Knowledge is Bad for You (v.2.0)

Unless industry puts its Seal of Approval ™ on it.

Now President Bush's Office of Management and Budget has crafted a far more subtle way to assure that policies that serve the president's political donors will move forward, while those less favored will suffer endless delay.

The dangerous proposal is buried in an OMB Bulletin on peer review dated Aug. 29, 2003 -- not something scientists usually peruse. The Bulletin, if finally adopted, would place the OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in the position of approving the scientific peer review used by all executive branch agencies for "all significant regulatory-science documents."

Peer review not bad in and of itself; but rule states reviewers must be "independent of the agency". Op Ed goes on:

To grasp the implications of this radical departure, one must recognize that in the United States there are effectively two pots of money that support science: one from government and one from industry. (A much smaller contribution comes from charitable foundations.) If one excludes scientists supported by the government, including most scientists based at universities, the remaining pool of reviewers will be largely from industry -- corporate political supporters of George W. Bush.

Hence the goal of the proposed peer review rules is chillingly similar to this administration's earlier efforts to stack Federal Advisory Committees with industry scientists. Where interests of the public and of industry conflict, the scientific advice our government receives will be far more likely to serve the interests of industry than the interests of the whole population.

Scientific study is THE way to see environmental and health (at least) dangers as they appear on the horizon. Always has been. The sort of sweeping-under-the-rug delays that this rule would cause will seriously hamper our ability to know what the problems are, much less actually get about to solving them.

Chillling indeed. Chris Mooney has more analysis and promises more, via Calpundit.