Scientific and Political Integrity in Environmental Policy

I. Introduction Environmental-policy conflicts characteristically have scientific dimensions. It matters to decisions about addressing global warming how much temperatures will change, how fast, and what consequences warming will have for the natural world. It matters to decisions about national-forest management whether post-fire salvage logging promotes or retards regrowth, and in what form. It matters to the identification of acceptable levels of air and water pollution what effect pollutants have on human and other life, how long they persist, and how rapidly they move. Incorporating accurate scientific information into environmental-policy decisions is therefore essential to ensuring that those decisions move society toward its chosen goals, and even to identifying goals that accurately reflect societal preferences. Not surprisingly, many federal environmental laws require that administrative agencies, the entities responsible for the vast majority of environmental-policy decisions, obtain and rely on the best available scientific information.1 However, the tasks of obtaining, identifying, and using the best scientific information available pose a series of challenges to the policy process. This Article concentrates on two intertwined challenges: ensuring scientific integrity and ensuring political integrity. The first comes primarily at the outset of the decision-making process, where information is fed in. Much of the needed information comes from scientists, some employed by the federal government in regulatory and research positions, others working for regulated parties or stakeholder groups, and still others in academic positions. Information contributors may have a variety of reasons to spin or even falsify the data and interpretations they contribute to the regulatory process. That process will not work as intended without some mechanism for ensuring the accuracy and reliability of input information. The second challenge arises primarily at the back end of the process, when the agency must translate information into decisions. This process requires that agency personnel measure the available information against applicable statutory and regulatory standards and decide what action, if any, to take. The concern here is one familiar to observers of the politics of the regulatory state-that the agency will undermine a statutory scheme by responding more to political pressures or the personal biases of agency personnel than to the evidence and the goals articulated by the legislature. Both scientific and political integrity are essential to accurate and legitimate policy choices.2 Neither is easy to provide in the contested world of environmental decision making. In this Article, I undertake to demonstrate the scope and nature of the problems of scientific and political integrity, and offer some concrete suggestions for correcting interrelated failures of the two in environmental policy. Part II sketches several recent controversies that have been described as failures of scientific integrity. Part III explains the natures and functions of scientific and political integrity, explains how the two are linked, and demonstrates that several of the controversies described in Part II are more directly attributable to shortfalls in political, rather than scientific, integrity. Finally, Part IV offers some concrete suggestions for correcting failures of political integrity through closer oversight of the Executive Branch, and those of scientific integrity through greater attention to role boundaries and reduced incentives for scientific sin. II. A Few Recent Controversies The G.W. Bush Administration is by no means the first to be criticized for its use of science in policy making,3 but it has faced the most persistent and blistering criticism, including reports, sign-on letters, and books about its "War on Science."4 This Part briefly reviews three distinct types of complaints lodged against the current Administration, as well as one directed at the academic science community, as a prelude to considering the role of scientific and political integrity in each. …