US: ACLU hits Bush administration’s anti-science policies

By Jamie Chapman
6 August 2005

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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recently issued a scathing indictment of the Bush administration’s record on science. Its report, entitled “Science Under Siege,” was issued on June 21. It documents the White House’s distortion, abuse and quashing of legitimate scientific inquiry in order to promote its political agenda.

The ACLU commissioned the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) to draft the report. The UCS issued its own report in February 2004, entitled “Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking.” This earlier statement has since been signed by over 6,000 American scientists, including 48 Nobel laureates, 62 National Medal of Science recipients, and 135 members of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new ACLU/UCS report shows that in the intervening 16 months the Bush administration, far from responding to pressure generated by the earlier UCS recommendations, has deepened its attack on science.

Such political hot topics as government backing for creationism over evolution or state intervention in scientifically supported legal rulings on the case of Terri Schiavo are not addressed. By focusing on four main areas that are less in the public eye, the authors establish how negatively the Bush administration has impacted the practice of science in the United States.

The first section details the unprecedented control that government exercises over the control of information. “A rising tide of secrecy” has produced a doubling of documents being classified as “secret” in the two years after September 11, 2001, reaching a record level of 15.6 million records being classified in 2004. At the same time, the rate of document declassification, or removing them from the “secret” category, has declined by 72 percent.

Besides extending classification authority to new agencies such as the Department of Agriculture and Health and Human Services, the administration has extended the time documents may be kept from public view to as much as 25 years. It has encouraged agency heads to retroactively reclassify previously unclassified documents.

The reason claimed for increased secrecy is the ostensible danger that scientific research will fall into the hands of terrorists, who will use it to fashion weapons. In the actual event, the hijackers who flew hijacked airplanes into buildings on September 11, 2001, used nothing more technologically advanced than box cutters to carry out their plot.

In the name of fighting “the war on terror,” however, the Bush administration is manipulating access to scientific studies. The use of the “secret” classification system is the method by which the Bush administration ensures that only research that the government finds acceptable is performed, and by scientists who are vetted by being subject to security clearance.

Another way the government has withheld research from the scientific community has been to divert federal grants—the primary source of funding—away from basic university research into defense research designated as classified. As the report explains, “[T]he government has funneled millions of federal dollars into the construction of at least four new high-security ‘biosafety level 4’ laboratories for the conduct of research on the most dangerous and exotic pathogens, while funding for basic microbiology and genetics research at universities has declined.”

The report’s authors hint in their subtitle, “The Bush Administration’s Assault on Academic Freedom and Scientific Inquiry,” that there is a connection between the administration’s inhibiting of science and the overall attack on freedom of expression. They state, “[E]stablished individual freedoms of thought, speech and publication have permitted and encouraged the formation of scientific communities. The pursuit of truth fundamentally depends on the degree to which information, ideas, and discoveries can be freely exchanged within these communities.... it is precisely these vital processes of individual expression and mutual exchange that are being threatened.”

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