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Trump political appointees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, David Legates and Ryan Maue, have been reassigned after publishing controversial papers on nongovernment websites that deny the severity of climate change. The papers were never approved by the director of White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, though they bear the seal of OSTP and the Executive Office of the President.
Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists thinks Legates and Maue's efforts are an attempt to create a government record of climate denial research that can become an official record and be cited in future lawsuits over regulations or climate policy. Rosenberg said, "They're trying to seed the record for the National Climate Assessment so that this stuff can't be excluded and probably for lawsuits as well. What they're trying to do is circumvent the usual peer review and consensus about what constitutes good science, scientific information."
Describing the content of their papers, Rosenberg said it's the "same old crap people have been pushing for years that have been debunked hundreds or thousands of times," and, "these are just nonsensical opinion pieces that have no basis in reality for the most part."
Trump's Interior Department deflected and obstructed congressional oversight
The Interior Department's lack of cooperation and outright deflection and obstruction of congressional oversight during the Trump administration is "without parallel" according to current and former congressional staff. Phil Barnett, a former aide to retired Rep. Henry Waxman said, "I've been involved with congressional oversight in different capacities for several decades, and the stonewalling of the Trump administration and its agencies has been unprecedented." Criticism of the Interior Department's obstruction extending across party lines—Justin Rood, an investigations staffer under the late Republican Sen. Tom Coburn said of Interior's efforts to evade scrutiny, "It shows extreme levels of disrespect for another branch of government. It's intolerable for a functioning democracy." In 2017, the Justice Department told agencies they could ignore oversight requests from the Democratic minority.
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As the last act of the most anti-wildlife administration in history, Trump is telling agencies to stick their heads in the sand and ignore science about the threats to endangered species. Our most imperiled wildlife will suffer for decades just so polluters and special interests can keep destroying our public lands. After everything that has happened in the past week, it’s disgraceful that this administration continues to wage its destructive war on wildlife.”
