Why isn't science deemed essential? Column

Hank Campbell | USATODAY

In 1968, after CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite formally came out against the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson was apocryphally to have said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."

For President Obama, that analogy might apply to TMZ. The celebrity gossip show, upon learning that the NASA website was down due to the government shutdown, mocked the administration for blaming it all on Republicans by stating, "Ann Romney: She's the reason we're not able to make sure there's still not water on Venus right now."

Americans and much of the news media, ostensibly on the side of the president before the shutdown, are now ridiculing Obama right along with the House Republicans.

When chief White House photographer Pete Souza posted a somber grayscale picture of a meeting in the Oval Office on the social media site Twitter, Joseph Weisenthal, executive editor off Business Insider, was prompted to retweet, "Eek. Shutdown forcing photographs to be in black and white."

There's no question that some of the administration's decisions on what to shut down have been downright silly.

The non-essentials

For example, two weeks ago the Navy Athletics Twitter account announced that the "Department of Defense suspends all intercollegiate competitions at the Service Academies," even though during the 1995 shutdown, all the academies played. Mount Vernon, the home of our first president, George Washington, is privately owned, so the administration can't close that. Instead, officials closed the parking lot.

Science has fared no better in this shutdown culture war. In his 2009 inaugural address, the president promised to "restore science to its rightful place." Now Obama is treating American science as so non-essential that only 300 of the National Science Foundation's 2,000 employees are as valuable as the 436 people he needs at the White House.

In the case of the science foundation, the essential employees include security guards and a few IT people to monitor the site they took down anyway.

NASA's website also has a splash page lamenting the budget crisis, and the National Zoo's giant panda cam is shut down. Fear not, the Smithsonian Institution is still feeding its animals; the panda cam shutdown is just adding to the perception that government institutions are given lunch money each day.

Zombie apocalypse

Regarding the government science projects on hiatus, the concern is that a few days of government political theater mean years of setbacks. Yet in some cases, science media are clearly engaging in hyperbole.

Food outbreaks happen all the time, yet suddenly it's a zombie apocalypse because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention didn't send out an e-mail about a "major food borne illness" outbreak as they always do. Oh, wait, yes they did. The poultry in this case is safe to eat; you just have to make sure you cook it properly, which is always the case with chicken.

Would anything the government is not doing have prevented these 317 salmonella illnesses linked to raw chicken?

No, that's not even a major outbreak: 48 million Americans get sick from food-borne illnesses each year, but the implication is that such outbreaks won't happen once the budget issue is resolved.

If the president believes that science is essential, why does he not declare it essential? More than 80% of the federal government is still working, but 97% of NASA is not. Because all government workers are still going to get paid, it isn't saving any money, and if science projects are truly at risk, the president should be willing to protect them the same way millions of other projects have been protected.

All politicians say science is a strategic resource, as vital for the 21st century as oil and food have been in the past. If so, it shouldn't be penalized arbitrarily.

The National Optical Astronomy Observatory is preparing to furlough its employees in Arizona, but its employees in Chile will remain on the job. Chilean labor laws forbid unpaid furloughs. There's no reason that Chile has more sensible laws about funding than the U.S. does.

Hank Campbell is the founder of Science 2.0 and co-author with Alex Berezow of Science Left Behind.

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