USDA Weathering Extreme Measures to Accommodate Trump’s Denial

Yesterday, the Guardian’s Oliver Milman dropped a bombshell report about the USDA’s censorship of climate change.
As the new administration took over, emails detailing changes in department language were sent around the agency indicating “climate change” should be avoided and “weather extremes” used instead. According to the staffer who sent the email, the USDA “won’t change the modeling, just how we talk about it.” Another email asked senior employees to “visit with your staff and make them aware of this shift in perspective within the executive branch.”

This sort of self-censorship is no doubt happening across the federal government. While evidence of the administration clamping down on agency speech would be even more damning, the chilling effect demonstrated here is nonetheless highly damaging. If staffers can’t talk honestly with themselves and their constituents, how can we be confident they are properly protecting us?
That said, the change in language is meant not for the public or farmers the USDA is charged with helping, but an audience of one: the Denier in Chief.
Between the rollover to Orwellian doublespeak when it comes to climate change and the installation of Sam Clovis at the top science post, the USDA is giving a whole new meaning to what archaeologists know as “Clovis Culture.”
Speaking of Clovis, some more troubling information came out last week about the nominee for the USDA’s top science position. CNN dug up some old blog posts Clovis wrote as a right-wing radio host back in 2011 and 2012. Most of the posts are unhinged diatribes on conspiracy theories, but Clovis also used his blog to rant on the history of racial politics in the United States in a handful of bizarre posts. One calls on the 2012 Republican presidential candidates to publicly label progressives as “liars, race traders and race ‘traitors.” In another, Clovis declares that then-President Obama has “no experience at anything other than race baiting and race trading as a community organizer.” In a third post, Clovis calls civil rights icon W.E.B. Du Bois “the first race-trader,” accusing Du Bois of encouraging black Americans to vote for segregationist Woodrow Wilson.
It’s important to place Clovis’s lack of scientific experience and his climate denial in the context of his worrisome and wacky understanding of the history of race. As Mariel Garza at the LA Times points out in an essay posted last week, Clovis’s off-the-wall posts strengthen questions about his readiness for the USDA position. “It’s troubling to think of someone without a background in evidence-based scientific study making important policy decisions for a governmental agency responsible for the nation’s food safety, nutrition, agricultural and natural resources,” Garza writes. “Compounding the résumé gap is that, as his blog posts reveal, Clovis seems to embrace tired conservative tropes without question. Will he be open to scientific study that doesn’t support his ideology?”
While these blog posts don’t deal directly with science, they add worrisome depth to Clovis’s absolute unfitness for the USDA position by showing his willingness to swallow right-wing nonsense wholesale. What’s more, in an age when intersectionality is becoming increasingly important to scientific policy, Clovis represents a step in the entirely wrong direction. A fourth Clovis post attributing “culture” differences as the reason recovery after natural disasters in the Midwest was more successful than the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita is, perhaps, the most subtly troubling of the lot. Having a racist like Clovis in charge of scientific policy isn’t just insensitive: his attitudes could do real damage to communities around the country.
Incredibly, after the posts became public, a USDA spokesperson defended Clovis. “All of his reporting either on the air or in writing over the course of his career has been based on solid research and data,” the spokesperson told CNN. “He is after all an academic.”
If this is what academic thought looks like to the Trump administration, it’s past time to give them a failing grade.
Phil Newell and Molly Taft contributed to this report for I Heart Climate Scientists.
