Abstract
President Trump and his administration have been regarded by news outlets and scholars as one of the most hostile administrations towards scientists and their work. However, no study to-date has empirically measured how federal scientists perceive the Trump administration with respect to their scientific work. In 2018, we distributed a survey to over 63,000 federal scientists from 16 federal agencies to assess their perception of scientific integrity. Here we discuss the results of this survey for a subset of these agencies: Department of Interior (DOI) agencies (the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the US Geological Survey, and the National Park Service); the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); the Food and Drug Administration (FDA); and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). We focus our analysis to 10 key questions fitting within three core categories that relate to perceptions of integrity in science. Additionally, we analyzed responses across agencies and compare responses in the 2018 survey to prior year surveys of federal scientists with similar survey questions. Our results indicate that federal scientists perceive losses of scientific integrity under the Trump Administration. Perceived loss of integrity in science was greater at the DOI and EPA where federal scientists ranked incompetent and untrustworthy leadership as top barriers to science-based decision-making, but this was not the case at the CDC, FDA, and NOAA where scientists positively associated leadership with scientific integrity. We also find that reports of political interference in scientific work and adverse work environments were higher at EPA and FWS in 2018 than in prior years. We did not find similar results at the CDC and FDA. These results suggest that leadership, positive work environments, and clear and comprehensive scientific integrity policies and infrastructure within agencies play important roles in how federal scientists perceive their agency's scientific integrity.
Highlights
The use and misuse of science in policy development has spurred a long-standing discussion about the proper role of science and scientists in government decision-making
We examined the degree to which over 3,700 federal scientists working across five federal agencies perceive scientific integrity to be upheld at their agencies by analyzing responses to survey questions that inform the three categories identified as contributing to maintaining scientific integrity in the workplace
We compared responses over time using survey data collected under prior administrations for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)
Summary
The use and misuse of science in policy development has spurred a long-standing discussion about the proper role of science and scientists in government decision-making. Scientists working for the federal government conduct, synthesize, and communicate scientific information that informs, guides, and directs policy action on issues with implications for public health and safety (e.g., the effects of climate change, the safety and efficacy of new drugs) This process has allowed government decisions to be better informed by scientific evidence producing great societal benefits [2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Scientific input from experts such as scientific advisory committees, academic scholars, or interdepartmental consultations, along with input from the public, can lead to robust and informed policy decisions Such expert-informed and participatory structures prove difficult in systems of government that have high concentrations of power in the executive branch, such as the US [14, 15]. Political decisions that are not informed by science are not as likely to benefit society and, in some cases, may cause undue harm to the public
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