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Trump: Facts go by the board and threaten democracy

The Scientific American is hardly a rabid publication, yet it calls out the actions of the Trump administration with regard to facts.    What makes the piece troubling is what it reveals (and not seemingly reported elsewhere)......the almost wholesale dismantling and immediate cessation of all manner of work by government agencies, curtailing the release of information, challenging unquestionable facts, etc. etc.  As the magazine says.....at the time of writing Trump had only been in office for 5 days!

"But it’s not just absence of facts that’s troubling, it is the apparent effort to derail science and the pursuit of facts themselves.

Already, we have learned that multiple agencies, including the USDA and the EPA, have ordered their scientists to stop speaking to the public about their research. The CDC suddenly cancelled a long-planned, international conference on the health impacts of climate change. And when the Badlands National Park started using its Twitter account to discuss the issue of climate change—as any nature center, park, or science museum might do—the tweets were immediately deleted. Most disturbingly, the EPA has immediately suspended all of their grants and contracts, and ordered the review of all scientific work by political appointees, including efforts to collect data, conduct research, and share information with the broader public—a public, we should remember, that paid for the work in the first place.


And it’s only been five days since Mr. Trump took office.


A disturbing pattern seems to be emerging. Facts, and the pursuit of facts, don’t seem to matter to this White House. Or, worse yet, they matter a lot and are being suppressed."

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