With a team of reporters and editors, journalist Samanth Subramanian, HuffPost, October 28, 2020, completed an exhaustive report of the Trump administration’s four-year record of destroying and distorting data crucial to forming policy and action plans in the public interest. The report starts with the pandemic but includes climate change, protecting the most vulnerable citizens, pollution, using science to form policy, food and agricultural studies, conservation and the census.
Science writer Jeff Tollefson, Nature, October 5, 2020, writes that besides the pandemic, President Donald Trump and his administration bungled the problems of climate warming and public health by undermining the use of science to determine public policy. “Much of the damage to science — including regulatory changes and severed international partnerships — can and probably will be repaired if Trump loses this November, writes Tollefson, “In that event, what the nation and the world will have lost is precious time to limit climate change and the march of the virus, among other challenges. But the harm to scientific integrity, public trust and the United States’ stature could linger well beyond Trump’s tenure, says scientists and policy experts.”