A survivor’s guide to being a muzzled scientist

I figured it would be a good idea to summarize some of the thoughts I have from having lived through this in the Canadian government to offer some ideas to colleagues in the US who are now entering what seems to be a similar (if not worse) era of limiting communication from government scientists and (possibly?) down-weighting scientific evidence in policy decisions, particularly as they relate to the environment and natural resource extraction. This comes from having worked for the Federal government for 4 years, the last two of which were under a conservative majority government which resulted in deep cuts and heavy top-down control of how things were done and approved. This blog was spawned from my experience cumulatively, but especially in the last two years when it seemed like everyone I knew was being laid off or reassigned and it literally felt like the philosophical foundations of scientific inquiry within the federal government were crumbling. While it wasn’t much fun, I can say I learned a lot from that experience, and hopefully some of what I learned can be used by others who are now going through the same thing.