The Deutsch Affair at NASA

I have posted a couple of times on the climate for public announcements on scientific opinion at NASA. Part of the information concerned George C. Deutsch, a 24 year old presidential appointee at NASA who reportedly limited reporters' access to a top climate scientist and who told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang.

In case you don't remember, here is part of the coverage from Irrigular Times:

Dr. James Hansen is director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies for NASA. As such, it is his professional responsibility to follow NASA’s mission “to understand and protect our home planet” (those words come right from NASA’s mission statement).

Yet, around the time that climate data revealed that 2005 was the hottest year for planet Earth on record, Dr. Hansen said he began receiving intimidating telephone calls telling him to stop informing Americans of the growing problem of global warming, as documented by a mountain of scientific evidence. The calls warned him of “dire consequences” if he continued to talk about global warming. His interviews with the news media were cancelled, and Dr. Hansen was told that other officials, who knew enough to stay in compliance with the President’s orthodoxy.

George Deutsch, a public affairs officer for NASA, told Dr. Hansen that he could not talk to anyone at National Public Radio because NPR was part of the liberal media. Deutsch told one of Dr. Hansen’s colleagues, Leslie McCarthy, that it was his job to make the president look good. Of course, that’s not what any public affairs officer of the federal government is hired to do. They are hired to serve the American people by telling them the truth about what the government knows, not to serve the political agenda of the President.

Andrew Revkin reported in yesterday's edition of the New York Times:

George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.

Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.

Officials at NASA headquarters declined to discuss the reason for the resignation.

The article also mentions:

Mr. Deutsch, 24, was offered a job as a writer and editor in NASA's public affairs office in Washington last year after working on President Bush's re-election campaign and inaugural committee, according to his résumé. No one has disputed those parts of the document.

According to his résumé, Mr. Deutsch received a "Bachelor of Arts in journalism, Class of 2003."

Yesterday, officials at Texas A&M said that was not the case.

"George Carlton Deutsch III did attend Texas A&M University but has not completed the requirements for a degree," said an e-mail message from Rita Presley, assistant to the registrar at the university, responding to a query from The Times.

Apparently Nick Anthis, a blogger on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford discovered that Deutsch had not graduated from Texas A&M, and publicized that information on his blog, the Scientific Activist. (The blog incidentally, seems quite good, and likely to be of interest to the readers of my blog.)

This has generated a lot of traffic in the blogosphere. Eschaton's posting "Bye George", for example, has more than 400 comments on his announcement. Bad Astronomer Blog's rant about Deutsch has more than 200 comments. Its blogger's posting on Slashdot has generated more than 450 comments to date.

A Blogpulse search gives the following trends:



Now Josh Marshall on (the great) Talking Points Memo reports "George C. Deutsch......has been forced to resign." A recent posting on Slashdot also seems to imply that Deutsch has been forced to resign. I don't know if it has been by force of circumstances, or as a result of a discrete talk with his NASA boss, but I'm glad to hear he succummed to that force.

World of Crap has done us the favor of looking up Deutsch's publications from his days on the Texas A&M Battalion. This young man, not surprisingly, seems to be a conservative true believer, with a contempt for what he characterized as "the liberal media".

I am concerned with the Bush Administration's treatment of scientific results, especially those results that would suggest stronger environmental policies or those which would challenge the beliefs of religious conservatives. Part of the problem I think is that he, as spokesperson, attracted people with excentric views and personal agendas to his campaign, and they in turn mole into government jobs from their campaign jobs. Of course, campaign workers get government jobs whenever their candidate wins, but the tendency concerns me when it gets antiscientific zealots into science related jobs. When they fake their credentials, and no one catches the fakery, and/or when they extend their power and no one imposes fair limits, we all suffer! Maybe outrage expressed in the blogosphere will help correct the problem!