Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
Thursday, December 29, 2016
The war on data heats up
We've been writing about for a long time. What we're seeing now is, in many ways, the logical conclusion of what we were writing about, but I had always assumed we'd come to our senses before this.
Over the weekend, our President-elect fingered South Carolina
congressman Mick Mulvaney to lead the Office of Management and Budget.
If confirmed, Mulvaney will wield a significant amount of power over
virtually every federal agency—and that should make anyone who values
science very, very uneasy.
...
Mulvaney’s track record blends in quite nicely: He thinks climate change is a myth, and he has consistently voted against pro-environmental bills. He also voted for a bill that prevented the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases, and questioned the nthe logical ee, d for federal funding for Zika research.
There is one key difference between Mulvaney and the rest of Trump’s
team of appointments, however. Rather than limiting his damage to one
individual agency, Mulvaney gets to defecate on all of them.
The Office of Management and Budget is the largest arm
of the executive office of the president, and possesses a
correspondingly huge amount of power. It helps develop and execute the
federal budget, oversees agency performance and management, and reviews
“all significant federal regulations by executive agencies.”
For
someone who will soon lord over government funding and the agencies that
depend on it, Mulvaney is almost religiously opposed to federal
spending. The New York Times notes
that he’s totally cool with being part of the “Shutdown Caucus,”
because of his “willingness to shut the government down” rather than
raise the debt limit. He’s also continuously advocated for cuts to federal spending, and has repeatedly butted heads with his own party on spending issues.
All of this spells bad news for federal agencies and programs in
general, but particularly those in the science, health, and
environmental realms. Trump and his lackeys have already made clear
their opposition to funding entire fields of scientific research—Bob
Walker, a senior adviser, even suggested
scrapping NASA’s Earth science division. Combine this staggering level
of disregard with Mulvaney’s belt-tightening approach to federal
spending, and the prospects for government-funded science research
appear dimmer by the day.
...
“The White House Office of Management and Budget is central to good
government—including its role overseeing science-based public health,
safety and environmental protections,” Andrew Rosenberg, director of the
Center for Science and Democracy at UCS, said in a statement.
“[Mulvaney] has backed legislation to change the regulatory process in
ways that would give an even stronger influence to industry, increase
political interference and undermine science-based decision-making.”
Chief among Rosenberg’s concerns is Mulvaney’s support
for bills like the Regulatory Improvement Act of 2015, which would
“[create] a commission tasked with eliminating and revising outdated and
redundant federal regulations.” Notably, the bill was intent on
protecting business interests, and was championed by the National
Association of Manufacturers and the National Federation of Independent
Businesses, among others.
While slashing “outdated and redundant
federal regulations” may sound prudent on the surface, Rosenberg, a
former regulator, says it’s often a smokescreen that can be used to
block policy measures protecting public health and the environment.
“You can’t overturn the Clean Air Act, so you just mess up the
process [by which it’s implemented],” Rosenberg told Gizmodo. He likened
it to the battle over reproductive rights: There may not be enough
support to overturn Roe v. Wade (yet), but that hasn’t stopped state legislators from inserting procedural roadblocks at every other step of the way.
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