Hannah Bloch-Wehba, The New York Times; Trump Is Ruling by Willful Blindness
[Kip Currier: This article's author chillingly dissects Trump 's "Execute Order 66-esque" war on information and data.
Data, in essence, is evidence. And without evidence -- in a court of law, a research laboratory, or a governmental agency -- it becomes harder to make a case for laws, ethics, and policy. Without data and information, authoritarians can project the sense that they are unfettered by adherence to logic and scientific validity and are inoculated from accountability and the rule of law. In short, they can do whatever they want or don't want to do.
"Destroy, distort, and disregard data" is right out of the authoritarian playbook. Orwell's 1984 showed us that in a work of fiction. But it's on stark display in the real world, too.
Reading this piece, I recalled having heard about the conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government having literally destroyed hundreds of years of fisheries and environmental data. As Vice reported in 2015 (see The Harper Government Has Trashed and Destroyed Environmental Books and Documents):
In the first few days of 2014, scientists, journalists, and environmentalists were horrified to discover that the Harper government had begun a process to close seven of the 11 of Canada’s world-renowned Department of Fisheries and Oceans libraries, citing a consolidation and digitizing effort as the reason. Reports immediately proliferated that the process was undertaken in careless haste, with the officials sent to gather and transfer the documents allegedly neglecting to take proper inventory of the centuries’ worth of documents containing vital information on environmental life, from aquatic ecosystems to water safety and polar research, with some documents reportedly dumped in landfills or burned, leading some scientists to refer to it as a ‘libricide.’
Soon after, a widely disseminated photograph emerged displaying a dumpster at the Maurice Lamontage Institute in Mont-Joli Quebec, stuffed with hundreds of carelessly discarded historic books and documents. In Winnipeg, Gaile Whelan-Enns, an environmental researcher with the Manitoba Wildlands told CBC News that he saved hundreds of documents that he found abandoned in an empty library. “It was really hard to figure out where to start because there was so many documents that you just went ‘Oh my God,’” he said, disbelief palpable in his voice. “They just left this lying here?”
The incautious nature of the consolidation effort adds another alarming chapter to a Harper government that appears deadset on directing how scientific research is conducted in Canada. Last Sunday, CBC’s the Fifth Estate aired an investigation on how the Harper government has dealt with scientists over the past seven years. The doc illustrated a battle between an ideology driven administration and mostly apolitical scientists simply pursuing the facts gleaned from their research, and how it led many to be silenced and defunded.
[Excerpt]
"The Trump administration has identified a key weapon in its campaign to remake the federal government: information control. Shortly after taking office, it ordered federal health agencies to freeze their communications with the public. The government promptly scrubbed many of its websites of data about climate change, public health, foreign aid and education. The Department of Government Efficiency slashed federal data-gathering activities, and the president fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a middling July jobs report.
As a scholar of information law and policy, I see a dangerous transformation: Instead of using data to determine how to govern, the administration is manipulating, ignoring and even jettisoning data altogether. Those who balk at the administration’s wishful thinking about reality face threats to fall in line or leave, as Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook and now the C.D.C. director, Susan Monarez, have all experienced.
The administration has clearly embraced the strategic cultivation of uncertainty and ignorance. It is not just trying to trim the fat from its statistical agencies, which were already underfunded before President Trump took office. Nor is it simply trying to spin the available data to its political advantage. Instead, it is turning away from the government’s responsibilities as a steward of information by minimizing, cherry-picking, misusing and sometimes even destroying data.
The idea that government ought to make decisions using evidence and hard data is a cornerstone of our political order...
A government based on deliberate indifference to information and data is a dangerous one. By turning away from evidence when it doesn’t suit, the administration is showing that it doesn’t think it matters whether it has the better argument, so long as it has the power to rule as it desires."
