Bush Misuses Science, Report Says Scientific Report

Scientist Say Data Are Distorted to Boost Conservative Policies

The Bush administration has repeatedly mischaracterized scientific facts to bolster its political agenda in areas ranging from abstinence education and condom use to missile defense, according to a detailed report released yesterday by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

...Several prestigious scientific journals have editorialized about the Bush administration's dealings in science in recent months, including Science, Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine.

An editor at Science, for example, recently said in print that the administration was injecting politics into arenas of science "once immune to this kind of manipulation."

And the editors of the Lancet noted "growing evidence of explicit vetting of appointees to influential [scientific] panels on the basis of their political or religious opinions" and warned against "any further right-wing incursions" on those panels.

...The General Accounting Office has been investigating such allegations since some in Congress asked the agency to do so in September, but it has not released any findings.

Among the purported abuses documented in the report:

• "Performance measures" used to determine the effectiveness of federally funded "abstinence only" sex education programs were altered by the administration in ways that made it easier to say the programs were effective. And information about how to use a condom -- along with scientific data showing that sex education does not lead to earlier or increased sexual activity in young people -- was removed from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site.

• In testimony before Congress, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton omitted -- and in at least one case misstated -- federal scientists' findings that Arctic oil drilling could harm wildlife.

• The administration altered a National Cancer Institute Web site in a way that wrongly implied there was good evidence linking abortions to breast cancer.

• The Education Department circulated a memo instructing employees to remove materials from the department's Web site not "consistent with the Administration's philosophy," prompting complaints about censorship from national educational organizations.

• Bush has appointed to key scientific advisory committees numerous people with political, rather than scientific, credentials. For example, his appointee to a presidential AIDS advisory committee, marketing consultant Jerry Thacker, has described homosexuality as a "deathstyle" and referred to AIDS as the "gay plague."

A spokesman for Waxman said the report will be updated on the Web as new examples arise.

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printed from Bush Misuses Science, Report Says Scientific Report on 2004-03-23 20:09:39