White House Respect for Science and Reality
The White House staff’s respect for C.J. is, of course, well-earned. Press Secretary is one of the toughest jobs in all of politics, and those who hold the post must constantly walk a tightrope with no net – and there’s a pool of piranha on one side and a velociraptor pen on the other.
The White House Press Room is where the world gets its clearest indication of what a president is thinking and who the president is listening to, based on what the press secretary passes along. And one specific domain of thought and deference has risen above all others in recent years: a president’s respect for scientific truth.
At this writing, the threat of the coronavirus pandemic looms large, not only over the United States but the planet itself. And the parade of misinformation, disinformation and outright bullshit that has issued forth from the Trump White House press room has been staggering.
In fairness, that press room has seen less activity than any other administration in modern history, and one doesn’t need any of its many press secretaries to know what Trump is thinking – all one needs is a Twitter account. But the questions of who a president listens to and whether or not we know about it are all the more pressing for the Trump Administration’s disinterest in the views of experts.
When is it okay to lie from the podium?
As it turns out, the Bartlet White House isn’t sinless when it comes to misleading the press. It happened for the first time when the CIA was caught napping as a massive armed confrontation between Indian and Pakistani troops suddenly erupted, and Bartlet and Leo and Toby elected to keep C.J. out of the loop initially – sending her into the press room, for all practical purposes, to lie.1 Toby tried to smooth it over...
“I was warned that coming to talk to you might be insulting to your professionalism,” he says upon entering her office.
“Well, you wouldn't want to do that.” She’s clearly still very pissed.
“I wasn't ready for the press yet,” he says, as if that makes anything better.
“Could've told me that before sending me in there,” she replies.
“C.J.-”
“I flatly denied it,” she says, cutting him off. “I said I was in the Oval Office ten minutes ago and nothing's going on.”
“They don't think you lied to them.”
“I know that,” she answers. “They think you lied to me, which is what happened. They don't know me. I'm from nowhere. I was just starting to get credible. I was just starting to get their respect. You know how long it's going to take me to get it back?”
“There's a concern-”
“‘Don’t ask C.J., she doesn’t know anything!’”
“-there is a concern that you're too friendly with the press.”
“Really.”
“We know it's important that you have a friendly relationship with them-”
“It's important for all of us!”
“I don't disagree.”
“Does this have to do with Danny Concannon?”
“People see you with Danny-”
“This is outrageous!”
“This is one time, and if we erred, it's on the side of trying to-”
“You sent me in there uninformed so that I'd lie to the press-”
“We sent you in there uninformed because we thought there was a chance you couldn't.”
Is it ever okay to lie to the press?
In the scene above, the consensus of Bartlet and Leo and Toby was that they needed to stall on speaking on the record about the India-Pakistan confrontation until they knew more about what was happening and had time to plan their response. For C.J. to get the question and tell the truth would have been politically disastrous, eroding confidence in the White House for purely circumstantial reasons. Such a lie is ethically gray, but understandable.
Lying to the press for political reasons is one thing; what about changing the story when it’s science, rather than politics, that are at stake?
Science denial isn’t just routine in the US at this point; it seems to be a plank in the GOP platform. And taking an anti-science stance from a White House podium isn’t simply failing to be forthcoming; it erodes public confidence in professional expertise. That goes beyond the moment – it can do lasting damage.
Leo himself indulges in this editing of science, having his own showdown with C.J. Will Bailey reveals to the two of them that Reuters has a story saying that the White House deleted two paragraphs from an EPA report on energy usage because the language was critical of the coal industry.
Leo tells Will and C.J. that it was he who cut the paragraphs. C.J. wants to back-pedal it, but Leo stands firm: “‘The report will reflect administration views.’ That’s the line.”
C.J. gets the question in the next press briefing.
“Sources at the EPA say the White House censored language from a report critical of coal-based energy. Does the White House feel that’s appropriate?”
“The White House feels the EPA report will reflect administration views,” C.J. dutifully replies.
“Not the EPA’s views. Their draft cited stunted trees, poisoned fish and wildlife as just some of the problems with coal. Hasn’t this president always-”
“The final report will lay out views on a range of issues.”
“Why did the White House tamper with an independent report?”
“I’ve addressed that.”
“No, you haven’t. Why is all independent analysis subject to White House censorship?”
“I don’t accept your premise.”
“Doesn’t the EPA have the right-”
“I’m sure you all look forward to reading the actual report.”
“I’ve read both drafts, the censored one and the original. Are you defending-”
“If there was interference with an independent report, that was obviously a mistake.”
C.J., surfing for dear life toward a beach she doesn’t want to be on, has now incurred Leo’s wrath.
“They had both drafts,” she explains to Leo later. “There was nothing I could do.”
“I gave you the line. Who said you could drop it?”
They proceed to argue over “clean coal,” which C.J. considers mythical, but Leo defends on the basis of less environmentally harmful byproducts.
“When I give you the line, that’s the line,” he says definitively.
“Not when no one will believe it.”
“You’re going to put out a statement in your own name,” he declares. “It’s going to say what you should have said in that briefing room, that we stand behind that report.”
“That’s saying I wasn’t speaking for this White House,” she replies.
“You weren’t,” he says. “On my desk within the hour.”
Ouch.
A War on Science
“Although scientific input to the government is rarely the only factor in public policy decisions, this input should always be weighed from an objective and impartial perspective to avoid perilous consequences. Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and implementing policies. The administration of George W. Bush has, however, disregarded this principle.”
~“Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking”, the Union of Concerned Scientists
The Right in the US has been growing steadily more authoritarian since Goldwater – and science isn’t the authoritarian’s friend. Social dominance is about emotion, and facts are very inconvenient when emotions are at stake.
The GOP’s pushback against science, learned testimony and professional expertise began with Reagan, when deregulation was the main course of the Right’s legislative agenda and those pesky scientific experts kept introducing inconvenient facts into deregulation proceedings. But the GOP’s anti-science penchant really hit its stride in 2001, with the Bush II administration.
While by no means the instigator of the Bush anti-science agenda, White House Science Advisor John Marburger was certainly its most visible exponent of it. It was he who responded to the Union of Concerned Scientists when they issued the document quoted above. That document, signed by more than 60 scientists and officials, highlighted the administration’s systematic distortions of information, suppression of reports, and ideological selectivity in advisory panel appointments. It was a damning document, underscoring that the Bush White House represented a new low in the dismantling of professional expertise in policymaking.
Chris Mooney documents the clash between Marburger and his UCS critics in 2005’s The Republican War on Science, a fact-packed, penetrating disclosure of the Right’s steady erosion of public faith in the integrity of science for political ends. He lists luminaries Paul Ehrlich, E.O. Wilson and Republican environmentalist Russell Train among the UCS signatories, and details egregious, persistent malfeasance in the Bush White House’s handling of scientific input into policy questions.
This malfeasance included modifications to the Endangered Species Act that made it harder to formally classify species and habitats in peril, over the objections of biologists; the jaw-dropping (and, in hindsight, outlandish) assertion that there was a connection between abortion and breast cancer; and documentation of the administration’s cherry-picking of advisory panelists, based on their friendliness to conservative doctrine.
Marburger – a scientist himself, and a good one – became the public face of the Bush White House in responding to the UCS, whose missive had made its way to every major news outlet. His replies were not those of a scientist, however, but a spinner - laced with evasions, missed points, and furtive misdirection. The UCS, for its part, grew louder, and found allies in Congress willing to sound the alarm – including Congressman Henry Waxman, who characterized the Bush Administration’s manipulations as “nothing more than the political creation of scientific uncertainty.”
The most egregious of Marburger’s sins, in the harsh light of history, was his politization of climate science, which artfully blurred the uncertainty lines by illuminating actual uncertainties about climate change while completely failing to mention the strong consensual conclusions of the scientific community. In this, he was following his boss’s lead, but it put the lie to his perpetual claim that he was just a messenger – certainly not a spinner! - and his denials that he had any trace of a partisan agenda.
“Such flagrant misrepresentation goes far beyond mere dishonesty,” wrote Mooney. “It demonstrates a gross disregard for the welfare of the American public, who Bush represent[ed], and for the population of the entire globe, whose fate depends in large measure on the behavior of the American behemoth.”
In late 2004, the Washington Post reported that the Bush White House had endeavored to suppress the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, the scientific work of eight collaborating nations, with 300 participating scientists, and that it had “repeatedly resisted even mild language that would endorse the report’s scientific findings.”
The effects of the Bush White House assault on science remain to this day, of course; even a pro-science Democratic president like Barack Obama faced a confused, untrusting public, making the justification of sound policy all the more difficult.
Obama’s Pandemics
Presidential dismissal or downplaying of scientific expertise over climate change (or any other public policy issue, for that matter) is certainly foolish, but it’s not hard to see why much of the public lets it pass; though the long-term consequences are catastrophic (perhaps even existential), they are years, perhaps decades in the future. Even the near-term impact fails to register in the minds of many; climate change is, to a large degree, abstract. Put another way, it’s hard for some people to be afraid of what they can’t see in front of them.
Public health risks are another matter. Pandemics, for instance, are both immediate and all too visible, as the world is learning as of this writing; the consequences are all around us, in the deaths of those afflicted, the daily barrage of media attention, the all-pervasive reminders like masks and hand sanitizer. If we drop that immediacy and threat into the mix with the conditions already mentioned – political expediency and the often-uncomfortable inconvenience of scientific fact – we're in a whole new territory.
And pandemics are just the highest-profile of the many public health concerns that present these days. Whether the threat is large or small, the question remains: Is it permissible, or even conscionable, to deny science and the advice of medical experts when public health is at stake?
The West Wing tackled this one in “Ellie”, a Season Two episode focusing on President Bartlet’s middle daughter, a medical student. After Dr. Millicent Griffith, the Surgeon General and a Bartlet family friend, says in an Internet interview that marijuana does not pose the same health risks as tobacco or alcohol, a firestorm erupts all around her, as this statement is at odds with the Bartlet Administration’s negative stance on legalization. Matters become worse when Ellie Bartlet publicly comes to Griffith’s defense: “My father won’t fire the Surgeon General. He would never do that.”
Now the president is fighting battles on two fronts: dealing with the political fallout from Dr. Griffith’s apparent contradiction of administration policy, and what he perceives as his daughter sticking her nose into politics where it doesn’t belong. Dealing with the former problem, Josh Lyman pays Griffith a visit and asks her to resign. She refuses; if the president wants her gone, he’ll have to fire her.
After the jaw-dropping behavior of the Bush Administration, the pro-science openness of the Obama years was all too welcome.
“The good news is that President Barack Obama’s administration, with a Nobel laureate as secretary of energy, a restored White House science adviser, and many other distinguished researchers in positions of major influence, represents a dramatic step forward for science and its role in public life,” wrote Chris Mooney in 2009, the year Obama took office. “The ‘reality-based community’ has been reinstated in Washington; after the Bush administration and its ‘war on science,’ it feels like a sunrise. Yet we can’t expect the long-standing gap between scientists and the broader American public to disappear overnight, meaning this is no time for satisfaction or complacency. If the metaphorical ‘war’ on science is over, now’s the time for the long and difficult process of ‘nation building’ - for laying sounder foundations to ensure it doesn’t come raging back.” (Little did he know!)
The Obama Administration was terrific on accurately framing climate issues with scientific integrity. Creating and implementing a Climate Change Action Plan in coordination with the 2015 Paris Agreement that united more than 200 countries in a commitment to address climate change, it was the culmination of years of effort not only to focus the nation’s considerable federal resources on the problem, but to engage the cooperation of mayors, governors, and businesses in the mission. It followed Obama’s participation in the Copenhagen Accord (2009) and his administration’s 2014 partnership with China in committing to reducing greenhouse gas emissions long-term.
Obama’s science advisor, John Holdren, was a climate change firebrand, in contrast to Marburger. A MacArthur Fellow with a Stanford doctorate in aerospace engineering and theoretical plasma physics, he came to the White House post with a bulging portfolio, having published on climate change policy in Scientific American and with the Brookings Institute. He had previously served as a science advisor to Bill Clinton, and took over as Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in March 2009 by a unanimous vote of the Senate.
He could not have been a more overt contrast to Marburger. His message on climate change (and many other policy areas with essential scientific dependencies) reached beyond the media into the Obama Administration’s effort to coordinate federal efforts with research and engineering initiatives around the world. More than an ambassador for science, he was a diplomatic troubleshooter, smoothing the path for alliances with other governments and private industry. Obama got the credit; it was Holdren who moved the mountains.
And then there were the pandemics - the eruption of Ebola in West Africa in 2014, which threatened the US when a man in Dallas, having traveled to the US from Africa, was found to have the virus. He died. Ten additional cases emerged; all but one recovered.
Ebola was more scare than reality in the US, but that didn’t stop Holdren; he went on PBS, describing high-tech measures to treat while containing; he met with private-sector scientists, preparing for the worst; and he led a task force created by executive order to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Five years earlier, a new virus – H1N1 – had appeared in the US, prompting Obama to declare a national emergency. More than 12,000 Americans died of the virus, but federal response was swift and effective; a vaccine was successfully deployed, and the crisis was ended by April 2010. Holdren’s role? To lead an effort to overall the vaccine distribution process to get to more people more quickly, an effort he openly presented to the media, to reassure the public.
Ah, the good old days...
Anthony Fauci in the Hot Seat
We have, then, two extremes: the expert voice in the White House that tells it straight and won’t back down, and the expert voice that dissembles and prevaricates for political gain.
But back in the Bartlet West Wing, it’s the expert telling it straight and the administration itself dissembling and prevaricating for political gain. In the end, however, Bartlet doesn’t disappoint. Griffith does offer her resignation, and they summarize the problem:
“On thinking about it, I felt your firing me would send a dangerous signal to whomever had my job next,” she explains.
“Did you not think that playing down the dangers of drug use sent a dangerous signal as well?” he asks.
“I do not believe that is what I did, sir,” she replies, and of course she’s correct; she’s grounding the debate back in the reality of the words actually spoken, defusing the political trimmings: “I was asked, by and large, if marijuana holds the same addictive properties as heroin or LSD; it does not. I was asked if marijuana poses a greater health risk than nicotine and alcohol, and in my opinion, it does not.”
And that brings us to another high-profile healthcare professional speaking truth to power, who in 2020 was faced with Griffith’s dilemma: Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an honest and effective scientist and administrator who served six administrations, having taken his post in 1984.
At age 79, Fauci faced the challenge of a lifetime for a professional of his particular specialty: the coronavirus and the global eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. That it happened while Fauci was the top-ranking epidemiologist in the US was certainly fortunate; that it happened on Donald Trump’s watch most certainly wasn’t. Fauci could not have been more equal to the task; Trump couldn’t have been less so.
Fauci, who had been at Barack Obama’s side through several pandemics had, in fact, predicted the coronavirus or something like it on the Trump watch: in January 2017, during an address to the Center for Global Health Science and Security at the Georgetown University Medical Center – 10 days before Trump’s inauguration – he said the following:
“If there’s one message that I want to leave with you today, based on my experience... there is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming administration in the arena of infectious diseases - both chronic infectious diseases, in the sense of already-ongoing disease, and we have certainly a large burden of that, but also there will be a surprise outbreak... History, and the history of the past 32 years that I’ve been the director of NIAID, will tell the next administration that there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that they will be faced with the challenges that their predecessors were faced with.” The title of the panel: “Pandemic Preparedness in the Next Administration.”
And when Fauci’s prediction came true in January 2020, it was he who stepped to the presidential podium to begin informing the public about the coronavirus; it was he who explained what it was and what it meant; it was he who outlined the steps necessary to limit the spread of the virus; it was he who offered up reasonable, fact-based predictions about what would happen next.
His narrative didn’t come close to matching Trump’s. In the early weeks of the pandemic, he careened wildly from one fictional statement to another: the virus was a hoax; the virus was a Democratic scheme to thwart his re-election; the virus was a vengeful Chinese attack on the US.
When the existence of the virus could no longer be denied and Americans were dying, his rhetoric shifted, but its unstable dynamic remained: the virus would just magically disappear before summer; it could be cleared up by injections of disinfectant; bright light shining inside the body would do the trick; and there’s this hydroxychloroquine stuff...
And running parallel to Trump’s snake oil pitches were his reports on his administration’s success in coping with the pandemic. As the US rocketed to the front of the international pack in cases and deaths, he steadily reassured the public that he was doing an “outstanding” job of containing COVID, repeatedly insisting that if there was less testing, there would be fewer cases.
A disconnect of this magnitude between President and Expert was unprecedented. Fauci and Trump could not have offered more radically disparate accounts of the nation’s reality.
It went far beyond Leo censoring the EPA, or Josh prioritizing a White House official position over medical truth, or C.J. speaking for herself and not the White House; those exemplars of executive disconnect pale beside the Fauci-Trump collision. But they are connected, and in-kind, on a deeper level: they all speak to the confusion such disagreement generates in the public, on the question of who to trust. And when the coronavirus came to town, that trust was already all over the map, in the mind of the American public. As of Summer 2020, Newsweek was reporting that “a majority of Republicans say they don't trust Dr. Anthony Fauci or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for advice on the coronavirus, but almost 70 percent say they trust President Donald Trump for advice... 52 percent of Republicans said they don't trust what the CDC has said about the novel virus, and 53 percent said they don't trust Fauci,” according to a poll it took.
By contrast, Newsweek’s poll revealed that among Democrats, “a large majority said they don't trust Trump for advice on the virus but do trust Fauci and the CDC. According to the poll, 93 percent of Democrats said they don't trust the president, while 78 percent said they trust Fauci and 76 percent said they trust the CDC.”
With partisan affiliation removed from the data, the results indicated that “among all respondents, 31 percent said they trust Trump for advice on the virus, 51 percent said they trust Fauci, and 55 percent said they trust the CDC. By comparison, 58 percent said they don't trust what Trump has said about the virus, 29 percent said they don't trust Fauci, and 32 percent said they don't trust the CDC.”
That kind of divide is unconscionable, certainly; but the numbers lay out in stark, disheartening transparency just how messed up the collective mind of the American citizen has become, when it comes to trusting experts – and more alarming, how off-the-charts its misplaced devotion to an authoritarian leader can be.
Per Fauci, the US is “still knee-deep in the first wave” of the pandemic; per Trump, “I think we are in a good place.”
Fauci dared not openly criticize the president, lest he be dismissed (and he sorely needed to remain where he was, for the good of the nation). Trump, predictably, had no compunctions about criticizing Fauci, speaking openly to the media about the NIAID director’s “mistakes.”
And even that wasn’t the worst of it; for daring to continue putting data ahead of authoritarian bloviation, Fauci revealed in early August that he and his family had been getting death threats, and that he had been forced to arrange private security to protect them.
“I wouldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams that people who object to things that are pure public health principles are so set against it and don’t like what you and I say, namely in the world of science, that they actually threaten you,” he said.
That’s how far we’ve wandered from the truth.
“A sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a foothold,” summarized Ed Yong in The Atlantic. “Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness. Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID-19. The decades-long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net forced millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their life for their livelihood. The same social media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors for conspiracy theories during the 2020 pandemic.”
“Openness is the Basis of a Free Society”
Sometimes President Bartlet got it right, of course, as when a fire in a national forest sparks controversy over the federal government’s responsibility to fight it. Public sensibility (and an anxious governor) favor the federal government putting the fire out; but his environmental science advisers tell him not to:
“It's the end of the season and the fire isn't anywhere near tourists,” he tells Leo.” Letting this fire burn is good for the environment. You know how I know?”
“How?”
“Because smart people told me. Please, god, Leo, let them be right...”
And Sam weighs in on professional expertise, peaking not only for progressive politicians everywhere but the majority of the electorate. He’s arguing with film producer Morgan Ross about the impact of TV violence on children.
“There's been a 28% drop in juvenile crime in the last five years, 10% drop in the overall crime rate,” Ross tells Sam.
“I don't care,” Sam replies.
“Why?”
“Because the American Academy of Pediatrics, the AMA and the American Psychological Association all say that watching violence on TV is bad for kids,” Sam explains, “and we're gonna listen to the experts...”
But the last word on this subject will go to Ellie, who found herself mired in White House controversy once again in “Eppur Si Muove”11, when a partisan attack on Bartlet was opportunistically based on her working as a research assistant for a controversial cervical cancer study that included sex workers as subjects. Bartlet is less harsh with his daughter this time around, as she obviously just wants to be left alone to do her work, but her father convinces her that science can‘t extricate itself from public controversy - there are times when she and those like her must take a stand.
This she does, behind the briefing room podium, giving this statement:
“While money spent studying the brains of PCP users might seem to be taxpayer waste, this research led directly to the discovery of the NMDA receptor. Science cannot exist in a vacuum. By nature, it’s an open enterprise, strengthened by public scrutiny. Openness is the basis of a free society. But when science is attacked on ideological grounds, its integrity and usefulness are threatened. Independent peer-reviewed research is the cornerstone of science in America. It shouldn’t be about the left or the right, but what works to keep people safe and healthy. I believe all Americans, and all people everywhere, no matter who they are or how they live, deserve research to improve their lives. Thomas Jefferson said, ‘We must not be afraid to follow the truth, wherever it may lead.’ Scientific truth ennobles us. It tells us who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. I believe the truth will only be found when all scientists are free to pursue it.”
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