The White House's war on science marches on

We've been hearing accounts for months from the lone scientist here and there claiming that the administration is enforcing gag rules, limiting access to the media, and occasionally even rewriting their work (remember the young Bush ally and college dropout who was caught asking that creationist language be inserted into NASA reports?).

The scientists are making another push, and hopefully they can present a united front against the White House's science policy. It would be a nice combo with our generals uniting against their military policy, conservationists arguing against their energy policy, and so on.

Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.

Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at an NOAA lab, said in interviews that over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether. Their accounts indicate that the ideological battle over climate-change research, which first came to light at NASA, is being fought in other federal science agencies as well.

These scientists -- working nationwide in research centers in such places as Princeton, N.J., and Boulder, Colo. -- say they are required to clear all media requests with administration officials, something they did not have to do until the summer of 2004. Before then, climate researchers -- unlike staff members in the Justice or State departments, which have long-standing policies restricting access to reporters -- were relatively free to discuss their findings without strict agency oversight.