Probe into BLM funding sought

GRANTS PASS, Ore. – Questioning whether the Bush administration is manipulating science for political ends, Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., called Tuesday for an inspector general’s investigation into why federal funding was suspended for a study that goes against White House-supported legislation to speed up logging after wildfires on national forests.

In a letter and a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, Inslee called for an investigation by the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Interior into whether the U.S. Bureau of Land Management was punishing researchers from Oregon State University for coming up with findings that don’t fit with White House policy goals.

“Unfortunately, it’s very apparent to most neutral observers that under this administration in a variety of ways that the scientific process has been corrupted by political influence,” Inslee said in a telephone interview. “We saw that when the administration and their political forces tried to shackle distribution of information by the chief climate scientist in the United States, Dr. James Hansen, two weeks ago.”

Hansen, director of the Goddard Space Institute, has said the Bush administration tried to stop him from talking about global warming since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases.

The study, which found salvage logging killed naturally regenerated seedlings and increased, in the short term, the amount of fuel on the ground to feed future fires, was embraced by environmentalists fighting a House bill to speed salvage logging on national forests after wildfires and other disasters.

BLM acknowledged Monday that it asked OSU whether the three-year study led by graduate student Daniel Donato and published last month in the journal Science violated provisions of a $307,000 federal fire research grant.

Donald Kennedy, editor in chief of Science, has said editors at the magazine were responsible for including a reference to pending legislation in supplemental material posted online, and that the researchers had asked them to remove it.

BLM Oregon spokesman Chris Strebig said the decision to suspend funding was purely a question of whether researchers had followed the terms of their contract.

“We would cooperate fully with that process,” Strebig said of any investigation that may develop.