Science has never been more crucial to deciding the political issues facing the country. Yet science and scientists have less influence with the federal government than at any time since the Eisenhower administration. In the White House and Congress today, findings are reported in a politicized manner; spun or distorted to fit the speaker's agenda; or, when they're too inconvenient, ignored entirely. On a broad array of issues-stem cell research, climate change, missile defense, abstinence education, product safety, environmental regulation, and many others-the Bush administration's positions fly in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus. Federal science agencies, once fiercely independent under both Republican and Democratic presidents, are increasingly staffed by political appointees and fringe theorists who know industry lobbyists and evangelical activists far better than they know the science. This is not unique to the Bush administration, but it is largely a Republican phenomenon, born of a conservative dislike of environmental, health, and safety regulation, and at the extremes, of evolution and legalized abortion. In The Republican War on Science , Chris Mooney ties together the disparate strands of the attack on science into a compelling and frightening account of our government's increasing unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate research and ideologically driven pseudoscience.

Institutions and Incentives in Regulatory Science explores fundamental problems with regulatory science in the environmental and natural resource law field. Each chapter covers a variety of natural resource and regulatory areas, ranging from climate change to endangered species protection and traditional health-based environmental regulation. Regulatory laws and institutions themselves strongly influence the direction of scientific research by creating a system of rewards and penalties for science. As a consequence, regulatory laws or institutions that are designed naively end up incentivizing scientists to generate and then publish only those results that further the substantive regulatory goals preferred by the scientists. By relying so heavily on science to dictate policy, regulatory laws and institutions encourage scientists to use their assessment of the state of the science to further their own preferred scientific and regulatory policy agendas. Additionally, many environmental and natural resource regulatory agencies have been instructed by legislatures to rely heavily upon science in their rulemaking. In areas of rapidly evolving science, regulatory agencies are inevitably looking for scientific consensus prematurely, before the scientific process has worked through competing hypotheses and evidence. The contributors in this volume address how institutions for regulatory science should be designed in light of the inevitable misfit between the political or legal demand for regulatory action and the actual state of evolving scientific knowledge.

Shulman asserts that the Bush administration has systematically misled Americans on a wide range of scientific issues affecting public health, foreign policy, and the environment by ignoring, suppressing, manipulating, or even distorting scientific research.