Abstract
The agencies of the government of the United States of America, such as the Food and Drug Administration or the Environmental Protection Agency, intervene in American society through the collection, processing, and diffusion of information. The Presidency of Barack Obama was notable for updating and redesigning the US government’s information infrastructure. The White House enhanced mass consultation through open government and big data initiatives to evaluate policy effectiveness, and it launched new ways of communicating with the citizenry. In this essay we argue that these programs spelled out an emergent epistemology based on two assumptions: dispersed knowledge and a critique of judgment. These programs have redefined the evidence required to justify and design regulatory policy and conferred authority to a new kind of expert, which we call epistemic consultants.
Highlights
The central claim of this essay is that the administration of Barack Obama adopted a picture of knowledge that disempowered experiential forms of expertise and endorsed what we call epistemic consultants
In this essay we argue that the picture of knowledge that emerged during the Obama administration prescribed certain knowledge ways, and we show by what institutional mechanisms, agencies, and actors these were implemented in the government of the United States of America
As organized science sets out to claim a monopoly of authority, science studies scholars counter it with pleas for public engagement and for extending our definition of expertise (Collins and Evans 2002 famously set this as the problem for contemporary sociology of science.) Our essay shows that the Obama administration’s implicit answer to the question “who is the expert?” matches neither the ambitions of scientist advocacy groups nor the counsel of its sociological critics
Summary
A feature of contemporary policymaking in the United States is the increasing reliance on mechanisms of administrative control. The White House complied with the demands of Congress and accepted curbs on the office’s actions, including subjecting the nomination of directors to Congressional confirmation (Harris and Milkis 1996; Morrison 1986) It was under these new rules that President George H. 1 3 and instead created an adhoc Council on Competitiveness to supervise the Office’s actions During his administration there were few notable changes to OIRA’s functioning, and the Office kept its reputation as an agent of the Republican White House’s constraining of the regulatory state. OIRA intruded into rulemaking by imposing to agencies new standards of evidence—including retrospective evaluation, experimentation, and data analytics These new standards were justified as privileging a more robust set of knowledge ways touted as “data-driven, evidence-based regulation and to select approaches on the basis of empirical findings, rather than intuition, anecdote, or guesswork” (OMB 2010). OIRA’s presentation before the agencies it oversaw was that of an epistemic authority, a knowledge overseer
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