Michael Regan, President Joe Biden’s freshly sworn in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, is seeking to clean up the mess left by the previous administration’s politically motivated attacks on science.
The previous administration
Yes, the Republican war on science began in earnest with Gingrich, then intensified with Bush and Trump in the White House.
Regan, 44, won over fierce competition for the nomination, beating out environmental regulators and experts with decades more experience, in an apparent effort by Biden to focus on building from fresh talent among a younger generation of political leaders.
Mike Regan is not himself a scientist but, if his record as an administrator is any guide, I think he will do just fine.
Reportedly, a lot of data was removed from websites and servers, but staff members may have copied it off and squirreled it away to safety. Any word on if and when it can be restored?
Well, good. Long time no see, objective reality. We’ve missed you terribly.
I’d bet it’ll be trivially easy, mostly just relinking to pages still in the relevant folders, or going to the backup files. I doubt very much was actually erased.
This is one Regan I can support.
… was all part of the Republican war on reality itself. They have been working nonstop to replace facts and truth with self-serving spin. Trump put that program into overdrive with his accelerated attacks on the media as “enemy of the people” and to believe only what they heard from him. We’re at a point where Republican voters embrace total fantasy and conspiracy theories, and reject the evidence of their own eyes.
Science was just collateral damage.
More than 500,000 dead from that “collateral damage”.
I don’t think so. It was targeted.
And yes, there were and are massive attacks on a wider reality, but these can be not as easy to corroborate or document.
Let’s start off by focusing on undoing the wholesale assault on water quality protection that T**** bulldozed in.
Restoration work began towards the end of election season and geared up during the transition.
Dedicated civil servants can be quite resourceful, plus they have allies outside government.
Agree completely. This is long overdue, especially because we never should have been put in this position in the first place! I’m very glad to see objective reality and science take center stage in the formulation of environmental policy, again.
My understanding is that reams of data were place on private mirror sites pretty much from the beginning by NASA, EPA NOAA, etc. And the Trumpistas likely wouldn’t have messed with DOD: there, the Navy has been collecting terrabytes of oceanographic data for decades.
Trump and his band of maleficent enablers turned much of the US government into a Toxic Waste Site. Lots of cleaning house to be done. And it’s a long to-do list. Glad to see Biden installing competent folks to do the job.
There’s been so much polluted water under the bridge since then that I had forgotten all about Scott Pruitt and his cone of silence phone booth.
I was going to say that EPA was one of the most egregiously abused departments under fat donnie’s reign, but then I thought about DoJ, State, etc., etc., etc.
There is a lot of restoration work to be done, all around.
Slightly O/t I guess
It’s not really the TA’s War on Science. I recall an Interior Department Director who was not at all concerned with environmental damages done because of his policies, since the End Times were just around the corner.
A tiny bit of common sense
Guess which day Cindy was sworn in?
So now that we know that major data dumps took place because of the previous administration, is there anything to prevent this kind of nonsense going forward? Should there be? How do we protect science and data in a time when so many want to suppress it and forget that it exists, to replace it with either a void or with feelings over data? Is there anything that can be done and should be done?
I do wonder how much the attacks were part of a plan and how much they just meshed together. Not that science wasn’t targeted–but when you have so many special interests to protect, it might not be part of a grand plan. Oil and gas interests are probably not all that concerned with women’s health interests, for example. Air and water polluters were probably not also concerned with vaccination policy. Trump was so nakedly (sorry for the image) interested in his own interests that it probably made it easier for specific special interests to make progress on their agendas. They didn’t even need to hide it any more.