By Robert Gebelhoff

The Washington Post

President Donald Trump may ridicule reporters and deride his opponents on Twitter. But there is a group of people he treats even worse than his most visible targets: scientists in his own administration.

Whatever the president says about the media or his online foes, they can all respond. After all, the First Amendment is still alive and well. But those who work for the government are not so lucky. When the president silences them, they have far less room for recourse. And this can have dire consequences for our democracy.

Take the recent directive from the Department of Health and Human Services to the communications staffers at the nation’s premier health research institutions. After two mass shootings this month, they were told not to post anything on social media regarding mental health, violence or mass shootings without prior approval from the government, The Post reported Tuesday.

In a statement to Post reporters, a spokesperson for the agency said: “It’s the department’s long-standing practice to not get ahead of the president’s remarks. This allows the president to share his message first with the nation.”

“But what happens when the president’s “message” is false? In this case, Trump blamed “mentally ill monsters” for our gun violence epidemic, a phony narrative that researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health have long attempted to defuse.

Who knows what horror these experts would inflict on the president’s “message,” given a chance to share their research? And that’s the point: Trump’s tendency to feud with people publicly is not good for our political climate. But silencing our nation’s experts is considerably worse — both for them and for our nation.

Consider Maria Caffrey, a scientist formerly working for the National Park Service who testified to Congress last month that, when she refused to remove references to climate change in her report about how rising seas could impact national parks, the government threatened to change the report without her consent and withhold it from being published.

Or consider Joel Clement, the former director of the Interior Department’s Office of Policy Analysis, who similarly said that administration officials retaliated against him for speaking out about how climate change is affecting Alaska Native communities. After speaking out, he was reassigned to an accounting office that collects royalty checks from fossil-fuel companies.

We know about these cases because these researchers stepped forward at great risk to their careers. Scientists shouldn’t have to make these decisions; nor should they be subjected to such political interference in their work, which risks chilling intellectual honesty.

And it has happened time and time again. In 2017, Interior Department officials — including then-Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt — blocked the release of a comprehensive analysis about the threat that three widely used pesticides pose to endangered species, requiring the report’s authors to use a narrower standard for determining the risk of the chemicals. That year, the government also halted a study by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine on the health risks of mountaintop removal mining in Appalachian states, wasting $455,110 that had already been spent on the process.

We could go on: The administration has suppressed, blocked or ignored scientific research on the environmental effects of mining in national forests, the dangers of asbestos, the status of endangered species, the effect a citizenship question would have on the U.S. Census, the safety of children’s products and countless other issues.

Censorship takes more subtle forms, too, such as the administration’s efforts to severely hobble expert panels or eliminate them altogether, and it has restricted the research that can be used in public policy to studies in which the underlying data is publicly available. The administration has painted these efforts as attempts to improve government or increase transparency, but in reality they prevent the government from using the best data available for policy decisions.

Or consider the administration’s plans to move two science agencies within the Agriculture Department from Washington to Kansas. The scheme appears to have been intended at least in part to upend the lives of government scientists. As acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said at a recent event, the relocation was meant to “drain the swamp”: “What a wonderful way to sort of streamline government,” he said.

This is the intellectual rot of the Trump era. It’s more than just an anti-big government ideology; it’s a systematic assault on science across the federal government. These actions will reverberate in our government for years to come, even after the Trump administration is gone, in the form of policy decisions we make without the benefit of the best evidence available. And worse, Americans may not even be aware of how they are being deceived and deprived.

That’s the true scandal of Trump’s war on scientists. No other group is so pervasively targeted and so thoroughly ignored. Yet it is their voices, more than any other, that our nation needs in this disturbing political moment.