Appointees in NASA Press Office Blamed

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/02/AR2008060202698.\
html?nav=rss_politics

An investigation by the NASA inspector general found that political
appointees in the space agency's public affairs office worked to
control and distort public accounts of its researchers' findings about
climate change for at least two years, the inspector general's office
said yesterday.

The probe came at the request of 14 senators after The Washington Post
and other news outlets reported in 2006 that Bush administration
officials had monitored and impeded communications between NASA
climate scientists and reporters.

James E. Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space
Studies and has campaigned publicly for more stringent limits on
greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, told The Post and
the New York Times in September 2006 that he had been censored by NASA
press officers, and several other agency climate scientists reported
similar experiences. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration are two of the government's lead agencies on climate
change issues.

From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said, NASA's public
affairs office "managed the topic of climate change in a manner that
reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made
available to the general public." It noted elsewhere that "news
releases in the areas of climate change suffered from inaccuracy,
factual insufficiency, and scientific dilution."

Officials of the Office of Public Affairs told investigators that they
regulated communication by NASA scientists for technical rather than
political reasons, but the report found "by a preponderance of the
evidence, that the claims of inappropriate political interference made
by the climate change scientists and career public affairs officers
were more persuasive than the arguments of the senior public affairs
officials that their actions were due to the volume and poor quality
of the draft news releases."

The political interference did not extend to the research itself or
its dissemination through scientific journals and conferences, the
investigators said. "We found no evidence indicating NASA blocked or
interfered with the actual research activities of its climate
scientists," the report said, but as a result of the actions of the
political appointees, "trust was lost, at least temporarily, between
the agency and some of its key employees and perhaps the public it
serves."
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Kristin Scuderi, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science
and Technology Policy, said in an e-mail that director John H.
Marburger III "would not comment until he's reviewed the report, and
he has not yet done so yet. Therefore, OSTP has no comment at this time."

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), one of the senators who pressed for
the investigation, said in a statement that the report showed that
citizens had been denied access to critical scientific information
that should inform public policy.

"Global warming is the most serious environmental threat we face --
but this report is more evidence that the Bush Administration's
appointees have put political ideology ahead of science," Lautenberg
said. "Our government's response to global warming must be based on
science, and the Bush Administration's manipulation of that
information violates the public trust."