump administration today: attacks on universities generally and on scientists specifically. If this continues, Americans will surrender the preeminence in science and technology that we have built over the last 80 years.
So, we face a choice: reverse this administration’s dismantling of federal science, or do nothing now, and then in a few years teach Mandarin to our children and grandchildren. They will need it to compete in the post-American world we leave behind.
Ronald E. (Ron) Bishop, of Bowerstown, earned a PhD in biochemistry from The West Virginia University School of Medicine and completed his post-doctoral training at the National Cancer Institute. He currently serves as associate professor and chair of chemistry and biochemistry at SUNY Oneonta. The opinions expressed here are his alone and do not represent SUNY Oneonta or the State University of New York.
