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Select Science Headlines: Political Edition

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U.S. Caps Number of AIDS Researchers at Toronto Meeting [Science, Feb. 24] - The Bush administration has capped the number of federal researchers being allowed to attend the XVI International AIDS Conference in Toronto scheduled for this August to only 50 researchers from the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The idea to cap US attendance at the yearly conference was apparently sparked in 2002, when "[t]he heckling of former HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson at the 2002 meeting in Barcelona upset congressional Republicans, who questioned sending 236 HHS staffers and spending $3.6 million on the conference. In 2004, the department imposed a 50-person limit for the Bangkok meeting, leaving some NIH and CDC scientists unable to present papers that had been accepted."
In Fire's Wake, Logging Study Inflames Debate [The Washington Post, Feb. 27] - The federal Bureau of Land Management revoked the final year of funding from a three-year, $300,000 grant by researchers at Oregon State University after graduate student Daniel Donato and colleagues published an article in Science, which showed that "salvage logging can strip burned forests of the biological diversity that fire and natural recovery help protect. The study also questions the scientific rationale behind a bill pending in Congress that would ease procedures for post-fire logging in federal forests.... After the cutoff, Democrats in the Northwest congressional delegation complained about government censorship, academic freedom and the politicization of science in the Bush administration. Within a week, the BLM backed down and restored the grant."
Bush Admits to 'Mixed Signals' Regarding Laboratory on Renewable Energy [NY Times, Feb. 21] - Within a week after President Bush's State of the Union Address on Jan. 31, in which he called for more funding for alternative energy research, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory announced that it was laying off eight scientists and 24 support staff due to a $28 million budget shortfall. Then, just days before Bush was scheduled to visit the lab, the Energy Department "announced that it had transferred $5 million back into the laboratory's budget and that the 32 employees would be reinstated."
Scientists See Clean Air Decision As Latest Snub [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Feb. 27] - For the first time in its 35 year history, the EPA is "rejecting recommendations from its Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee as the agency moves forward this year with revised rules governing how much soot and dust can be permitted in the air.... In the first step of the review process for air-quality standards, EPA scientists prepare documents summarizing the latest scientific research. Those documents looked much different after being edited by the White House Office of Management and Budget. The White House office made dozens of changes, many of them softening assertions of harm from pollution and some deleting entire sections. For instance, the White House budget office deleted references to a study concluding that low-income people could be more vulnerable to exposure to soot and dust. Likewise, the office removed a sentence asserting that the air quality rules "may have a substantial impact on the life expectancy of the U.S. population.""