Science for Government Policy Should Be Transparent

Suppose a progressive just woke up from a coma and you explained, "There is currently a battle between the Trump Administration and public health and environmental activists. One is favoring government proclamations and edicts issued on the basis of secret information, while the other favors transparency so outside parties can review the methods and data." The progressive could be forgiven for thinking that the activists would surely be the ones favoring open access. And yet, the opposite situation is currently playing out, as critics blast the EPA's new proposed rule that requires regulations to be based only on scientific findings that are derived from publicly available information. I am not a lawyer and cannot comment on the specific language used in the proposed rule. However, as an economist who has worked in the climate change policy debate, I definitely agree that the only hope the public has for accountability and fidelity to the actual scientific literature is that government officials should issue rules on the basis of judgments or analyses that can be reproduced--and thus put to the test--by outside groups. It is amazing to me that we are even having this argument, at a time when there is a genuine "crisis of reproducibility" in the social sciences and even in economics, as I discuss in this recent article.

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