Another totally inappropriate Bush appointee. This one bites the dust!
Phyllis
--
February 8, 2006
New York Times
A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
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KIN&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=ANDREW%20C.%20
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George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told
public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate
scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every
mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.
Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas
A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his
résumé on file at the agency asserted.
Officials at NASA headquarters declined to discuss the reason for the
resignation.
"Under NASA policy, it is inappropriate to discuss personnel matters,"
said Dean Acosta, the deputy assistant administrator for public affairs
and Mr. Deutsch's boss.
The resignation came as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
was preparing to review its policies for communicating science to the
public. The review was ordered Friday by Michael D. Griffin, the NASA
administrator, after a week in which many agency scientists and midlevel
public affairs officials described to The New York Times instances in
which they said political pressure was applied to limit or flavor
discussions of topics uncomfortable to the Bush administration,
particularly global warming.
"As we have stated in the past, NASA is in the process of revising our
public affairs policies across the agency to ensure our commitment to
open and full communications," the statement from Mr. Acosta said.
The statement said the resignation of Mr. Deutsch was "a separate
matter."
Mr. Deutsch, 24, was offered a job as a writer and editor in NASA's
public affairs office in Washington last year after working on President
Bush's re-election campaign and inaugural committee, according to his
résumé. No one has disputed those parts of the document.
According to his résumé, Mr. Deutsch received a "Bachelor of Arts in
journalism, Class of 2003."
Yesterday, officials at Texas A&M said that was not the case.
"George Carlton Deutsch III did attend Texas A&M University but has not
completed the requirements for a degree," said an e-mail message from
Rita Presley, assistant to the registrar at the university, responding to
a query from The Times.
Repeated calls and e-mail messages to Mr. Deutsch on Tuesday were not
answered.
Mr. Deutsch's educational record was first challenged on Monday by Nick
Anthis, who graduated from Texas A&M last year with a biochemistry degree
and has been writing a Web log on science policy,
scientificactivist.blogspot.com <http://scientificactivist.blogspot.com>
.
After Mr. Anthis read about the problems at NASA, he said in an
interview: "It seemed like political figures had really overstepped the
line. I was just going to write some commentary on this when somebody
tipped me off that George Deutsch might not have graduated."
He posted a blog entry asserting this after he checked with the
university's association of former students. He reported that the
association said Mr. Deutsch received no degree.
A copy of Mr. Deutsch's résumé was provided to The Times by someone
working in NASA headquarters who, along with many other NASA employees,
said Mr. Deutsch played a small but significant role in an intensifying
effort at the agency to exert political control over the flow of
information to the public.
Such complaints came to the fore starting in late January, when James E.
Hansen, the climate scientist, and several midlevel public affairs
officers told The Times that political appointees, including Mr. Deutsch,
were pressing to limit Dr. Hansen's speaking and interviews on the
threats posed by global warming.
Yesterday, Dr. Hansen said that the questions about Mr. Deutsch's
credentials were important, but were a distraction from the broader issue
of political control of scientific information.
"He's only a bit player," Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Deutsch. " The problem
is much broader and much deeper and it goes across agencies. That's what
I'm really concerned about."
"On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed," he said.
"The foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously
means an honestly informed public. That's the big issue here."
February 4, 2006
New York Times
NASA Chief Backs Agency Openness
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
<http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=ANDREW%20C.%20REV
KIN&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=ANDREW%20C.%20
REVKIN&inline=nyt-per>
A week after NASA's top climate scientist complained that the space
agency's public-affairs office was trying to silence his statements on
global warming, the agency's administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a
sharply worded statement yesterday calling for "scientific openness"
throughout the agency.
"It is not the job of public-affairs officers," Dr. Griffin wrote in an
e-mail message to the agency's 19,000 employees, "to alter, filter or
adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA's technical
staff."
The statement came six days after The New York Times quoted the
scientist, James E. Hansen, as saying he was threatened with "dire
consequences" if he continued to call for prompt action to limit
emissions of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. He and
intermediaries in the agency's 350-member public-affairs staff said the
warnings came from White House appointees in NASA headquarters.
Other National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists and
public-affairs employees came forward this week to say that beyond Dr.
Hansen's case, there were several other instances in which political
appointees had sought to control the flow of scientific information from
the agency.
They called or e-mailed The Times and sent documents showing that news
releases were delayed or altered to mesh with Bush administration
policies.
In October, for example, George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA
headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word
"theory" after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail
message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The
Times.
And in December 2004, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
complained to the agency that he had been pressured to say in a news
release that his oceanic research would help advance the administration's
goal of space exploration.
On Thursday night and Friday, The Times sent some of the documents to Dr.
Griffin and senior public-affairs officials requesting a response.
While Dr. Griffin did not respond directly, he issued the "statement of
scientific openness" to agency employees, saying, "NASA has always been,
is and will continue to be committed to open scientific and technical
inquiry and dialogue with the public."
Because NASA encompasses a nationwide network of research centers on
everything from cosmology to climate, Dr. Griffin said, some central
coordination was necessary. But he added that changes in the
public-affairs office's procedures "can and will be made," and that a
revised policy would "be disseminated throughout the agency."
Asked if the statement came in response to the new documents and the
furor over Dr. Hansen's complaints, Dr. Griffin's press secretary, Dean
Acosta, replied by e-mail:
"From time to time, the administrator communicates with NASA employees on
policy and issues. Today was one of those days. I hope this helps. Have a
good weekend."
Climate science has been a thorny issue for the administration since
2001, when Mr. Bush abandoned a campaign pledge to restrict power plant
emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global
warming, and said the United States would not join the Kyoto Protocol,
the first climate treaty requiring reductions.
But the accusations of political interference with the language of news
releases and other public information on science go beyond climate
change.
In interviews this week, more than a dozen public-affairs officials,
along with half a dozen agency scientists, spoke of growing efforts by
political appointees to control the flow of scientific information.
In the months before the 2004 election, according to interviews and some
documents, these appointees sought to review news releases and to approve
or deny news media requests to interview NASA scientists.
Repeatedly that year, public-affairs directors at all of NASA's science
centers were admonished by White House appointees at headquarters to
focus all attention on Mr. Bush's January 2004 "vision" for returning to
the Moon and eventually traveling to Mars.
Starting early in 2004, directives, almost always transmitted verbally
through a chain of midlevel workers, went out from NASA headquarters to
the agency's far-flung research centers and institutes saying that all
news releases on earth science developments had to allude to goals set
out in Mr. Bush's "vision statement" for the agency, according to
interviews with public-affairs officials working in headquarters and at
three research centers.
Many people working at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said that at the same
time, there was a slowdown in these centers' ability to publish anything
related to climate.
Most of these career government employees said they could speak only on
condition of anonymity, saying they feared reprisals. But their accounts
tightly meshed with one another.
One NASA scientist, William Patzert, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
confirmed the general tone of the agency that year.
"That was the time when NASA was reorganizing and all of a sudden earth
science disappeared," Mr. Patzert said. "Earth kind of got relegated to
just being one of the 9 or 10 planets. It was ludicrous."
In another incident, on Dec. 2, 2004, the propulsion lab and NASA
headquarters issued a news release describing research on links between
wind patterns and the recent warming of the Indian Ocean.
It included a statement in quotation marks from Tong Lee, a scientist at
the laboratory, saying some of the analytical tools used in the study
could "advance space exploration" and "may someday prove useful in
studying climate systems on other planets."
But after other scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory queried Dr.
Lee on the statement, he e-mailed public-affairs officers saying he
disavowed the quotation and demanded that the release be taken off the
Web site. His message was part of a sequence of e-mail messages exchanged
between scientists and public-affairs officers. That string of messages
was provided to The Times on Friday by a NASA official.
In his e-mail message, Dr. Lee explained that he had cobbled together
part of the statement on space exploration under "the pressure of the new
HQ requirement for relevance to space exploration" and under a timeline
requiring that NASA "needed something instantly."
The press office dropped the quotation from its version of the release,
but in Washington, the NASA headquarters public affairs office did not.
Dr. Lee declined to be interviewed for this article.
According to other e-mail messages, the flare-up did not stop senior
officials in headquarters from insisting that Mr. Bush's space-oriented
vision continue to be reflected in all earth-science releases.
In the end, the news release with Dr. Lee's disavowed remark remained up
on the NASA headquarters public affairs Web site until The Times asked
about it yesterday. It was removed from the Web at midday.
The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential
appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he
was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election
campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the
public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen's public
statements.
In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA
contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for
middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be
added after every mention of the Big Bang.
The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote,
adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration
such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts
intelligent design by a creator."
It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious
issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting
one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to
properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information
the most."
The memo also noted that The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual
specified the phrasing "Big Bang theory." Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch's boss,
said in an interview yesterday that for that reason, it should be used in
all NASA documents.
The Deutsch memo was provided by an official at NASA headquarters who
said he was upset with the effort to justify changes to descriptions of
science by referring to politically charged issues like intelligent
design. Senior NASA officials did not dispute the message's authenticity.
Mr. Wild declined to be interviewed; Mr. Deutsch did not respond to
e-mail or phone messages. On Friday evening, repeated queries were made
to the White House about how a young presidential appointee with no
science background came to be supervising Web presentations on cosmology
and interview requests to senior NASA scientists.
The only response came from Donald Tighe of the White House Office of
Science and Technology Policy. "Science is respected and protected and
highly valued by the administration," he said.
Dennis Overbye contributed reporting for this article.
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