Trump's science policies

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The budget isn't good for science

If you thought the Republican tax plan was just about huge tax cuts for the wealthy, think again. It’s also a major attack on science. To understand why, let’s step back a bit. The scientific enterprise in America heavily relies on grad students. They do mostly invisible work in thousands of labs and research institutions across the US, on everything from basic research about human cells to clinical research on how to cure cancer. Their contributions are essential to running studies. In exchange for that labor during their training, the federal government gives them a break on their taxes. Very simply, grad students get their tuition and other school fees waived while they’re teaching or researching. When tax season rolls around, they’re exempted from having to pay taxes on that money (which never hits their pockets).

But under the House version of the tax bill, these waivers would become taxable income. “This means that MIT graduate students would be responsible for paying taxes on an $80,000 annual salary, when we actually earn $33,000 a year,” explained one MIT grad student, Erin Rousseau, in an op-ed in the New York Times. “That’s an increase of our tax burden by at least $10,000 annually.” This waiver repeal appears in the House bill, not the Senate bill, and Congress is currently reconciling these two versions as part of its effort to form the tax code. But if this change becomes law, make no mistake: It’ll seriously damage the model that keeps America’s scientific labs running, wrote Jeremy Berg, the editor-in-chief of the Science journal, in another new op-ed.

The House bill would also drop the student loan interest deduction, which helps people who are paying their student loans manage their debt. And provisions in both the House and Senate bills would add an excise tax on income from university endowments. “Disturbingly, these provisions emerged from a remarkably opaque process with little or no discussion of their policy objectives or analysis of data that would inform these important decisions,” Berg wrote. And they would hamper universities’ abilities to attract and retain the talent needed to run the labs that have made America a global scientific powerhouse..

The GOP tax plan would blow a hole in American science - Vox

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Yea, "evidence-based" and "science-based" are really controversial concepts, right?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was reportedly told not to use seven specific words and phrases in its federal budget-proposal documents. Materials with the words, "vulnerable," "entitlement," and "diversity" were returned to the agency for "correction," according to a senior staffer at the CDC's Office of Financial Services. Bans on the words and phrases "transgender," "fetus," "evidence-based," and "science-based" were communicated "verbally," according to the staffer. The Trump administration has sought to change how it communicates about issues it views primarily through an ideological lens, including matters related to LGBTQ people and climate change. The allegedly banned words were roundly criticized on social media Friday night.

Trump administration bans 7 words, phrases from official CDC documents - Business Insider

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Anything evidence based is anathema for this government..

The federal government has ended a national registry designed to provide information to the public about evidence-based mental health and substance use interventions and programs. The National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices, which is funded and administered by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has existed since 1997 to help people, agencies and organizations identify and implement evidence-based behavioral health programs and practices in their communities, according to the website.

Trump administration ends registry for substance abuse, mental health programs | TheHill

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This nonsense is what you get when you have misinformed leaders

When asked if he believed in the existence of climate change, however, Mr Trump’s answer did not chime with the scientific consensus. “There is a cooling, and there’s a heating. I mean, look, it used to not be climate change, it used to be global warming. That wasn’t working too well because it was getting too cold all over the place,” he said. 

Global warming and climate change are often used interchangeably, but in fact refer to slightly different things. The two are not mutually exclusive.
While global warming refers only to the Earth’s rising surface temperature, climate change is a broader term that includes the other effects of carbon pollution, such as changing weather patterns. There have been several studies gauging the consensus among climate scientists on human-caused global warming, with 97 per cent emerging as an accurate estimate of the proportion who accept it. 

“The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records. They’re at a record level,” Mr Trump continued. Mr Trump’s comments echo arguments often made by climate change sceptics that global warming has stopped, or even reversed, in recent years. Recent figures from the Met Office, Nasa and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed 2017 was one of the hottest years ever recorded. These temperatures came as little surprise to climate scientists, as they are a continuation of the upward temperature trend that has been on-going for decades.

“Forget what the sceptics will tell you, climate change is real and is happening right now,” said Professor Martin Siegert, a climate change expert at Imperial College London, in response to the new figures. As for polar ice levels, data shows that they are indeed – as Mr Trump stated – at “a record level”, although not the level he had in mind. Last year Nasa reported record lows in sea ice extent in both the Arctic and the Antarctic. Though as with global temperature data, there are always fluctuations in sea ice levels from year to year, scientists always consider long-term trends when analysing climate data, and these are what they base their conclusions on..

Donald Trump appears to misunderstand basic facts of climate change in Piers Morgan interview | The Independent

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Environmental Protection Agency is battling its own board of science advisers over its controversial plan to dismiss certain types of scientific research from consideration when issuing rules. A meeting this week between the agency and some of the nation’s top scientists highlighted the growing rift between the EPA and the scientific community, with members of the Science Advisory Board (SAB) pushing back on the administration's efforts to bar consideration of studies that don't make their underlying data public. Critics say the move would omit important research from EPA consideration and lead to a dramatic rollback of existing regulations. ADVERTISEMENT The SAB, a team of more than 40 of the nation’s top scientists, have been asking to weigh in on the controversial proposal since it was unveiled more than a year ago. On Wednesday, it said it would do so —despite a request from the agency to review a narrow portion of the rule.  There’s mistrust between the scientific community and EPA’s leaders in the Trump administration.

Battle over science roils EPA | TheHill

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Former agency heads and environmentalists are blasting a new executive order issued late Friday evening as a stealthy means to remove scientific oversight from agency rulemaking. Previous heads of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Interior Department say President Trump’s directive last week for all agencies to cut at least a third of their advisory committees by September would weaken the science-based regulations process that the administration has pushed back against since Trump took office. ADVERTISEMENT “The decision is disappointing to anyone who cares about evidence-based policy making, scientific review or the truth,” said Carol Browner, the sole EPA administrator under former President Clinton, in an email to The Hill on Monday. “Engaging a range of outside advisors has served EPA well,” she said. “While probably predictable, the decision is no less alarming. The American people expect more from agencies, especially those charged with protecting our health, like the EPA.” Trump’s executive order directs all federal agencies to cut by at least one-third the number of boards and advisory committees that weigh in on government regulations and other agency decisions. That means 462 committees are potentially on the chopping block when excluding agencies that are mandated by law.

Trump's order to trim science advisory panels sparks outrage | TheHill

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If you want to understand the perilous state of federal scientific research, ask Linda Birnbaum. For 40 years, Birnbaum has worked as a toxicologist for the US government, rising through the ranks to direct both the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program. She has authored more than 700 peer-reviewed publications and collected numerous awards and international accolades for her research on public health.

Now, as she prepares for an October retirement from the institute she says she has tried to “protect” from the ramifications of Donald Trump’s election, Birnbaum has words of warning about the dire path ahead she sees for public health. We ought to listen to what she has to say. Birnbaum fears that the US regulatory system has become too politicized, too beholden to corporate money and power, and lacks the urgency and political will needed to address dire health crises around the globe. Many of those crises are tied to the climate emergency, which she considers the “biggest threat to humanity.”

Also troubling Birnbaum are the impacts of exposures to pesticides and other chemicals on children and other vulnerable populations. From neurotoxic insecticides to a class of industrial chemicals known as PFAS, increasingly research shows that low level chronic exposures to a toxic soup of multiple pervasive pollutants jeopardizes the health of current and future generations, she said. “We have a very small world,” Birnbaum said. “People need to understand that pollution is global, not local,” and “it’s not just high-level acute exposures that are doing damage”. Low-level exposure is also dangerous, and people have different susceptibility. “An old person and a healthy adult and a little child are impacted differently.”

Part of the problem is the way that resources are allocated. “Infectious diseases are where so much of the money goes but that is not the biggest killer anymore,” she said. “It’s these chronic low levels of exposure, and long-term effects of early life exposure, which are hard to identify and are causing so much damage.” The Trump administration’s recent decision to continue to allow farmers to treat food crops with the insecticide chlorpyrifos, done at the bidding of Dow Chemical, is a prime example of how children’s health is taking a back seat to corporate interests, according to Birnbaum. The science showing that chlorpyrifos harms brain development in children is “open and shut”, Birnbaum said, with concrete evidence that “exposure to chlorpyrifos impacts learning and memory and behavior in children”.

Why this top federal scientist is worried about public health under Trump | Carey Gillam | Opinion | The Guardian

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Since 1980, emissions of six common air pollutants have decreased by 67%, thanks largely to government regulation. At the same time, U.S. gross domestic product has increased by 165%. While some assert that regulation acts as a drag on the economy, this record indicates that environmental protection does not have to undercut economic growth.

I have studied air pollution and air quality for over 30 years, and have been directly involved for a decade with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s reviews of scientific findings on air pollution. This includes seven years of service on the agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and stints on 10 specialized panels focused on individual pollutants.

The Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee is currently reviewing the national standard for regulating particulate matter – tiny solid particles and droplets that measure a fraction of the width of a human hair and penetrate deeply into the lungs when inhaled. Health effects of exposure to fine particulate air pollution include respiratory, cardiovascular and other diseases and premature death.

But on Oct. 10, 2018, I and other scientists on a panel that advised the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee on this issue learned that the EPA abruptly disbanded our panel. Now the particulate matter review is moving forward without the scientific expertise and experience that it needs.

To help fill this gap, we reconvened ourselves independently, and have met over the past year to produce scientific advice for EPA aimed at protecting public health. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group that advocates for the use of rigorous, independent science to solve global problems, hosted our most recent meeting on Oct. 10 and Oct. 11, 2019. We reported our conclusions directly to the EPA, and panel members donated their time and expertise.

In contrast, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee has been restructured over the past several years with new appointees who appear to be developing advice aimed at pleasing the EPA administrator.

Fine particle air pollution comes from many sources, including burning fossil fuels. Today more than 20 million Americans live in areas with high levels of fine particles. Average annual fine particulate levels in the U.S. fell by nearly 25% between 2009 and 2016, but this trend may be reversing. Increasingly frequent and severe wildfires, such as those currently raging in California, are one likely source.

A recent study found that fine particle levels rose 5.5% between 2016 and 2018 and estimated that this increase was associated with some 9,700 premature deaths in 2018 that would not have occurred otherwise. Our panel noted the recent uptick in fine particle levels in our latest report, released last week.

The EPA disbanded our clean air science panel. We met anyway – and found that particle pollution regulations aren't protecting public health

• Trump's policy: disbanding the scientist, ignoring the science, ignoring the reversal in fine particle pollution, ignoring the avoidable deaths these cause..
  

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Trump has repeatedly denigrated law-enforcement officials at the FBI, moved to evict scientists from the policy-making process, excluded the Central Command general with direct responsibility for the region from his abrupt decision to withdraw American troops from Syria, and even sparred with meteorologists over his mistaken insistence that Hurricane Dorian threatened Alabama in September.. 

Trump’s attempt to sublimate expertise to both ideology and loyalty has perhaps been most pronounced on environmental and climate issues. The Environmental Protection Agency has disbanded or sidelined several scientific-advisory committees. It recently signaled its plan to propose a major change in federal rule-making that would make it much more difficult to use scientific research to justify new or existing regulations; the proposed rule would prevent the EPA from using any research that offered confidentiality to its subjects, as almost all major studies of the health effects of environmental threats have done. Last June, Trump signed an executive order that would require the federal government to eliminate two-thirds of its existing outside advisory committees..

Trump’s War on Experts Is Intensifying Amid Impeachment - The Atlantic

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The Interior Department is pushing ahead with a controversial proposal that would prohibit the agency from considering scientific studies that don’t make all of their underlying data public. Critics argue that the move, described by the agency as an effort to increase transparency, would sideline landmark scientific research, particularly in cases where revealing such data would result in privacy violations. The proposal, dubbed the Promoting Open Science rule, mirrors a similar effort at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which critics argue would block that agency from considering renowned public health studies.

New Interior rule would limit which scientific studies agency can consider | TheHill