Fish and Wildlife official overrode scientists

A high-ranking political appointee in the Department of Fish and Wildlife overrode scientists, according to an internal investigation by the Department of the Interior:

Their report, sent to Congress this week by the department’s inspector general, does not accuse the official, Julie A. MacDonald, the deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, of any crime. But it does find that she violated federal rules when she sent internal agency documents to industry lobbyists.

Ms. MacDonald, an engineer by training, has provoked complaints from some wildlife biologists and lawyers in the agency for aggressive advocacy for industries’ views of the science that underlies agency decisions. The words of more than a dozen high-ranking career employees, from Interior Department headquarters and regional offices in California and Oregon, who are quoted usually by title in the report, describe a manager determined to see that agency findings and the underlying science conform with policy goals.

In recent years, agency lawyers reported, 75 percent of the Western offices’ findings on endangered-species status reviews and critical-habitat determinations were sent to Washington without any assurance from career lawyers and biologists that they were valid. Court challenges from both industry and environmentalists are a regular occurrence at the fish and wildlife agency. Making decisions that are vulnerable increases the risk that time-consuming, labor-intensive scientific and regulatory work must be redone.

The report, citing a lawyer in the Sacramento office, noted that Ms. MacDonald lobbied for a decision to combine three different populations of the California tiger salamander into one, thus excluding it from the endangered-species list, and making the decision legally vulnerable. A federal district judge overturned it in 2005., saying the decision was made “without even a semblance of agency reasoning.” [NYT]

TPM Muckraker has more on the Julie MacDonald scandal.

Comments

[greensmile]

This sort of thing has been an ongoing and progressively worse problem throughout the bush administration. My daughter has worked in both the Forest Service and the Park Service for most the reign of Bush II and is pretty sure her non-promotions owe to what her bosses knew of her ideas about conservation and ecology [she had a BS in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley]. When I heard about that and started googling around, I found several instances of career FS biologists or staff scientists squelched by a politically or industrially connected higher-up in the administration of these departments. The occassionally effect Federal Acquisition Regulations that have been written by GAO to keep defense contracting from being an out and out porkfest do not have an equivilently forceful oversight of CoI for Dept of Interior.
My daughter is fatalistic about such things and was not protesting...she went and got a masters in ecology and went to work for nature consevancy.

Just want emphasize to anyone reading here that Lindsay's post is about the tip of an iceberg: your tax dollars are most definitely NOT defending your natural resources and are much more likely now than at any time in the recent past to be spent building logging roads. Better to give your money to NRDC, Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club, Audubon Society etc and take the tax deduction than to fork it over to Uncle Sam's Timber and Oil Club.

[mudkitty]

What next? Are they suddenly going to be passing out creationist material at the Grand Canyon?

[herbert browne]

Re the Grand Canyon gift shop offerings, yes, mudkitty- you can buy a book that postulates an earth of about 16, 000 years of age. I think they keep it next to "Poems for the John" (that great little book with the keychain installed to hang on a nail in the outhouse...) The Bushco folks have kept a regular crew of corporate apparatchiks (eg Mark Rey, Norton, MacDonald, etc) to do their thing- but there was also some, uh, "inefficiency" in Clinton's Dept of Interior, too- a bunch of leases for oil & gas production that were written without standard clauses requiring increased royalty payments in the cases of increasing prices... & that led to even larger profits than the rest of the industry, for a few lucky drillers... ^..^

[noen]

"your tax dollars are most definitely NOT defending your natural resources"

um... yeah, we know. I mean, remember James Watt? There was another brilliant product of the GOP borg.

The American experiment is over, we lost. We're now starting our long descent into religious intolerance and fascism. The wealthy are leaving for Dubai and those who can are moving just about anywhere else. Take a look at where new and exciting architecture is being designed and built, answer... not here. That tells you all you need to know.

That might be an interesting research project, "Architectural innovation as a leading indicator for not becomming a bankrupt backwater state".

[cfrost]

From the trenches at the USGS where much of the DOI’s biological research is done, I can attest to the fact that BushCo has made it abundantly clear to us that they’re not particularly happy with research that doesn’t square with their favorite constituents. Projects defunded, publications delayed, tactical stalling and inaction on every front, bureaucratic snow jobs, and on and on. Within the building where I work there have been research projects on several different threatened and/or endangered species basically squelched or radically curtailed in the last few years. Though it is never officially stated overtly, everyone understands why.

Go to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) for regular inside updates on the 43rd president’s brilliant environmental record.

[greensmile]

Cfrost:
Thanks. I collect those kind of things:(

[Craig Johnson]

Purgegate: More Bush/Rove Soviet Style Thuggery
.
The United States is now a Commissariat

Political appointees oversee science (FDA & global warming) in this administration.

Political appointees botch, bungle and butcher Iraq reconstruction and Katrina relief.

Political appointees are sent into the CIA executive suite for a political cleansing mission.

Political appointees set up a propaganda office in the DOD to deliberately and maliciously mislead the nation into war while refusing to plan for known obstacles ultimately leading to thousand of troop' deaths and injuries.

The hue and cry over Purgegate is that the Justice Department has traditionally been significantly and honorably immune to rank political interference. Not under our presently governing thugs.

Despoiling democracy and honor while emulating a Soviet/Communist Commissariat model government is the operational and ethical basis of Gonzalez and his handlers.

Good news. If politicizing the Justice Department finally brings out the backbones of our legislators, Republican and Democratic alike, shout hosannas. Citizens of the entire planet sincerely want the America that strives for honor, honesty and equal treatment under the law to reappear.