Australia's Top Scientist: Trump’s EPA Changes Akin to Stalin’s Censorship of Science

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The top government scientist in Australia has some stern words for President Donald Trump and his changes to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), liking his changes to the censorship of science under former Russian dictator Josef Stalin.

Chief Scientist Alan Finkel, speaking during a roundtable discussion in Australia’s capital city of Canberra, said that science is “literally under attack” in the United States, reports the Guardian:

The Trump administration has mandated that scientific data published by the United States Environmental Protection Agency from last week going forward has to undergo review by political appointees before that data can be published on the EPA website or elsewhere.

It defies logic. It will almost certainly cause long-term harm. It’s reminiscent of the censorship exerted by political officers in the old Soviet Union.

Every military commander there had a political officer second-guessing his decisions.

Finkel’s comments were specifically targeting comments by the Trump administration which called for political appointees to review all the scientific data found by scientists at the EPA before it can be cleared for publication. Doug Ericksen, communications director for Trump’s EPA transition team, said that the review also applies to information on the agency’s website and social media accounts.

“If the website goes dark, years of work we have done on climate change will disappear,” one unnamed EPA staffer told Reuters last month, adding that some employees were working to preserve the data stored there.

EPA memo says agency is not allowed to issue press releases, add new content on websites, or post on social media – Huffington Post pic.twitter.com/3lJSk5BoFi

— BNO News (@BNONews) January 24, 2017

“We’re taking a look at everything on a case-by-case basis, including the web page and whether climate stuff will be taken down,” Ericksen told the Associated Press. “Obviously with a new administration coming in, the transition time, we’ll be taking a look at the web pages and the Facebook pages and everything else involved here at EPA.”

Climate Central reported last week that the EPA has, in fact, started removing Obama-era information from the government website. “They’re mostly scrubbing it of anything that has a hint of Obama,” Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said.

The Blaze reports that White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who first denied Trump directly ordered the EPA’s data scrub, said in January that the communications clampdown on scientific data was not out of the ordinary, telling reporters, “I don’t think it’s any surprise that when there’s an administration turnover, that we’re going to review the policy.”