Abstract

THE JUNK SCIENCE OF GEORGE W. BUSH

The author argues that the administration of U.S. president George W. Bush is engaged in a campaign to suppress science and dismantle environmental protection measures, while promoting the interests of big business. The Bush White House is purging, censoring and blacklisting scientists and engineers whose work threatens the profits of the Administration's corporate paymasters or challenges the ideological underpinnings of their radical anti-environmental agenda, indeed, so extreme is this campaign that more than sixty scientists, including Nobel laureates and medical experts, released a statement on February 18 that accuses the Bush Administration of deliberately distorting scientific fact "for partisan political ends." Led by the President, the Republicans have gutted scientific research budgets and politicized science within the federal agencies. In a dramatic expansion of this disturbing strategy, the Bush Administration now plans to systematically turn government science over to private industry by contracting out thousands of science jobs to compliant consultants already in the habit of massaging data to support corporate profits. The Bush Administration has so violated and corrupted the institutional culture of government agencies charged with scientific research that it could take a generation for them to recover their integrity even if Bush is defeated this fall.