Abstract
Last August, while many of us were worried about other matters like wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and nuclear proliferation, the president's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) was busy putting the final touches on its “Draft Bulletin on Peer Review.” The bulletin, now halfway through the approval process, is a little something designed to give a White House known for denying unpleasant facts absolute power over information.
Don't be silly, you say–they couldn't do that. But John D. Graham, OMB's administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, finds that viewpoint naïve. As he told a National Academy of Sciences' conference on the OMB's proposed new rule governing the control of scientific information, “For those of you who are not familiar with OMB as a bureaucracy, the one thing I would say is you might think at first blush that legislation and executive orders are more important than OMB bulletins.
“Believe it or not, there are a few people on my staff who think in the long run sometimes little documents like OMB bulletins have bigger and more durable impacts on the federal government than do legislation and executive orders. So, I don't think we should underestimate the potential significance of the activity we are engaged in today.”
Citing the Data Quality Act (described by OMB Watch, a public interest organization, as “a 15-line rider on an appropriations bill that received no congressional discussion or debate”), the OMB officials expect to assume the authority to approve or veto peer-review practices at places like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Further, citing the Paperwork Reduction Act, they have decided that the same authority will extend to all agencies of government.
There is more. Not only does OMB want to bring uniformity to peer-review methods across agencies, it proposes that OMB, not the agencies or their scientific experts, should be in charge of naming reviewers. And in this OMBest of all worlds, agencies would be prohibited from releasing any information to the public unless that information has first been vetted (at length) by OMB–even in most cases of emergency.
OMB also has a unique take on “conflict of interest.” Under its proposed guidelines, government and university scientists who work for or consult with agencies are automatically assumed to have a conflict. But those who work for profit-making corporations are not.
This looks a lot like codification of proven-to-be dangerous and deplorable behavior. For example, instead of issuing warnings about air quality around the site of the destroyed World Trade Center, soon after 9/11 EPA told the public the air was safe. The reason? According to documents obtained a year ago by Cong. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, the White House Council on Environmental Quality “strongly influenced” EPA to make those assurances–despite studies to the contrary by both the agency and those conflicted university scientists.
If the final–and only–say-so on science resides in the White House, it won't be long before all government statements will be sprinkled with political pixie dust, and what we now know as science will become “science”–just another of the fact-free ideological arguments being used to undermine democratic government as we know it.