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“I think that’s a missed opportunity,” says Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, an advocacy group based in New York City. Although the policy seeks to strengthen scientific-integrity operations and create an independent panel that could provide consistency from administration to administration, Kurtz warns that these efforts aren’t guaranteed to withstand future political meddling.

"An astounding three quarters of litigators are failing to cite the most recent peer-reviewed findings in the climate change lawsuits."

“They make a point of going after the fact-checkers because, in addition to stopping regulation, they also want to prevent or discourage climate scientists from doing things that might educate the public" said Lauren Kurtz.

Our staff attorney Rachael Lyle says “a problem on the scale of climate change can never be solved without sustained public demand for forward-thinking policies – and that demand starts at the grassroots level.”

To diminish the EPA’s ability to restrict emissions from power plants at a time when the world is being battered by floods, fires, and droughts, is nothing short of reckless.

Drawing on more than four years of tracker data-from Trump's election to Biden's inauguration-we show that the Trump presidency fundamentally changed how federal government agencies perform, use, and communicate scientific research.

"While this report does a good job of setting the stage, there is also a lot more that needs to be done to actually guarantee protections for federal science,” says Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund.

We documented 328 anti-science actions taken by the Trump administration. Biden has only reversed or reconsidered nine of them.

Concerns about political interference have plagued many US administrations, says Lauren Kurtz, the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund’s executive director.

Lauren Kurtz thought the report downplayed some transgressions during the Trump years. She noted that EPA’s scientific integrity policy was used to defend unscientific claims like former Administrator Scott Pruitt’s statement that carbon dioxide was “not a primary contributor to global warming.”

“This is a situation where the devil is truly in the details, and the lack of specificity is frustrating,” says executive director Lauren Kurtz regarding the consequences for those who violate scientific integrity policies.

Our Silencing Science Tracker and staff attorney August Wilson quoted in this Nature article about getting the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to adopt much-needed, stronger protections for federal science.