Et Tu, Feinstein? Farmers Cheer as Senator Funds Fake Science

By Matt Smith Wed., Dec. 30 2009 at 2:19 PM

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One of the hoped for benefits of throwing Republican bums out of the White House last fall was that we'd no longer have politicians undermining government scientists' ability to honestly inform policy.

Thanks to former San Francisco Chronicle ace investigator Lance Williams, we learn that science-subversion is a game Democrat politicians can play too -- San Francisco Democrats, no less.

Thanks to a report Williams filed with his current employer, the Center for Investigative Reporting, we now have an absurd situation where California farmers are defending Feinstein for her efforts to use federal funds to undermine government scientists' work.

"Is there something wrong with having an independent scientific body review the federal agencies' scientific work?" wrote Tom Nassif, CEO of the trade association Western Growers, in an opinion piece in the December 27 Sacramento Bee.

In this case, there's a big problem. According to Williams, Feinstein in September urged the Obama administration to spend $750,000 re-examining scientific research that led government agencies to reduce the amount of water available to a large farmer who happens to be a major Feinstein campaign donor.

According to Williams story:

Wealthy corporate farmer Stewart Resnick has written
check after check to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein's political campaigns. He's
hosted a party in her honor at his Beverly Hills mansion, and he's entertained
her at his second home in Aspen.
And in September, when Resnick asked Feinstein to weigh
in on the side of agribusiness in a drought-fueled environmental dispute over
the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, this wealthy grower and political donor
got quick results, documents show.
On Sept. 4, Resnick wrote to Feinstein, complaining that
the latest federal plan to rescue the Delta's endangered salmon and smelt
fisheries was "exacerbating the state's severe drought" because it
cut back on water available to irrigate crops. "Sloppy science" by
federal wildlife agencies had led to "regulatory-induced water
shortages," he claimed. "I really appreciate your involvement in this
issue," he wrote to Feinstein.

The story is fascinating because an aspect of the George Bush administration that particularly bugged Democrats was the president's propensity to manipulate, or suppress, science in order to advance favored policy goals. Indeed, this April, Feinstein praised an EPA finding that greenhouse gases pose a danger by saying the move was "confirmation that the EPA has restored science-based decision-making."

But "science-based decision making" that's good for the EPA is apparently not good for the Federal Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, which conducted the water studies. According to the New York Times, the heads of the U.S. Departments of Commerce and the Interior say there is no scientific reason to re-do the government research.

Notwithstanding the lack of scientific rationale for re-examining science that hurts the bottom line of a major Feinstein campaign donor, the farm trade association's Nassif suggests in Sunday's Bee that Feinstein was just doing her job:

"Does a constituent who is a donor to a U.S. senator's campaign lose the right to communicate his positions to the senator or forfeit any expectation that the issue can be judged on its merits? What hogwash!"

So that's it: the political value of science merely depends upon whose hog is being washed.

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