There are a lot of ways that former presidents have allegedly censored science or the public in the past. Usually, though, they spread it out a little so as not to be obvious. Not Trump. You can explore the different shades of censorship during his eight-month tenure using just examples from last week.
Last Sunday, we learned that Trump disbanded an advisory group charged with helping policymakers and the private sector incorporate the findings of the National Climate Assessment. The group pledged to keep meeting without official White House blessing, giving us hope that the public won’t be cut off from vital climate info. This is the third scientific advisory board to be disbanded by the Trump administration.
The next day, it was reported that Trump halted funding for a study on the health impacts of mountaintop removal mining, killing an attempt to understand the threats facing those coal miners he loves so much.
On Wednesday, the Bay Journal announced that it was losing its EPA funding, putting the future of the 27 year old Chesapeake Bay-focused paper in jeopardy. Pruitt has made assurances that the EPA still cares about cleaning up the Bay, but apparently it doesn’t care about keeping the public informed. Also on Wednesday, it was reported that the National Institute of Health scrubbed the term “climate change” from its site.
Then on Thursday came a triple-whammy. As explained by Vox, Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s grid study showed how political editing can censor out inconvenient facts, and how politicians can ignore the findings and say whatever they want about the study.
Meanwhile, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s “sham review” of national monuments showed how easy this administration finds censoring the public. There were literally millions of comments that were opposed to the administration’s plan of shrinking or eliminating monuments, but Zinke wrote them off as part of a “well-organized national campaign.” Instead of listening to the public, Zinke chose to do what he wanted in the first place, and used a handful of pro-industry comments as justification for shrinking protected lands.
Thursday’s third example came in a simple tweet: “This is what censorship looks like”. It looks like that in order to meet the president’s budget language restrictions, some scientists are being asked to remove the words “climate change” from the abstracts of grant proposals.
Then Friday, in addition to Vice publishing the FOIA’d details about the climate scientists who weren’t allowed to meet with Mark Zuckerberg, a small blurb in Politico’s Morning Energy reported that EPA leadership has decided employees can’t use social media except for a specific business purpose.
We’d put an ask out on Facebook and Twitter about how staff members feel about this, but apparently only Trump is allowed to use social media while at work.
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