From the WaPo:
The Justice Department is removing political appointees from the hiring process for rookie lawyers and summer interns, amid allegations that the Bush administration had rigged the programs in favor of candidates with connections to conservative or Republican groups, according to documents and officials.
The decision, outlined in an internal memo distributed Thursday, returns control of the Attorney General's Honors Program and the Summer Law Intern Program to career lawyers in the department after four years during which political appointees directed the process.
Like the CDC and other areas of government traditionally non-politicized, this administration has done a bang-up job of ruining the reputation of one agency after another, specifically over ideology and the practice of allowing "conservative or Republican groups" to dictate hiring practices and to silence embarrassing science. Some recent examples: this was from Wired (2/07):
Congress continued to probe allegations Wednesday that the Bush administration tried to muzzle government scientists on climate change and suppress scientific research, including a comprehensive report in 2000 on global warming's impact on the United States.
and this was from the prestigious science journal Nature from 2/06:
US scientists fight political meddling
Nobel laureate attacks government's suppression of research findings.
The rift between US scientists and the administration of President George W. Bush widened last weekend, as Nobel-prizewinning biologist David Baltimore used the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)in St Louis to denounce government suppression of scientific findings.
Speaking last Saturday to a packed conference room, Baltimore — the president-elect of the AAAS — urged scientists to challenge perceived censorship of their research. Tensions between the Bush administration and researchers have been high for years, but Baltimore said he had recently grown convinced that the problem cannot be shrugged off as the usual battles between science and politics.
This is not politics as usual... this is something else altogether. You'd have to go back to the late USSR to find such insidious and pervasive placement of political minders in every facet of government. Testimony at a Henry Waxman-led committee hearing:
However, Mr Piltz told Congress even he was taken aback by the extent of the political interference, in technical reports, public meetings as well as exchanges with the media, in which scientists were assigned minders from the administration.
In the survey of 1,600 government scientists by the Union of Concerned Scientists, 46% had been warned against using terms like global warming in speech or in their reports. The scientists interviewed were working at seven government agencies, from Nasa to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Forty-three percent of respondents said their published work had been revised in ways that altered the meaning of scientific findings. Some 38% said they had direct knowledge of cases where scientific information on climate was stripped from websites and printed reports.
One can't help but think that Alberto Gonzales is hanging on as long as he can because of programs like this at DOJ, and their inevitable exposure once the career people are back in charge. The damage has been done, however. For all the press about call girls and massages (and you can't make this stuff up), the real embarrassment is this administration's war on science, truth and (in this case) Justice.
The pattern seems widespread. Maybe our friends in the press would like to call a few agencies that they have contacts with to see what's going on there. As Bush's political power and credibility wanes, more is going to come out... and it will not be just at Justice, and it will not be pretty.
Comments are closed on this story.