Without data accountability, how do we call the right shots?
The Kansas City Star
Like much of America, we were surprised by President Donald Trump’s speech to Congress Tuesday. Where was the argumentative, contradictory Trump we’ve come to know? In his place stood a president presenting a coherent, if broad, outline for congressional action on a host of important issues. In tone and performance, Trump finally exhibited some qualities we expect from the nation’s chief executive.
We have no idea if this Trump was the real Trump. It’s possible the president will relapse into meaningless rhetorical battles with his perceived enemies. A man who conducts his presidency via Twitter can’t ask the rest of us to stop focusing on trivial things.
And there was much to dislike in the policy pronouncements Trump outlined, particularly on immigration and education. The president’s plans to spend more on defense and infrastructure will collide with his promise to cut taxes and with his own party’s longstanding pledge to reduce the deficit.
But there were important places in the speech where Americans of good faith can find a toehold for discussion. Congress should grab these opportunities:
While still supporting repeal of the Affordable Care Act, Trump said his proposed replacement would include tax credits for Americans to purchase insurance, help for the states providing Medicaid coverage and a guarantee that Americans with pre-existing medical conditions could obtain coverage at a reasonable cost. That’s Obamacare-lite.
The president proposed spending $1 trillion for infrastructure repairs. Congress must find funding for such a program — tax credits for private businesses, along with toll roads, are non-starters. But our roads and bridges need attention.
Trump endorsed paid family leave, federal help for child care and investing in women’s health. Congress should deliver.
At the same time, lawmakers should walk away from some of Trump’s ideas.
An increase in defense spending may be needed, but 9 percent is unaffordable.
President Trump wants additional federal support for school choice. The federal government cannot abandon free public education.
He promised to protect air and water quality, a laughable commitment given his appointment of Scott Pruitt, a pollution enabler, to run the Environmental Protection Agency.
Before his speech, the president told TV news anchors he was open to a compromise on immigration that could provide legal status for millions of immigrants already in the U.S. A CNN report Wednesday said the suggestion was an insincere false flag. Still, Congress should pursue this middle ground anyway.
Trump’s call for an office focused on helping victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants is dehumanizing and unnecessary. All violent crime is horrific.
Finally, tone. We applaud the president’s denunciation of last week’s Olathe shooting. The Justice Department should vigorously pursue any hate crime.
We also support Trump’s call for unity, but he must start by looking for it within his party. For eight years, Barack Obama begged Republicans for help. They refused.
It isn’t realistic to expect Democrats to reach across the aisle just yet.
It is reasonable to expect Trump to behave like a president. Tuesday, at long last, he showed that is possible. ast week, the U.S. Senate confirmed Scott Pruitt as Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Despite environmentalists’ concerns about his qualifications, at least one aspect of Pruitt’s stated agenda is something everyone can agree on: Bring back scientific transparency to the Agency.
Many people may be surprised to find that the EPA doesn’t even own, nor does it have access to, much of the data informing the basis of its most impactful regulations. The trouble stems largely from EPA research grants, which fail to require the entirety of researchers’ findings be released to the federal agency. And Trump certainly hasn’t helped matters of transparency after imposing a gag order on EPA scientists in his first week in office.
EPA staff admitted to their agency’s meager access to information after being unable to produce raw air pollution data requested under a 2013 Congressional subpoena. Part of the data in question belonged to Harvard University, where researchers tied air pollution to deaths in 6 U.S. cities. Since its publication, the study has been an integral vehicle for EPA efforts to constrict air quality regulations.
That the data supporting upwards of $65 billion in regulatory oversight is “held solely by… outside research institutions” and never scrutinized by their funding agencies is troubling, to say the least. Policy generally shouldn’t be based on secret data.
In 2009, researchers with Stanford University found that roughly 2 percent of scientists intentionally fabricated, falsified, or modified data at some point in their career. Roughly one third admit to lesser, but certainly still impactful, forms of scientific misconduct.
And if government toleration of widespread fraud is too jarring a prospect, consider this: a pair of Dutch statisticians found that almost every academic in the field of psychology had published research containing a minor statistical error in the last two decades.
A major tenant of science is the replication of previous results to assure their validity. With a federal government disinterested in obtaining raw data to compare to future research, no one can know if the initial results of any study were obtained by chance, manipulation, or accurate science, or if attempts to address an underlying environmental problem are having any effect at all.
EPA awards research grants in fields complimentary to its mission — air and water quality, climate change, and chemical safety, to name a few. Upwards of 750 research projects have been dependent on the agency’s funding in the last 5 years. And if none of the resulting studies are able to be validated, our foundation of knowledge is a lot less stable than we think.
It would be ludicrous to suggest that all federally-funded research is meritless simply because it avoids governmental scrutiny. After all, scientists must submit a robust quality assurance plan before the grant-funded research process can begin. But we must entertain the very real possibility that without transparency, we have no way of knowing which results are valuable, and which contain a fatal flaw.
The EPA certainly isn’t the only entity guilty of accepting published findings as unquestionable fact. California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment admittedly relies on the findings of a controversial foreign body — the International Agency for Research on Cancer — to direct some of its own policies. IARC has previously stated that working at night belongs in the same category of carcinogenicity as toxic mold and gasoline. It’s a laughable comparison.
Yet since California consumers represent more than 10 percent of the total U.S. population, the state’s reliance on IARC forces every retailer hoping to gain access to California’s vast market to bend to shoddy science.
There’s no doubt that some environmental regulations are accurate and necessary. But without data transparency, we can’t expect to devise the best possible solutions to the public health problems at hand.
Perhaps more ground may have been gained improving life expectancy by pursuing methods alternate to those imposed under the Clean Air Act. Until Pruitt can implement scientific and transparent scrutiny of EPA research, there is not much to be done but hold our breath and wait. JOSEPH PERRONE, SC.D. Jim Powell of Young Harris