The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) efforts to protect scientific integrity make the agency a leader among its federal counterparts, OMB Watch said in comments filed last week.

The Obama administration recognizes that sound, uncensored science is critically important to protecting our health, economy, and environment. Consequently, President Obama issued a memo shortly after taking office, establishing protections for scientific integrity and directing agencies to implement them. However, implementation has been sluggish and uneven.

NOAA represents some of the best efforts so far. The agency's draft scientific integrity policy and procedural handbook, released to the public in June, are thoughtful and detailed. In addition, NOAA has been an exemplar of openness in developing its policy, most importantly by soliciting public comments on its draft policy.

Fundamentally, an effective scientific integrity policy must do two things: prevent political interference with science and protect the free flow of scientific information. NOAA's draft policy makes strong provisions for both.

In our comments, OMB Watch makes the following recommendations:

1. Retain strong protections to prevent and redress political interference with science;
2. Retain and strengthen protections for the free flow of scientific information;
3. Strengthen protections for personnel who blow the whistle on violations of scientific integrity;
4. Improve the timeliness of investigations of scientific integrity violations;
5. Improve the transparency of investigations of scientific integrity violations;
6. Regularly review the policy and update it as appropriate; and
7. Strengthen scientific integrity in interagency processes.

Although our suggestions would further improve the policy, NOAA should be commended for its leadership for posting a strong draft. At a time when some agencies are struggling to meaningfully move scientific integrity forward, other agencies should look to NOAA as a model.

At the same time – as we point out in our final recommendation – NOAA alone can't fully protect its science. The biggest recent scientific integrity controversy at NOAA, regarding the mysteriously delayed disclosure of worst-case models for the BP oil spill, revolves around the role of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), not NOAA itself. As we write in our comments:

Consequently, while NOAA has done its duty to develop strong scientific integrity protections, the task of fully securing NOAA science will not be complete until other agencies do so as well, particularly OMB and other White House offices.

Today, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced that it was asking agencies to submit their draft scientific integrity policies within 90 days.

Although the announcement doesn't include a deadline to finalize the policies and begin implementation, with luck the new policies could be in place later this year. The new policies should further protect federal science from interference, ensuring that government decisions are based on sound science and improving public trust.

Unfortunately, the announcement doesn't address the question of public consultation. Before finalizing their policies, agencies should publish their proposed policies for public comment.

The announcement is the light at the end of what has been a long tunnel. In March 2009, President Obama explained his principles for protecting scientific integrity in a memo to agencies. After considerable delay, OSTP followed up with guidelines in December 2010. Those guidelines asked for progress reports from agencies, which were delivered two weeks ago. Today's announcement is the first deadline for agencies to begin putting the OSTP guidelines into practice.

What will the new policies look like? We can find some clues from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which have posted their progress reports online. Hopefully, more agencies will follow suit and post their reports online as well.

Even though Sunshine Week is officially this week, the House of Representatives got the ball rolling last Friday. The House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and Procurement Reform (say that ten times fast) held a hearing called "Transparency Through Technology: Evaluating Federal Open-Government Initiatives," although the hearing focused more on spending transparency than anything else. While one would expect that an oversight hearing in the House “evaluating” the Obama administration’s transparency efforts would be contentious, the most surprising aspect of the hearing was that it wasn’t.

The subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. James Lankford (R-OK), started the hearing off with a balanced tone. In his opening statement, Lankford commended the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), specifically on its efforts with USAspending.gov, Recovery.gov, and Data.gov. “It is not our intent today to belittle the efforts of this administration,” Lankford said, “only to discover the important lessons learned and to hear the steps being taken to move things forward.” It was good to see that the subcommittee was more focused on solving problems than scoring political points, a concern some have with a Republican House Oversight Committee.

The good feelings, however, didn’t last the entire hearing. Full committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) was more critical of the administration than Lankford, calling the spending data "useless." Several members of the subcommittee were miffed that Daniel Werfel, the head of OMB’s Office of Federal Financial Management, asked to be on a panel by himself, citing an apparent long-standing precedent. The subcommittee’s vice-chair, Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA), was particularly incensed, saying it betrayed the administration’s transparency rhetoric.

Eventually, the subcommittee got around to debating actual policies. With Sunlight Foundation executive director Ellen Miller as one of the witnesses, the conversation quickly focused on spending transparency and data quality. Subcommittee members used research from Sunlight to press two of the other witnesses, chief information officers (CIOs) from the departments of Agriculture and Education, on USAspending.gov data quality. Kaitlin Lee over at Sunlight has a pretty good rundown of two of the more contentious issues debated during the hearing, school lunch block grants and student loans. Sadly, the hearing provided little in the way of new details from the administration, with the CIOs simply saying that the administration is making unprecedented strides in spending transparency, and that their data isn’t as bad as Sunlight suggested.

In a more positive note, towards the end of the hearing, the subcommittee’s ranking member, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), brought up tax expenditure transparency. Saying “I don’t think we pay enough attention up here to tax expenditures,” Connolly correctly pointed out that they are a “real life spending item by any other name” and should be tracked. He asked Werfel what OMB was doing to make sure the federal government “shed enough light on tax expenditures and their relationship to the deficit.” Werfel dodged the question, saying he first needed to talk with Internal Revenue Service, but in a show of bipartisan support, Lankford chimed in, saying it’s important to have transparency in this area. With tax expenditures consuming a trillion dollars a year, we couldn’t agree more, and look forward to Congress and the administration working together on tax expenditure transparency.

Image by Flickr user cliff1066^TM used under a Creative Commons license.

White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren issued a memo to executive branch agencies today that could improve scientific integrity in the federal government. "The memo is a sign of relief for federal scientists who are unsure of their rights and whose work is too susceptible to manipulation," said Gary D. Bass, Executive Director of OMB Watch.

For more on the memo, read OMB Watch’s statement.

The memo is the result of a March 2009 request from President Obama for recommendations on scientific integrity. The recommendations were due in July 2009, but had stalled.

Groups like OMB Watch and the Union of Concerned Scientists applauded Obama’s focus on scientific integrity. After years of abuse during the Bush administration – including censorship of scientists, suppression or alteration of research, and manipulation of findings used in policymaking – Obama’s decision to attempt to restore scientific integrity was, and still is, a breath of fresh air.