Throughout history, special interests have worked studiously to deny, distort, or manipulate science to interfere with policy outcomes and rig the game so that they may continue profiting, usually at the expense of public health or environmental quality. The tobacco and fossil fuel industries have perhaps most infamously used these strategies to avoid public scrutiny and maintain the status quo. Sadly, the outcome is the delay or obstruction of science-based policies intended to protect the public.

That is the theme of a hearing tomorrow at the House Natural Resources Committee, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee: “The Denial Playbook: How Industries Manipulate Science and Policy from Climate Change to Public Health.” The committee took care to show the breadth of these disinformation campaigns by featuring witnesses whose lives have been directly impacted by science denial on climate, chemical exposure, opioids, and the risks of playing football. Among the witnesses are Dr. David Michaels, expert on this phenomenon and author of Doubt Is Their Product, Chris Borland, a UCS science champion who ended his career with the NFL after concerns about chronic traumatic encephalopathy that NFL attempted to bury, Alexandra Precup, a Puerto Rico native displaced by Hurricane Maria, and Ryan Hampton, a national addiction recovery advocate. In their stories, we will hear the human cost of the use of the disinformation playbook, the piece that is too often left out of conversations about unethical corporate behavior.

The Playbook takes On a new meaning under the Trump administration

We outlined the different plays used by these special interests to interfere with the science in our Disinformation Playbook. The Trump administration has been notoriously anti-science and on a deregulation warpath, and has engaged in a whole suite of sleazy behaviors including burying data, scrubbing scientific information from agency websites, delaying or cancelling the release of important scientific studies, stacking science advisory committees, forbidding scientists from attending conferences, and the list goes on (and on). The tricky thing is figuring out which came first: the focus on deregulation or the infiltration of corporate interests at top posts at the federal agencies.

President Trump and his political appointees have embraced the use of one play in particular that we call “The Fix:” manipulating government officials or processes to inappropriately influence policy. This has played out through the revolving door of former employees of big industry entering the government to work on the same issues they previously worked on and then doing the bidding of their former employer or business associate. The use of this play on a range of issues has led to the rollback of protections that were in place to protect us from pollution in the air we breathe to contaminants in the products with which our children play. While corporate interests seem to only think in terms of dollars, cents, and green money bags, there are real victims who are suffering as a direct result of these destructive policy changes.

Here are just five of the myriad ways the Trump administration has enabled special interests to interfere in science-based policymaking:

Government officials should not be in cahoots with the industries they are regulating if there is to be any objectivity and independence in evidence-based decisionmaking. As I laid out above, when industry interference prevents government from making decisions based on science, it undermines our democracy and the public suffers.

I will be attending the hearing and livetweeting from tomorrow’s event, so be sure to follow @UCSUSA if you don’t already and tune in for updates. I would also urge you to write to your member of congress if they are on the House Natural Resources Committee to show your support for strong congressional oversight and for paying attention to this incredibly important issue of the real-life impacts of science denial. Click here to see if your representative is on the committee. If they’re not, you still have an important role to play—all representatives can help encourage and support House committees to make full use of their responsibility to hold agencies accountable for serving the public, not special interests. Take action here to tell your representatives that they need to conduct more oversight on government agencies to ensure that special interests aren’t dictating what should be science-based policies.

Posted in: Science and Democracy Tags: chlorpyrifos, disinformation playbook, endangered species, fuel efficiency standards, mercury, the fix



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