OPINION/COMMENTARY

Senate Mounts Sneak Attack on Sound Science

In a behind-the-scenes move with far reaching implications, the Senate Appropriations Committee last week approved a bill including language that would shield one of the federal government’s most important scientific agencies from legal requirements mandating integrity in government science. A clause in the annual appropriations bill for the Department of Commerce and other agencies (S. 2809) would exempt research produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from complying with the Federal Data Quality Act, which requires that data circulated by federal agencies conform to standards of scientific integrity.

“This quiet ploy is clearly aimed at avoiding the inevitable lawsuits exposing the junk science, much of it traceable to NOAA, which has been employed in government publications in recent years, including two alarmist global warming reports,” said Christopher C. Horner, Senior Fellow and Counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “The apparent strategy here – that any agency or department report using NOAA science will now be above the law – guts existing data quality rules in the very context which forced Congress to enact them in the first place.”....