The Interior Department had Julie A. MacDonald, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks. Her claim to fame? Despite having “a degree in civil engineering and no science background”, the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group that advocates scientific integrity, charged that:
Julie MacDonald personally reversed scientific findings, changed scientific conclusions to prevent endangered species from receiving protection, removed relevant information from a scientific document, and ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to adopt her edits.
Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona had his reports censored by the likes of “William R. Steiger, a specialist in education and a scholar of Latin American history whose family has long ties to President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Since 2001, Steiger has run the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services.”
NASA suffered under the yoke of George C. Deutsch, “a young presidential appointee … who told public affairs workers to limit reporters’ access to a top climate scientist (James E. Hansen) and told a Web designer to add the word “theory” at every mention of the Big Bang”.
“Mr. Deutsch, 24, was offered a job as a writer and editor in NASA’s public affairs office in Washington last year (i.e., in 2005) after working on President Bush’s re-election campaign and inaugural committee, according to his résumé.”
Steiger is in his middle 30s. Mother Jones describes him as “George H.W. Bush‘s godson”.
In this proud tradition — for a nice little encyclopedia of ghostwriting and censorship in the time of Bush, try this — is there a bright-eyed bushy-tailed young person with similar Bushie credentials sitting in, or sitting over, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and exercising veto power over key statistics about the economy?
I ask that because, clearly, all is not well with the BEA’s statistics. Not to put too fine a point on it, they’re seriously distorted. In the direction that the Bush administration would choose to distort them, if it were in the business of distorting government statistics about the U.S. economy.
And I ask it that way because it doesn’t look like BEA Director J. Steven Landefeld is a loyal Bushie. For one thing, he’s been Director since 1995. Also, he’s a career BEA employee, not a political appointee (having served as Deputy Director and Associate Director for International Economics before becoming Director). Moreover, he seems to be an eminently qualified and reasonably well respected economist. I also count it as a big point in his favor that his official BEA biography runs to only two short paragraphs. Just 112 words. (For comparison, Buttercheeks’ official biography is 657 words long. Of course, the man who was on the shortlist to be Supreme Court Justice might need a little more space to do — pardon me — justice to his achievements.)
So, given the Bush administration’s track record — their obsession with the perception of things rather than the substance thereof, their proven record of distorting facts and truth — one has to ask whether the BEA’s statistics say what they say only because they are being deliberately and systematically tampered with.
And so, I do, hereby, officially, ask.