Whistleblower Protection Act Will Be a Critical Bulwark for Scientific Integrity in a Trump Admin

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Whistleblower Protection Act Will Be a Critical Bulwark for Scientific Integrity in a Trump Administration

By Jason Zuckerman - Sunday, December 11, 2016

According to press reports, President-elect Trump’s transition team sent a questionnaire to the Department of Energy (“DOE”), demanding the names of employees who have attended climate-change-policy conferences or performed research on climate science. Some of the questions are a reasonable effort to garner information about ongoing DOE projects. But many of the questions appear to be a troubling witch hunt designed to enable Trump’s political appointees to retaliate against climate scientists. Such retaliation could include launching retaliatory investigations, making false accusations of research misconduct, placing the scientist under surveillance, changing their job duties or terminating their employment (directly or constructively). This is a sample of the questions:

27. Can you provide a list of all Department of Energy employees or contractors who have attended any Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon meetings? Can you provide a list of when those meetings were and any materials distributed at those meetings, EPSA emails associated with those meetings, or materials created by Department employees or contractors in anticipation of or as a result of those meetings?
28. Can you provide a list of current professional society memberships of lab staff?
29. Can you provide a list of all websites maintained by or contributed to by laboratory staff Labs during work hours for the past three years?

If oil-industry lobbyists plan to suppress scientific research and to convert the DOE into a think tank for the oil industry, then they might be in for a rude awakening. Though a new Administration is entitled to implement its policy agenda, censoring scientific research and retaliating against whistleblowers is prohibited...

Read more:
http://www.natlawreview.com/article/whistleblower-protection-act-will-be-critical-bulwark-scientific-integrity-trump