Bush Administration Science Abuses

After President Bush's 2004 reelection, scientists noticed that the problem was becoming even worse. One example was Bush's appointment of George Deutsch, a twenty-four-year-old Texas A&M University dropout and Bush campaign intern, to a key position in NASA's public relations department. Deutsch set to work muzzling NASA's top climate scientist. James Hansen, once refusing to allow Hansen to interview with National Public Radio because it was "the most liberal" media outlet in the country^^ and telling a Web site contractor that the word "theory" had to be inserted after every mention of the Big Bang on NASA Web site presentations being prepared for middle school students. The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Deutsch told the contractor. "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator. This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA." Deutsch later resigned after it was revealed that he had fabricated his own academic credentials.

Other Bush public relations appointees were muzzling scientists at other agencies, or altering scientific information in official agency reports to fit a preconceived ideological agenda,^* angering and dismaying many in the American science enterprise who saw these tactics as antithetical to what America stands for.

The problem became so widespread and so broadly reported that in early 2007, the House Oversight committee held hearings investigating the alleged distortions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was forced to discontinue a project called Programs That Work, which identified sex education programs found to be effective in scientific studies, none of which were abstinence-based. On the National Cancer Institute's Web site, breast cancer was falsely linked to abortion. The so-called morning-after pill (Plan B), an emergency contraceptive that prevents ovulation after unprotected sex and may in rare circumstances prevent an already-fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus, was held back from FDA approval for over-the-counter sale even though scientists and physicians had judged it to be safe and determined that it was actually likely to reduce the number of abortions. "Faith based" initiatives like abstinence-only sex education were federally funded, even when they were contradicted or shown ineffective by science. And business-cozy FDA administrators failed to remove the arthritis drug rofecoxib (Vioxx) from the market even after it became apparent that it was causing heart attacks, resulting in more than fifty thousand American deaths—nearly as many as the number of American soldiers who died in Vietnam—and made calls to a government whistle-blower-protection attorney and a leading medical journal in an attempt to discredit the scientist who brought the problem to light.

From prohibiting studies that didn't fit their agenda, to refusing to approve drugs approved by the FDA, "faith-based initiatives", etc, etc.