Category: Anti-Science

Trump Dissolves Climate Change Advisory Panel

The Trump administration has decided to dissolve a federal advisory panel that contributes to a report that measures the current and future impacts of climate change on the U.S., The Washington Post reports.

The acting administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Ben Friedman, informed the chair of the advisory committee that the agency would not renew its charter, which expired Sunday, the report said. This comes two years after NOAA formed the panel, called the Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment, whose 15 members were tasked with advising government and private sector stakeholders on navigating climate change.

The National Climate Assessment, as the report on climate change is known, is supposed to be issued every four years, and the next one is expected next spring, according to the Post.

In the meantime, the administration is reviewing a report that could be key to the final assessment, which estimates that human activities are to blame for an increase in global temperature from 1951 to 2010. Scientists from 13 different agencies produced the report.

That report, which was obtained by The New York Times earlier this month, is awaiting final approval by the Trump administration. The report indicates that temperatures in recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years.

[CBS News]

EPA Chief Scott Pruitt: “Science Shouldn’t Dictate American Policy”

You know the drill. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt, has been asked about something scientific and has said something ludicrous in response.

Shortly after announcing that he wants climate researchers to “debate” climate deniers on live TV, he gave a characteristically painful interview to a Texas radio show. Just after appearing to endorse peer-reviewed science, he added that “science should not be something that’s just thrown about to try and dictate policy in Washington DC.”

The idea that science should not dictate nor influence policy is insane. It really doesn’t need to be said that science is one of the key foundations of modern society.

JFK couldn’t have made his famous, rousing speech about heading to the Moon without the advice and expertise of scientific experts, just as lawmakers couldn’t have appropriated funds for the groundbreaking LIGO experiments that detected gravitational waves for the very first time.

Forget America – what about the world? Without science dictating policy, smallpox wouldn’t have been eradicated, hundreds of millions of children would not be alive, and we wouldn’t know that climate change was an existential threat to life on Earth.

Science, as has often been said, is true whether you believe in it or not. It is a constantly self-correcting, unbiased system, one through which our collective understanding of the cosmos advances with each discovery.

Politics is a method in which those with the most convincing argument win elections, regardless of how factual those arguments are.

These two systems are quite different, but in an ideal world, science is used to help the most powerful people on the planet understand what is true and what is not. Evidence is better than reading our future in tea leaves.

When people like Pruitt say that science should stay out of politics, it’s immediately clear that they have an ulterior motive other than concern about the dilution of one or the other. This type of phrase is wielded by those who are unhappy that science is pointing something out to them that they dislike.

Very few people looked up at the solar eclipse and thought that science was a junk field of academia. Plenty of those with vested interests do, however, consider climate science and vaccines to be incredibly suspect. The reason why is incredibly simple: Acceptance of an eclipse probably doesn’t lose this administration votes, but acceptance of climate science does.

So is it any surprise that the Trump administration is doing all it can to destroy the reputation of scientists and the scientific method at any opportunity? Of course not – but it doesn’t make it any less outrageous.

[IFLScience]

 

 

 

Trump Officially Nominates Climate-Denying Conservative Talk Radio Host as USDA’s Top Scientist

Sam Clovis, a former Trump campaign adviser and one-time conservative talk radio host, has no background in the hard sciences, nor any policy experience with food or agriculture. Still, that did not stop President Donald Trump from officially nominating Clovis to the position of the United States Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary of research, education, and economics, the agency’s top science position.

In the past, the undersecretary of research, education, and economics has brought years of experience in science, public health, or food policy. Previous undersecretaries have been biochemists, plant physiologists, or food nutrition experts. The most recent undersecretary, Catherine Woteki, came to the position from Mars, Inc., where she helped manage the company’s scientific research on health, nutrition, and public safety.
Clovis, on the other hand, comes to the position after serving as national co-chair for the Trump campaign, which he joined in 2015. Before that, Clovis was a professor of economics at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. He has a doctorate in public administration, and unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate in 2014.

“Dr. Clovis was one of the first people through the door at USDA in January and has become a trusted advisor and steady hand as we continue to work for the people of agriculture,” USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue said in a statement on Wednesday. “He looks at every problem with a critical eye, relying on sound science and data, and will be the facilitator and integrator we need. Dr. Clovis has served this nation proudly since he was a very young man, and I am happy he is continuing to serve.”

He has served as the administration’s top USDA policy adviser since January, signing off on a memo sent to USDA scientists telling them to cease publishing “outward facing” documents, like press releases or fact sheets.

Clovis, like so many of the Trump administration’s top policy officials, does not accept the scientific consensus on climate change. In 2014, he told Iowa Public Radio that climate science is “junk science” and “not proven.” He also said in an interview with E&E News in October that the Trump administration would not prioritize climate change or climate science at the USDA — a sharp break from the Obama administration, which made a point of trying to better prepare farmers and the food system for imminent climate-fueled changes like droughts or heavier storms.

“Whether or not Clovis acknowledges climate change, it is happening, and agriculture has to deal with that,” Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food and Water Watch, told ThinkProgress. “They have to come up with techniques to grow crops in tough weather conditions, and there are always research needs for how you grow crops in changing climate more efficiently with less resources.”

Clovis would not be the only senior official at USDA to question established climate science. Secretary Perdue called climate science “obviously disconnected from reality” and “a running joke among the public” in a 2014 op-ed published in the National Review.
As undersecretary, Clovis will be responsible for administering policies to ensure USDA’s scientists conform to “scientific integrity.” It’s unclear how Clovis will administer those programs, or whether he will specifically seek to undermine climate science, as EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is doing with his “red team/blue team” initiative aimed at questioning mainstream climate science.

For Lovera, Clovis’ nomination simply underscores the Trump administration’s disdain for science, from the dismissal of dozens of EPA advisory board scientists to the deletion of climate information from government websites.

“It’s a sad continuation of that trend that we were seeing with EPA and science advisory boards, and shutting down different websites,” Lovera said. “It’s just another sad example of the Trump administration putting politics first, and inside USDA, the politics of Big Agriculture.”

[ThinkProgess]

The White House’s Science Division Is Now Completely Empty

Despite the veritable purge of scientists and science communication that has characterized the Trump administration, the White House still has an Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Unfortunately, its science division is now completely lacking any staff whatsoever.

As reported by CBS News, the three remaining employees, all of which were holdovers from the Obama administration, have left. One staffer, the assistant director for biomedical and forensic sciences, tweeted, “Science division out. Mic drop” as she left.

Over the last couple of years, there were up to 100 employees working at the OSTP, which saw a high level of investment from the former President. It is unclear when or even if the roles will be filled again, and by whom.

First established in 1976 by Congress, it is designed to provide the President and others with “advice on the scientific, engineering, and technological aspects of the economy, national security, homeland security, health, foreign relations, the environment, and the technological recovery and use of resources, among other topics.”

Many governmental scientific agencies have been threatened with massive and historic funding cuts; the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is being effectively stripped of its scientific advisory board; that is why federal scientists have been bullied to not to speak out about their research. Entire departments that focus on science and technology are being shut down.

As of June, around 85 percent of all scientific posts in the federal government, including an official scientific advisor to the President, were left unfilled. Perhaps uniquely, this percentage has now increased, what with the recent dismissals at the EPA and the new removals at the OSTP.

[IFLScience]

Rick Perry Loses His Cool When Confronted by Sen. Franken on Climate Science

After a week full of misleading and inaccurate statements, Energy Secretary Rick Perry remained incredulous and defiant when confronted with climate science-related facts in a budget hearing Thursday.

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) informed Perry that scientists have concluded that “humans are entirely the cause” of recent warming, to which Perry responded, “I don’t believe it” and “I don’t buy it.”

And when Franken reminded him this was the conclusion of a team of climate science skeptics funded by conservative petrochemical billionaires Charles and David Koch, Perry raised his voice and said: “To stand up and say that 100 percent of global warming is because of human activity, I think on its face, is just indefensible.”

What is indefensible is that the U.S. Secretary of Energy continues to reject established climate science and remain completely impervious to facts — which was made all too clear by a review of this week’s events.

Monday on CNBC, Perry falsely claimed that carbon dioxide was not the primary cause of recent global warming, along with a bunch of other nonsense. He also defended his right to be a “skeptic.”

On Wednesday, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) wrote Perry a letter informing him that he was simply wrong. The central role of greenhouse gases — of which CO2 is the “most important” — is “based on multiple independent lines of evidence that have been affirmed by thousands of independent scientists and numerous scientific institutions around the world,” the letter read.

The AMS called these “indisputable findings,” and pointed out, “we are not familiar with any scientific institution with relevant subject matter expertise that has reached a different conclusion.”

The AMS also explained that while some aspects of climate science are not fully resolved, this wasn’t one of them, adding, “skepticism that fails to account for evidence is no virtue.”

On Thursday, at an Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing, Franken asked Perry to defend downplaying the role of CO2 — and Perry reiterated his denial. Oblivious, Perry repeated, “what’s wrong with being a skeptic?”

Perry went on to call for a so-called “red team” exercise where scientists argue back and forth with a “blue team” on the issue. “But that is exactly how science works,” replied Franken, with teams of scientists pushing back and forth on one another until a consensus is reached.

Franken then pointed out that the Koch brothers had actually helped set up a “red team” of skeptics to take a new look at all of the historical data on global surface temperatures. He then quoted what the head of that team, Dr. Richard Muller, said in the New York Times about their findings:

Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

At that moment in the questioning, Perry lost his composure, not merely rejecting this scientific reality but asserting angrily that it is “just indefensible.”

For the record, not only is it defensible, but in 2013, the world’s leading climatologists concluded in their summary of the latest science that “the best estimate of the human-induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period.”

To clarify this science-speak from U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the best estimate is that humans are responsible for all of the warming we have suffered since 1950. Every major government in the world signed off on this conclusion back in 2013.

But the U.S. Energy Secretary is not just unaware of the science; when presented with it, he’s sure it can’t be true. That’s what makes him a denier and not a skeptic.

[ThinkProgress]

Trump has made the Department of Health and Human Services a center of false science on contraception

Contraception policy may not be the biggest target of the anti-science right wing — climate change and evolution probably rank higher — but it’s the field in which scientific disinformation has the most immediate consequences for public health.

So it’s especially disturbing that President Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price have stocked the corridors of health policy with purveyors of conclusively debunked claptrap about contraception, abortion, pregnancy and women’s reproductive health generally.

That’s the conclusion of a new article in the New England Journal of Medicine identifying four Trump appointees as carriers of the disinformation virus. What makes them especially dangerous, says the author, bioethicist R. Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin law school, is that the “alternative facts” they’re purveying could influence an entire generation’s attitude toward contraception, for the worse.

Among their themes is that condoms don’t protect against HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases and that abortions and contraceptives cause breast cancer, miscarriages and infertility. None of these assertions is true.

“The move toward misinformation at the level of sex education is dangerous,” Charo told me, “because you form instincts about what is safe very early in life.”

These appointments are all of a piece with Trump’s habit of staffing federal agencies with people actively in opposition to those agencies’ goals and statutory responsibilities — climate change deniers at the Environmental Protection Agency, corporate executives at the Department of Labor, and so on.

They’re also consonant with policies from the White House and Price’s office aimed at narrowing access to contraceptives by reducing government assistance to obtain them.

As Charo observes, the rate of unintended pregnancies has come down sharply, especially since the advent of the Affordable Care Act, which mandated that health plans make birth control available without co-pays or deductibles.

Price has defended reducing government assistance for contraception on the ground that “there’s not one” woman who can’t afford it on her own, but that’s plainly untrue; some long-lasting contraceptives such as Nexplanon or IUDs, can cost hundreds of dollars, a discouraging obstacle for many low-income patients.

Let’s take a look at the four horsewomen of disinformation on Charo’s list. What characterizes their approach to human reproduction, she says, is “rejection of the scientific method as the standard for generating and evaluating evidence.”

(We’ve asked both Charmaine Yoest, now the assistant secretary for public affairs at Health and Human Services, and the department for comment but have received no reply.)

Charmaine Yoest

Charmaine Yoest is now the assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS. Yoest is the former head of Americans United for Life, a prominent anti-abortion group. She and the organization promoted the claim that abortion increases a woman’s chance of breast cancer, a claim that was conclusively debunked by medical authorities years ago. The National Cancer Institute (a government body), declared in 2003 that thorough scientific studies “consistently showed no association between induced and spontaneous abortions and breast cancer risk.”

The same goes for the claim by Yoest’s group that abortion increases the risk of “serious mental health problems.” This notion is the basis for state laws requiring counseling before a patient is allowed to undergo an abortion. A study by UC San Francisco published last year found that the “greater risk” of “adverse psychological outcomes is faced by women denied an abortion. These findings do not support policies that restrict women’s access to abortion on the basis that abortion harms women’s mental health,” the study concluded.

Yoest was an architect of the strategy that led Texas to enact an anti-abortion law so extreme that it was slapped down by the Supreme Court last year on a 5-3 vote. The law placed heavy restrictions on abortion clinics, ostensibly to protect women’s health, that effectively shut many down. In his majority opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer essentially called that a subterfuge: “There was no significant health-related problem that the new law helped to cure,” he wrote.

Teresa Manning

Teresa Manning was appointed as HHS’ deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. Manning is a former lobbyist for the National Right to Life Committee and a legislative analyst for the Family Research Council. During a 2003 NPR interview, she said: “Of course, contraception doesn’t work. … Its efficacy is very low.” In fact, as Charo observes, hormonal methods are 91% effective, and IUDs are 99% effective.

In 2001, then as Teresa Wagner, Manning was quoted in a Family Research Council news release attacking prescriptions for the morning-after pill, which she characterized as an abortion method. She said doctors prescribing the pill were “accepting — and, in effect, — promoting promiscuity — the cause of the STD explosion, as well as the well known social problems of out of wedlock pregnancy and illegitimacy. We expect more from our doctors than collaboration with abortion advocates!”

Valerie Huber

Valerie Huber was appointed earlier this month as chief of staff to the assistant secretary for health at HHS. Huber is an abstinence advocate and the president of Ascend, a Washington group that advocates for abstinence-only sex education.

The problem there is that birth control experts have consistently found that abstinence education is ineffective at preventing teen pregnancies. In fact, just the opposite — a 2011 study at the University of Georgia reported that the “data show clearly that abstinence-only education as a state policy … may actually be contributing to the high teenage pregnancy rates in the U.S.”

Huber’s approach is moralistic. “As public health experts and policymakers, we must normalize sexual delay more than we normalize teen sex, even with contraception,” she told PBS last year. But studies consistently show that what reduces teen pregnancies is increased use of contraceptives.

Katy Talento

Katy Talento was named to Trump’s Domestic Policy Council. Talento has been the author of frequent anti-birth control screeds, including several that appeared on the Federalist, a right-wing website. Among them was an article whose headline called birth control “the mother of all medical malpractice,” and another asserting that women who took chemical forms of birth control risked “breaking your uterus for good,” ruining it “for baby-hosting altogether.”

Talento’s basis for this claim was what she called a “ground-breaking 2012 study” ostensibly showing that women who used birth control pills for several years had higher rates of infertility and miscarriage than those who did not. But as Jon Cohen of Science Magazine showed earlier this year, the study reported nothing of the kind — as its lead author confirmed. In fact, the researchers cited a study indicating that long-term use of the pill — five years — actually increased a woman’s subsequent fertility.

The lead author, Robert Casper, a Toronto fertility doctor, told Cohen that while his study found that using the pill sometimes led to thinner uterus linings, that wasn’t associated with more infertility or miscarriages — his study group was small and predisposed to fertility problems, he explained.

“The benefits of the birth control pill in preventing unwanted pregnancy or in treating painful menstrual periods far outweighs the rare possible case of thin endometrium,” Cohen wrote. “There is no evidence that the birth control pill is ‘seriously risky’ in terms of future reproductive health.”

As Charo observes, the “alternative science” underlying these appointees’ approach has infected public discussions of birth control and the courts. “Legislatures and even the Supreme court have tolerated individuals making up their own definitions for abortifacient [that is, abortion-producing] and pregnancy,” she writes, and then using them to justify refusing to fill prescriptions or offer insurance coverage for contraceptives.”

That was glaringly true in the Supreme Court’s egregious 2014 Hobby Lobby decision, which allowed owners of private companies to refuse to cover contraceptives under the Affordable Care Act. The Hobby Lobby plaintiffs specifically objected to four birth control methods — including IUDs and the morning-after pill because they produced abortions, which the plaintiffs found objectionable supposedly on religious grounds. But neither medical authorities nor the federal government classified those methods as abortifacients; the plaintiffs’ definition was accepted as gospel by Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the opinion, which became the basis for allowing businesses to exclude all birth control methods from their health plans.

With adherents of similar viewpoints now ensconced in positions of responsibility in the Trump administration, their approach threatens to spread throughout government policy. But it’s no more based on legitimate science than it ever was.

[The Los Angeles Times]

Trump Administration Keeping Senate Torture Report From Public

The CIA, CIA inspector general and director of national intelligence will return their copies of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s massive 6,700-page report on the CIA’s interrogation and detention program under the George W. Bush administration, a Senate aide confirmed to CNN on Friday.

The decision means it’s highly unlikely the report — which concluded that interrogation techniques such as waterboarding did not elicit useful intelligence from detainees — will be made public so long as Republicans control the Senate and the White House. Democrats are concerned it will never see the light of day if the copies are destroyed.

The report, written under then-intelligence chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein when Democrats controlled the Senate, has remained classified, except for an executive summary that was released when the report was completed in 2014. The report concluded that interrogation techniques such as waterboarding did not elicit useful intelligence from detainees.

The Senate report was sent to federal agencies in the hope that it could eventually be made public, but committee chairman Richard Burr, R-North Carolina, has asked the administration to return the copies to the Senate.

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that the report was a congressional record, which is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, which Burr said was why he has asked that the agencies return the documents.

“I have directed my staff to retrieve copies of the congressional study that remain with the Executive Branch agencies and, as the committee does with all classified and compartmented information, will enact the necessary measures to protect the sensitive sources and methods contained within the report,” Burr said in a statement.

Republicans have criticized the report as unfairly targeting the CIA and ignoring the intelligence gained under the interrogation program.

The administration’s decision to return the reports to the Senate was first reported by The New York Times.

The intelligence panel’s Democrats slammed the Trump administration for giving the copies back, and Burr for making the demand they be returned.

Sen. Mark Warner, top Democrat on the committee, said he was “very disappointed” by the decision.

“This study must be preserved for history, and the Senate intelligence committee will continue to conduct vigorous oversight of our nation’s intelligence agencies to ensure that they abide by both the spirit and the letter of the law that bans the practices outlined in the report,” he said in a statement.

Feinstein called Burr’s move “divisive” and claimed Democrats on the committee had not been notified or consulted.

“No senator — chairman or not — has the authority to erase history,” the California Democrat said. “I believe that is the intent of the chairman in this case.”

And Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon accused Burr and the Trump administration of seeking to “pave the way for the kind of falsehoods used to justify an illegal and dangerous torture program.”

“For the sake of future generations of Americans, this report should be immediately returned to the government agencies who gave it up, disseminated widely within the government and most importantly, declassified for the American people,” Wyden said in a statement.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued to make the full report public, but its case was dismissed.

“It would be a travesty for agencies to return the CIA torture report instead of reading and learning from it, as senators intended,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.

The committee sent the report to seven federal agencies: the CIA, CIA inspector general, FBI, director of national intelligence and the Justice, State and Defense Departments.
But even if all those copies are returned to the committee, there is another way the report could eventually be made public.

When President Barack Obama was still in office, the White House felt it was caught between congressional Democrats who wanted the full report made public and the CIA and intelligence community that felt strongly against it, according to a former administration official.

But in December, the White House declared the document a presidential record, which means it’s part of the Obama presidential record, which remains classified for 12 years.
“It doesn’t mean it will be automatically declassified after 12 years, but at least in this case, a copy will be preserved,” the official said.

[CNN]

After Leaving Paris Accord, Trump Surrogates Go To Absurd Lengths To Deny Science

After Donald Trump isolated America from the rest of the world by pulling us out of the historic Paris Accord, there was a race to the bottom from his surrogates to see who could spit out the dumbest excuse to deny settled science.

Trump’s former communications director Jason Miller was caught by Daily Beast editor John Avlon using fake statistics to support absurd points. EPA head Scott Pruitt also claimed Thursday that the president’s decision isn’t about climate denial. Today, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) also claimed the 4.5 billion-year-old sun is no longer reliable and Trump’s economic advisor Steve Moore didn’t know the difference between 1,000-year-old windmills in Holland and wind energy mills in western Kansas. And finally, Trump apologist Jeffrey Lord called coal “the wave of the future.”

[Raw Story]

Trump Announces U.S. Will Exit Paris Climate Deal

President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw the US from the Paris climate accord Thursday, a major step that fulfills a campaign promise while seriously dampening global efforts to curb global warming.

The decision amounts to a rebuttal of the worldwide effort to pressure Trump to remain a part of the agreement, which 195 nations signed onto. Foreign leaders, business executives and Trump’s own daughter lobbied heavily for him to remain a part of the deal, but ultimately lost out to conservatives who claim the plan is bad for the United States.

“In order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord but being negotiations to reenter either the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction under terms that are fair to the United States,” Trump said from the White House Rose Garden.

“We’re getting out. And we will start to renegotiate and we’ll see if there’s a better deal. If we can, great. If we can’t, that’s fine,” he added.

[Washington Post]

Reality

The U.S. now joins Syria, which has been mired in a war and Nicaragua, which has said it didn’t join because they didn’t think the climate agreement went far enough, in not taking part in the global agreement.

For years conservatives railed against Barack Obama for what they perceived was “leading from behind.” This is exactly leading from behind. Other countries like China will now take over as global leaders in green energy and reap the economic benefits while Trump at home will push for more oil and coal.

Under Trump, Inconvenient Data is Being Sidelined

The Trump administration has removed or tucked away a wide variety of information that until recently was provided to the public, limiting access, for instance, to disclosures about workplace violations, energy efficiency, and animal welfare abuses.

Some of the information relates to enforcement actions taken by federal agencies against companies and other employers. By lessening access, the administration is sheltering them from the kind of “naming and shaming” that federal officials previously used to influence company behavior, according to digital experts, activists and former Obama administration officials.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, for instance, has dramatically scaled back on publicizing its fines against firms. And the Agriculture Department has taken off-line animal welfare enforcement records, including abuses in dog breeding operations and horse farms that alter the gait of racehorses through the controversial practice of “soring” their legs.

In other cases, the administration appears to be dimming the prior spotlight on the background and conduct of top officials. The administration no longer publishes online the ethics waivers granted to appointees who would otherwise be barred from joining the government because of recent lobbying activities. Nor is the White House releasing logs of its visitors, making it difficult for the public to keep track of who is stopping by to see the president’s inner circle.

The administration has also removed websites and other material supporting Obama-era policies that the White House no longer embraces. Gone, for instance, is a White House Web page that directed prospective donors to private groups that aid refugees fleeing Syria and other embattled nations.

Officials also removed websites run by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department that provided scientific information about climate change, eliminating access. for instance, to documents evaluating the danger that the desert ecology in the Southwest could face from future warming. (On Friday, protesting against the disappearance of the EPA website, the city of Chicago posted the site online as it had existed under the Obama administration.)

And within a week of President Trump’s inauguration, the White House retired the two-year-old Federal Supplier Greenhouse Gas Management Scorecard, which ranks firms with major federal contracts on their energy efficiency and policies to curb carbon output.

“The President has made a commitment that his Administration will absolutely follow the law and disclose any information it is required to disclose,” said White House spokeswoman Kelly Love in an email Sunday.

The White House takes its ethics and conflict of interest rules seriously,” Love added, “and requires all employees to work closely with ethics counsel to ensure compliance. Per the President’s Executive Order, violators will be held accountable by the Department of Justice.”

But Norman Eisen, who served as President Barack Obama’s special counsel for ethics and government reform, said the changes have undermined the public’s ability to hold the federal government accountable.

“The Trump administration seems determined to utilize a larger version of Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility to cover the entire administration,” said Eisen, now a fellow with the Brookings Institution’s governance studies program.

Across the vast breadth of the government, agencies have traditionally provided the public with massive data sets, which can be of great value to companies, researchers and advocacy groups, among others. Three months ago, there were 195,245 public data sets available on www.data.gov, according to Nathan Cortez, the associate dean of research at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law, who studies the handling of public data. This week it stood at just under 156,000.

Data experts say the decrease, at least in part, may reflect the consolidation of data sets or the culling of outdated ones, rather than a strategic move to keep information from the public. But the reduction was clearly a conscious decision.

Cortez said the Obama administration increased the amount of government data offered to the public, although the information was at times incomplete or inaccurate and sometimes used as a “regulatory cudgel.” Under Trump, the government is taking transparency “in the opposite direction.”

In some cases, federal Web pages are being routinely maintained. In other cases, information that was once easily accessible to the public has moved to locations that are harder to find, access and interpret. Yet other data has entirely vanished.

The Education Department, for instance, continues to update weekly how many universities and colleges are being investigated for how they handle claims of sexual assault and harassment under the federal statute, Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination.

Under Obama, OSHA regularly sent out news releases to publicize the fines levied against companies, aiming to discourage others from engaging in similar behavior. President George W. Bush’s administration had a similar policy, issuing dozens of news releases each month.

Business groups have criticized the practice as scapegoating.

“The issue of shaming through news releases has been a real issue with my members,” said Randy Johnson, senior vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in an interview, adding, “It’s about trying to drive customers away, so that will put pressure on companies to settle” with the Labor Department rather than fight the alleged violations in court.

Since Trump took office, OSHA has issued more than 200 citations of $40,000 or more, according to the agency’s former deputy assistant secretary Jordan Barab, which was the threshold for issuing a news release under Obama.

But OSHA has issued only two stand-alone press statements on fines of at least $40,000, along with one on a judicial ruling. The releases include an incident where two men died in a collapsed trench in Boston where the agency found the company did not provide safety training or proper safeguards and when a worker in an auto insulation manufacturer in suburban Toledo had his right hand amputated by a machine.

A record of OSHA’s enforcement actions is still available online, but accessing it requires navigating the Labor Department’s extensive website to access raw data that largely lacks context and can be opaque.

Howard Mavity, a labor and employment lawyer at Fisher & Phillips who represents management, said in an interview that Obama officials’ practice of “regulation by shame . . . angered some employers, as well as me.” But putting a near-total stop to the news releases, he said, “was too far the other way.”

“Those news releases served a valuable role, to constantly alert and catch employers’ attention,” Mavity said.

Other documents are simply absent. Just days after taking office, Trump instituted a policy under which appointees are barred from working on any issue on which they have lobbied in the past two years, but the government can still waive this restriction. The administration has not made public which waivers, if any, it has granted.

The waivers detail contacts that could have precluded the person from serving and in some cases outline what contacts that person can have with former clients.

Michael Catanzaro represented clients including American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers and Devon Energy as a partner at the CGCN Group before becoming special assistant to the president for domestic energy and environmental policy in February. Since joining the White House, Catanzaro has played a key role in drafting executive orders that could affect his former clients, including orders on climate and offshore drilling. The administration has not explained what steps, if any, he took to avoid a conflict of interest with those clients.

Catanzaro declined to comment.

Robert Glicksman, a George Washington University environmental law professor, was making the final edits on a law review article when he noticed that a government website he was relying on had vanished. Gone was the ecological assessment issued by the Bureau of Land Management for the Chihuahuan Desert, while another one was archived and a third was moved to an entirely different site.

“It’s one of the most important tools for BLM in understanding the current and likely impact of climate change on the public lands,” Glicksman said, adding that each document ran hundreds of pages and included technical and scientific information. “All that research is essentially off the boards, for now.”

The BLM did not respond to a request for comment.

In some cases, experts say, shelving disclosure requirements can hamper innovation in the private sector. Two years ago, the White House launched the greenhouse gas score card for federal contractors, listing whether they had disclosed their carbon output, have a goal to cut it and could face business risks from climate change. The site was archived within a week of Trump taking office.

Jason Pearson, executive director of the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council, said that action removed a powerful incentive for private companies to improve their environmental practices.

“That transparency about positive action can be one of the most important motivators for the broader community to take action,” he said.

[Washington Post]

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