Editorial: Hear no evil/Politics vs. inconvenient facts

08/28/2005

Star Tribune
August 28, 2005

A recent Justice Department study has found that black and Hispanic motorists are more likely than whites to be searched and roughed up by law enforcement officers during traffic stops, the New York Times and the Washington Post reported last week.

But that’s not the most disturbing aspect of the story. As with any study of racial profiling, there are open questions about whether the officers had legitimate reasons to act as they did. What’s really troubling about the story is that senior political appointees in the Bush administration tried to suppress some elements of the study and stifled its release to the general public. Worse, they initially threatened to fire its chief author, a veteran Justice Department employee and a respected statistician named Lawrence Greenfeld. He is being replaced as director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics and demoted; on Thursday, six congressional Democrats called for his reinstatement.

If this were an isolated episode, one might shrug it off as one more turf war in a town that’s full of big egos and sharp elbows. But Greenfeld’s case is only the latest example of the Bush administration punishing career professionals for producing research or making assessments that contradicted the president’s political agenda.

Famously, there was Harvard economist Lawrence Lindsey, who got fired as head of Bush’s National Economic Council after telling the Wall Street Journal in 2002 that a war in Iraq would cost far more than the White House predicted. (His estimate was $100 billion to $200 billion, which looks modest in hindsight.)

Then there was Richard Foster, a top actuary at the Department of Health and Human Services, who was threatened with termination after he calculated that the Bush administration’s legislation for a Medicare drug benefit would cost far more than the White House had told members of Congress. And of course there was Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was demoted after telling Congress that pacifying Iraq would require a much bigger army than Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted to deploy.

This pattern should offend anyone who believes in republican government, and it’s mortifying from a president who talks constantly about democracy and America’s freedoms. It means that taxpayers don’t get public information and expert advice that they’re paying for. It intimidates and discourages the talented scientists, economists, military officers and lawyers who go into government thinking—hoping—that they might serve the public interest and keep the politicians tethered to reality. Worst of all, it can lead a nation into horrible blunders, such as the botched prewar planning in Iraq.

In general, the truth seems to catch up with those who would deny it. The question is how long that takes, and at what cost.