Save our Scientists (and their work)
Another week has passed and there’s no letting up in the new administration’s torrent of executive actions. Long running strategic initiatives are being stymied, agencies shuttered, funding eliminated, website content stricken, and organizations of all stripes bullied. (I mean, the Kennedy Center, really?!)
As we wrote last week, it’s one thing to review, finetune, or even restructure existing efforts—indeed, that’s usually a smart practice. But this is something entirely different. This is not seeking to examine what is working and making changes to what is not. This is reckless and destructive.
Among the many casualties recently left in the administration’s wake is a near-complete project by a group of leading scientists—some of whom were employed by the government, some not—examining society’s dependence on nature. This group of experts had substantially completed their research and were finalizing a comprehensive paper reporting their findings. Given the resources that went into this, the obvious and huge importance of the topic, and the status of near completion, it seems crazy to block publication at the very last minute. Kind of Orwellian even.