By By Dan Vergano

USA Today

Aug. 5, 2009

Science and politics mix badly, a bipartisan report said Wednesday. It called for changes to federal agencies and expert panels to keep the subjects apart.

The "Science for Policy Project," headed by the former House Science Committee chief Sherwood Boehlert, a retired Republican from New York, and Don Kennedy, former editor of Science, suggests conflict over stem cells, climate and other science "has left the U.S. with a system that is plagued by charges that science is being 'politicized.' "

For example, President Bush's decision in 2001 not to sign a climate treaty on economic grounds inflamed charges that science was being ignored. The discovery that a Bush administration lawyer had edited climate science summaries (critics argued he softened the certainty of global warming) in 2005 further alarmed scientists.

In March, President Obama released "scientific integrity" guidelines for federal scientists, saying the "public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions."

The new bipartisan report's recommendations call for changes at agencies and the roughly 1,000 committees that provide science advice to the federal government, which can exert tremendous influence on government decisions. Report recommendations include:

• Federal agencies should explicitly distinguish between science and policy questions, such as costs or legalities, in rule-making. For example, a 2000 debate over arsenic in drinking water, which hinged on filtering costs, turned into a dispute over how much cancer risk the chemical posed.
• Panel scientists should be selected through a public process with added requirements for disclosing financial conflicts.
• Scientific advisory panels should not recommend regulations but give science background to decision options.
• Studies that panels use should be transparent to the public, not treated as business secrets unless strictly needed.

"Following the recommendations in this report should make it more difficult for policymakers to hide behind science in what are, in reality, disputes over policy," says Al Teich of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., who was not part of the panel. "In practice, however, it's not always easy."

"It's difficult in some cases to distinguish science from policies, but now there are no incentives not to," says David Goldston of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, which sponsored the report.

Former Bush science official James Connaughton calls the report recommendations sensible. "Scientists just aren't aware of the legal, ethical, economic, political and all the other factors that go into a decision."

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/ethics/2009-08-05-science-politics_N.htm

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Science for Policy Project