OMB vs. Science

In an outrageous assault on the professional integrity of a leading scientist and on scientific standards of peer review, the Bush Administration’s Office of Management and Budget has censored testimony prepared for a Senate subcommittee by the director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Substituting its own conclusions for those of Dr. James E. Hansen, the OMB watered down the scientist’s concerns about the dangerous potential consequences of the global warming trend--the so-called greenhouse effect. The purpose of this flagrant intervention, charges Sen. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.), chairman of the subcommittee on science, technology and space, was to force scientific judgment to conform to the fiscal and ideological policy goals of some in the Administration, rather than basing policy on scientific judgment.

Hansen had planned to argue that computer projections indicate that discharges of enormous quantities of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere are producing temperature increases in many parts of the globe, threatening drought in some areas and encouraging other environmental stresses that will affect plant and animal life. Hansen believes that steps should be taken now to prepare for and mitigate those effects. Over his objections, the OMB inserted a concluding statement that effectively negated these warnings by saying that since they are based on evolving computer models, they shouldn’t be taken as “reliable predictions.”

A scientific consensus now accepts that the greenhouse effect is real, although not all scientists accept Hansen’s conclusions. But while his judgments may remain arguable, they at least are based on accepted research and have been subjected to peer review. The OMB’s censorship of these opinions, on the contrary, seems based only on the worry that to act on their implications would require levels of federal action that some Administration conservatives find ideologically unacceptable.

President Bush has promised to make the United States the international leader in addressing the threat of global warming. This week an important U.N.-sponsored conference on that issue opens in Geneva. But at this point it remains unclear what U.S. policy at that meeting will be. If the OMB has its way, Gore says, it will be to adopt a do-nothing approach to the problem. A concomitant to do-nothingism seems to require distorting the views of one of the government’s top scientists. That’s not policy-coordinating, which is one of the responsibilities the OMB is charged with. That’s dishonesty, and there is no justification whatever for it.