HHS Seeks Science Advice to Match Bush Views (washingtonpost.com): The Bush administration has begun a broad restructuring of the scientific advisory committees that guide federal policy in areas such as patients' rights and public health, eliminating some committees that were coming to conclusions at odds with the president's views and in other cases replacing members with handpicked choices.
     In the past few weeks, the Department of Health and Human Services has retired two expert committees before their work was complete. One had recommended that the Food and Drug Administration expand its regulation of the increasingly lucrative genetic testing industry, which has so far been free of such oversight. The other committee, which was rethinking federal protections for human research subjects, had drawn the ire of administration supporters on the religious right, according to government sources.
     A third committee, which had been assessing the effects of environmental chemicals on human health, has been told that nearly all of its members will be replaced -- in several instances by people with links to the industries that make those chemicals. One new member is a California scientist who helped defend Pacific Gas and Electric Co. against the real-life Erin Brockovich.

Apparently, Shrubya believes that science that causes the contributors to his campaigns to spend money on our safety, to stop following paths that harm the people of this country, is invalid science. The commitee that was examining consumer-level genetic tests -- almost all of which are either invalid or unnecessary -- is disbanded. The committee in charge of redrafting regulations to protect human subjects in research projects is disbanded, apparently both because it offended the pharmaceutical industry to actually, like, protect human subjects, and because religious conservatives wanted it to come out against using embryos in research, and the committee declined to do so. (The new version of the committee will be headed by the person who founded the National Right to Life organization.) The committee that evaluates the effect of exposure to environmental chemicals is being restocked by people working in the chemical industry.

To be sure, that this administration would take that type of approach was indicated by its handling of the Environmental Protection Agency. Headed by the hardly-pro-environment Ms Todd-Whitman, Shrubya has managed to essentially eviscerate her position, cutting the legs out from under her in public with such dedication and frequence, one wonders why she's still in the administration. The EPA had to be bludgeoned into cleaning up the apartments larded with asbestos from the fall of the World Trade Towers; they have still declined to actually tell people in the affected areas that they can apply for dust cleanup. If you don't petition the EPA or somehow otherwise get told, you'll never know. (They're still being rather unforthcoming about the fact that the deadline for applying for cleanup was extended.) Thus, you have the spectacle of one apartment in a building being thoroughly cleaned, but the hallways and other apartments remain laden with asbestos dust and other pollutants. It's not likely that the cleaned apartment will stay that way very long, is it? The EPA also still maintains that the Towers site itself is relatively clean, despite increasing numbers of sick workers from the site.

(Something of a side issue, but perhaps still indicative: Interior Secretary Gale Norton has been held in contempt of court. To be sure, she's the second Interior Secretary in a row to be held in contempt over that particular case. Nonetheless, when a judge issues a 267-page opinion -- ye gads! -- and says therein, "In February of 1999, at the end of the first contempt trial in this matter, I stated that 'I have never seen more egregious misconduct by the federal government,"' Lamberth wrote. "Now at the conclusion of the second contempt trial in this action, I stand corrected. The Department of Interior has truly outdone itself this time." ... well, you've gone some way to distinguish yourself, haven't you? Justice and Interior plan to appeal, of course. Heaven forfend they should simply do as they were told.)

It is all part and parcel of this administration's approach to government. We have an elected leader who doesn't believe in democracy or democratic procedures; he appoints as the nation's highest constitutional officer a man who does not believe in the Constitution; he appoints as guardians of the environment people who believe that its effective exploitation should be their guiding principle; now as the guardians of the nation's health, he appoints people who believe that the health of their purse is more important than the health of our bodies.