HOUSTON, TX - January 30 - In a move seen by many as another Bush Administration attack on scientific freedom, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is politicizing the proven scientific practice of independent peer review in favor of research controlled by an agency created in 1970 to assist the president in budget evaluation and management. The OMB is proposing new peer review requirements for all but a few government agencies. The National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC) called the new standards "preposterous."

In this latest ploy to regulate how scientific research impacts public policy and what results are made public, OMB plans to impose crippling new conflict-of-interest rules for peer review that would heavily favor peer review panel participation by industry-paid scientists over well-qualified and independent scientists who had been awarded government research grants. One need only recall the research results of tobacco company scientists who long concealed the adverse health effects of their employers' products to see the problem of eliminating independent scientific review.

Additionally, the OMB bulletin proposes to oversee peer reviews itself or to appoint an outside entity to do so. It furthermore proposes that peer reviewers may be politically appointed individuals or parties. This has the potential to make a scientific process vulnerable to manipulation and to take flexibility and fairness out of a review system, thus making it more science for special interests rather than true scientific advice.

"Why bother having any scientific study if the Administration simply wants something to match whatever they feel it should be?" fumed NTAC Chair, Vanessa Edwards Foster. "A story in the Philadelphia Inquirer inferred that individual parties or even corporations could sue researchers if the findings are deemed not to their liking! For transgenders, this sends a message that government will kill any future study on our community unless it produces the finding "transgenders are evil" and leaves it at that," Foster commented. "This heavy-handed intimidation of scientific research is preposterous."

Combined with arch-conservative congressional attacks on National Institute of Health research grants concerning sexual topics related to AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, and with the Center for Disease Control suppression of life-saving condom information, this attempt to hamstring independent evaluation and critique of research important to the well being of Americans is a blatant effort to politicize science.

NTAC feels this policy will also thwart published scientific results and increase the formulation of government policy for the benefit of business and religiopolitical activist groups, which tend to contribute heavily to the Bush and other Republican reelection campaigns. This begs the questions: what will now become of research into GLBT issues such as gender identity or sexuality? More to the point, what about anything outside of the mainstream right in thought and deed?

"This aggressive dissuasion of scientific study will leave a deleterious pall over any future research," said Foster, the chair of NTAC. "The Administration is clearly overstepping its bounds with its misguided attempt to micro-manage science."

"There are other issues much more deserving of this attention, such as job creation!"

NTAC joins with such scientific organizations as the National Academies of Science, the American Public Health Association, theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science, the Ecological Society of America, the Federation of American Scientists, the Association of American Medical Colleges, plus environmental, consumer and public-interest groups in opposing OMB's uncalled for power grab. Politics have no more of a place in science and in determining policy concerning the welfare of the American people than OMB's policy makers and bugeteers have in scientific research.

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