It's Even Worse Than You Think

by David Cay Johnston

  Pruitt’s reluctance to go anywhere near health issues is not surprising. He has awards aplenty from groups like the Oklahoma Well Strippers Association. On the taxpayer dime he flew back and forth from the nation’s capital to his Oklahoma home, throwing in the cost of a side trip to attend a Colorado gathering of the Heritage Foundation, long a foe of fossil fuel industry regulations. Pruitt’s predecessor, Gina McCarthy, also flew to her home in Massachusetts. But unlike Pruitt, McCarthy paid her own way.

  At his Senate confirmation hearing, Pruitt could not recall ever receiving an award from an environmental or public health group. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, said Pruitt may also be the only prosecutor in America who does not keep a record of successful cases, his official website as Oklahoma attorney general showing not a single case brought against a polluter. Pruitt said he hadn’t checked his official website so he couldn’t say.

  Asked about his contacts with energy industry sources, Pruitt was evasive at his confirmation hearing. He said as Oklahoma attorney general he taught government officials how to comply with requests for records. Whitehouse repeatedly tried to get Pruitt to explain why his office had not responded after two years to requests for the emails and other public documents.

  “I actually have a general counsel and an administrator in my office that are dedicated to performing or providing responses to Open Records requests,” Pruitt said.

  Whitehouse was not buying that, saying snidely, “Not very dedicated, if it takes 740 days.” Pruitt then changed his tack, absolving himself of responsibility because “I’m not involved in that process. That is handled independently by the administrator and that general counsel in responding. So I can’t speak to the timeline and why it is taking that length of time.” He said he couldn’t provide the documents to the senators, either.

  It would come out later that Pruitt had exchanged more than three thousand emails with oil companies, industry groups, affiliates of the Koch brothers, and others from the fossil fuel industries. The Center for Media and Democracy, a liberal nonprofit media watchdog, and lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union fought for more than two years to get these emails, which were not available until after Pruitt got his expedited Senate confirmation hearing. No emails meant no hard questions about Pruitt’s conduct as Oklahoma’s top law enforcement official.

  Those emails, released after Pruitt was sworn in, show that he worked hand in glove with fossil fuel companies as Oklahoma attorney general. Nothing in the emails suggested any regard for public health, the focus being on maximizing fossil fuel industry profits by allowing the industry to shift the costs of pollution onto the society at large instead of taking responsibility to clean up.

  Interior Purging

  The attacks on science that advanced the interests of fossil fuel industries were not limited to the Environmental Protection Agency. Donald Trump’s political appointees also went after scientists who worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at the Commerce Department run by Secretary Wilbur Ross, at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and at the Interior Department. Managers and policy experts whose work touched on climate issues were purged. People whose job was to manage federal properties and wildlife in an era of rising temperatures, severe storms, and raging fires were also singled out in a drive to get them to quit.

  The purge at Interior began on Thursday evening June 15. At about 8 p.m. some fifty managers and senior executives received emails giving them new job assignments.

  Federal executives and managers get reassigned as the government’s needs change, but this was not like any previous redeployment. People whose skills the federal government had spent years or decades developing were not being moved into positions of greater or parallel responsibility. Instead they were reassigned to jobs well below their skill levels, often to jobs not connected with their education or work experience.

  Joel Clement was a senior federal executive, director of Interior’s Office of Policy Analysis. His work included advising the Interior Department about management of its assets. One of his areas involved rising sea levels in the American Arctic, where a half dozen small coastal villages were being battered by winter waves, their land in danger of being permanently underwater. Relocating the Native American residents to other federal lands was part of Clement’s portfolio.

  Knowledge gleaned from these North Bering Sea communities could be used to develop strategies to deal with rising ocean levels predicted for highly populated areas of America including Florida, the Gulf Coast, and the barrier islands on the eastern seaboard.

  Another part of his duties included working closely with the Denali Commission, created by Congress in 1998. In some years it spent as much as $150 million building health clinics, roads, oil and other fuel storage facilities, community electric power plants, and houses for teachers in some of the most remote areas of Alaska where extreme weather is the norm. Its budget when Trump took office was just $15 million. Trump’s first budget, the so-called skinny budget, cut that to zero.

  The White House also ended a long-term goal of Native Americans in Alaska to have representation on the Denali Commission board, which they finally were about to get when Trump became president. But with no commission there would be no seats at the government table, no opportunity for Native peoples to have a larger say in their relations with the federal government.

  In one of his executive orders, Trump included a clause rescinding an Obama executive order from December 2016 dealing with climate change in the North Bering Sea.

  * * *

  “We don’t work on greenhouse gas stuff, we work on stuff already baked into the system,” Clement explained to my reporter Jill Ambroz. “We have equities and assets to manage—wildlife assets, American Indians and Alaska natives, and how they are being affected by climate change.”

  Clement’s reassignment email came from James Cason, a Trump political appointee with the title of associate deputy secretary at Interior. Cason had also been a political during the George W. Bush administration.

  Clement was moved to the Office of Natural Resources Revenue, which is responsible for collecting, disbursing, and monitoring oil and gas royalty checks on federal and tribal lands. “It’s not my skill set and they’ve had to completely retrain me, reprogram me,” Clement said.

  Because his new post has nothing to do with his areas of knowledge, Clement figures he was expected to quit. The signal he got was clear: “The new administration wants to cut loose anyone doing stuff they don’t want to do.”

  Instead, he took a hundred hours of training in accounting at taxpayer expense. To his delight, others in his new office “are bending over backwards to help me in my new position. They had a stack of fan mail waiting for me!”

  He has also taken the new work seriously so as not to give any excuse for firing him while a whistle-blower complaint that he filed is reviewed as he tries to get his old job back. “I’m not just phoning it in. I have to be a Boy Scout because I have a pending complaint,” he said.

  While Clement was pondering what to do, his telephone began to ring. Fifty other Interior executives and managers were reaching out to one another trying to figure out why they were being reassigned to positions for which they were unsuited.

  To Clement it was clear that the incoming interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, who had not yet been confirmed by the Senate, “was going to use reassignments to trim personnel. I spoke to some others that night who had been reassigned. Dozens were. It’s never been done before and it could be unlawful. They did this to clear out people.”

  Zinke had been a one-term congressman, the only one representing Montana, after a career as a Navy SEAL followed by becoming a developer and serving on the board of an oil pipeline company.

  What struck Clement and others was that neither he nor his colleagues were climate scientists. They were administrators for the most part whose jobs included managing federal government assets. “We didn’
t understand why they were targeting work that was essential to our mission,” he said.

  One of Clement’s duties was to be Interior’s representative to the U.S. Global Change Research Program. There were representatives from thirteen federal agencies as well as state, county, and city officials. Congress mandated that the program produce a National Climate Assessment every four years.

  The final report was under review at the Trump White House. Clement and the many others who had some role in writing or reviewing it heard nothing back. “The concern is that it’s in review and it contradicts everything the White House is saying about climate change,” he said.

  The White House could have buried that report, but a copy had been provided to a nonprofit Internet library, and in August it was found by reporters at The New York Times, which published the 673-page document.

  The draft report noted that 2014 was the hottest year since records began being kept. It was succeeded by record warmth in 2015 and then again in 2016. Of the prior seventeen years, sixteen were the warmest on record for the planet. The report said that in recent decades temperatures rose more than at any time in the previous 1,700 years. It also said that human activity, notably burning carbon fuels that increase carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, explained the rising temperatures. Much of the report detailed how rising temperatures were adversely affecting the United States and what could be expected as the trend continued.

  * * *

  During the transition, it became clear that a purge of those who worked on climate change and fossil fuels issues was being contemplated. The Energy Department received a list of seventy-four questions that included a demand for the names of every federal civil servant or contractor who had attended meetings on ways to reduce burning of carbon fuels and any who worked on the Obama administration’s climate change action plan. The Obama administration rejected the request.

  The questionnaire evoked a much stronger response from Senator Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has long been critical of fossil fuel industry practices.

  “Any politically motivated inquisition against federal civil servants who, under the direction of a previous administration, carried out policies that you now oppose, would call into question your commitment to the rule of law and the peaceful transition of power,” Markey wrote. “Civil servants should never be punished for having executed policies with which a new administration disagrees.”

  Markey also warned that if any information gleaned from the questionnaire “is used to demote, sideline, terminate, or otherwise discriminate against federal civil servants whose only ‘crime’ was to execute the lawful policy directors of their supervisors, then your administration would violate U.S. law that protects employees against such wrongful acts of retaliation. Politically motivated employment decisions will erode the foundation of apolitical civil service and run counter to federal law.”

  It was civil service and whistle-blower laws that Clement and others cited in seeking to get back their executive, managerial, and professional positions at Interior and other agencies after the Trump administration began its purges.

  Clement says he and others misunderstood what Trump meant when he spoke of draining the swamp in Washington. “When they were talking about draining the swamp, we thought they were talking about lobbyists, but they meant civil servants . . . the civil servants were the swamp.

  “When your entire workforce is described as the swamp, morale is done,” he said. “People are walking around feeling devalued, targeted, like a group of people with Stockholm Syndrome. Trump’s cabinet and high-level office nominations demonstrate the desire to tear down the executive branch. They are making it impossible to implement the laws of Congress. They’ll be swimming in litigation. They won’t get much else done. They have tossed every guideline from ethics to personnel management.

  “When,” Clement asked, “will they be held accountable?”

  Stripping Science

  Scientists across the country and around the world were aghast at what they saw in Donald Trump’s first federal budget. It cut billions of dollars of spending, especially basic research and biomedicine, where huge advances in the last two decades have created vibrant economic growth. These cuts came as China, India, and other countries have been increasing their investments in scientific research and luring some American scientists to leave the United States by giving them well-funded laboratories and a free hand to hire their research staffs.

  John Holdren, a plasma physicist and 1981 MacArthur Genius Award winner who was President Obama’s science adviser, said there was much more at stake than the work of this or that scientist whose project would not be funded because of the proposed budget cuts. “The partial budget blueprint released by the White House will put U.S. leadership in science and technology at serious risk if Congress goes along,” Holdren warned.

  For America to lose its more than century-long leadership in science and technology would be a stunning blow to the economy and America’s influence and reputation. And yet Holdren was just one of many leading science policy experts who saw long-term disaster for the country in the Trump science and technology budget.

  Cutting spending on scientific research runs directly counter to Trump’s claim that he will create a robust economy with growth rates unseen in decades. The opening of one coal mine or even a hundred cannot come close to matching the economic benefits that can flow from a single research project. For example, federal spending to sequence the human genome has returned at least $140 for every dollar spent. That figure is conservative, Holdren said, and in any event will continue to grow as genomics produces more lifesaving medical advances, more techniques to improve the quality of life, and new insights that no one could imagine before the sequencing project.

  How, Holdren asked, does anyone look at the return on the genomics project and not propose greater spending or at least continued spending at existing levels? Beyond the economic growth benefits, what of the benefits of improved well-being and relief of suffering?

  Science gets little attention in the Trump administration, other than the ferreting out of scientists whose work offends Trump’s love of coal and steam, combined with his frequently expressed hostility to all things digital. Anything digital, he says, requires the brain of an Einstein, a curious remark for a man who has claimed to be one of the smartest human beings, to be “like a smart person,” and to possess the world’s greatest memory. Of course, that may explain his disdain for science. A man who has asserted that he is the world’s leading authority on more than a score of topics from taxes to ISIS and negotiating to nuclear missiles would not have much need for others to advise on science. And, on top of that, during a telephone call with the the prime minister of Australia, Trump described himself as “the world’s greatest person.”

  Whatever his expertise in science, Trump has little interest in spreading scientific knowledge. In its first eight months, the Trump administration did not release a single report or study by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. It also did not post any science news or announcements at the policy office webpage. The Obama White House, which embraced science, issued 125 reports and studies in eight years, nine of them in the first year, on a wide array of urgent scientific and technological issues.

  There was not much interest in hiring scientists to top policy posts, either. Of forty-six science positions requiring Senate confirmation, only sixteen were filled by summer’s end. Seven of those involved the military or nuclear energy. There were no nominees in environmental areas such as atmospheric, oceanic, and food safety science.

  Basic research has no obvious commercial applications, which is why government funds the work. But the reason America is rich is due in very large part to basic scientific research. Despite this and despite the rapid pace of expanding knowledge in other countries, basic science received a lower priority in the Trump administration budget than developing deadlier military weapons, devising new techniques for nation
al security, and helping companies develop profitable products and services.

  The American Association for the Advancement of Science gives an annual Golden Goose Award to encourage public understanding of basic research and how it can have big economic benefits. The 2016 award honored scientists who spent years studying the sexual activity of the screwworm fly. Now, there’s an easy area of science for know-nothing politicians and pundits to mock, and many did. The research results got a lot less attention. The scientists learned how to eradicate the pests, which can otherwise kill an otherwise healthy cow in two weeks. Today the price of beef is about 5 percent lower than if the little parasites were still infesting cattle herds.

  Discoveries made through fundamental research in biology, chemistry, genetics, mathematics, and physics have opened vast new areas of knowledge that enabled entrepreneurs to develop valuable commercial goods and services. More than a century of taxpayer-funded basic research made possible everything from jet engines that run for years without an overhaul to lithium batteries that power automobiles, from algorithms streaming movies on smartphones to the smartphones themselves. Advances in genomics and other biological sciences are beginning to deliver individually tailored cancer treatments. Take away those investments by taxpayers and most of the conveniences, tools, and lifesaving technologies of the twenty-first century would exist only in the pages of science fiction magazines.

  Trump’s first budget proposed lopping a fifth off the National Institutes of Health’s budget, a $6 billion reduction. Holdren said the budget should go up, not down. “In recent time a lot of economic growth has been driven by investments in a lot of the big advances in science, in biotech, genomics, and so on,” Holdren said.

  Many medical researchers complain that tight budgets hold back scientific advances because only safe projects get funded, not the moonshot gambles that when they work change the world. The National Institutes of Health in recent years has funded only about 16 percent of the projects that review panels of experts said are top-notch. With only one project in six getting any funding from the NIH, the incentive for researchers is to have their labs work on incremental advances of existing knowledge, not the foundations of medical knowledge.