Since taking office the Bush administration has made clear its distaste for regulating air and water pollution, even in the face of global warming. What is now coming out is how they took their political beliefs and forced them upon important government agencies charged with developing scientific analyses of these dangerous problems.
Today, the Inspector General reports that political appointees in the NASA press office altered the agency's findings on global warming. Yes, at the press office.
The world's most powerful country -- and its biggest polluter -- has some of the most talented and respected scientists anywhere, and yet
from the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said, NASA's public affairs office "managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public." It noted elsewhere that "news releases in the areas of climate change suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency, and scientific dilution."
Officials of the Office of Public Affairs told investigators that they regulated communication by NASA scientists for technical rather than political reasons, but the report found "by a preponderance of the evidence, that the claims of inappropriate political interference made by the climate change scientists and career public affairs officers were more persuasive than the arguments of the senior public affairs officials that their actions were due to the volume and poor quality of the draft news releases."
The arm of the White House under this overreaching executive can apparently extend into any agency, on any subject, and bend it to their political will. The reason we have career staff at government agencies is to handle such issues without political interference -- the exact opposite of what's happening now, as this story shows.
(h/t TPM)
