UPI has an article by SHAUN WATERMAN, its Homeland and National Security Editor, about a Congressman's effort to pressure the Congressional Research Service. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., the chairman of the House Permanent Select on Intelligence,

"blasted the Congressional Research Service for bias in two reports it produced on the National Security Agency's program of warrantless counter-terrorist surveillance.......The reports questioned the legal reasoning the administration has employed to justify both the program and the way that only a handful of senior lawmakers from both parties were briefed on it..... 'The plain message people were getting was that The president broke the law, he said. 'That is wrong. It requires a strong answer.'"

The article goes on to cite several others who feel the Congressional Research Service is careful to guarantee neutrality of its reports, and left me with the impression that Hoekstra wanted to silence potential critics more than to set the record straight.

I was especially interested in the following:

"Citing recent reports about efforts to silence government scientists on the subject of global warming, Beth Daley, of the watchdog group the Project on Government Oversight, said Hoekstra's letters were part of a Republican "campaign against expertise."

"'These complaints,' she told UPI, 'are part of their campaign against accurate information, against science.'

"She accused CRS management of allowing a 'culture of fear and intimidation' to develop at the service.......veterans of the service say that taking positions -- which may be unpopular with one side or the other in any debate -- is essential to their work."

The Project on Government Oversight is an interesting NGO, using its resources to keep the government honest and its operations transparent. If their Communications Director states publicly that there is a Republican campaign against expertise, the comment is worthy of attention.

Daley's comment is cited by Kevin Drum in his column in the Washington Monthly yesterday. Drum goes on to describe the case of Louis Fisher of the CRS, who is trying to survive the fallout from his statement that the 1989 Wistleblower Act has not proven very effective in rooting out government problems. Drum concludes:

Newspaper reporters might well take note of this: objectivity is not neutrality. The fact that there are two sides to a story does not make both sides equally valid. Louis Fisher appears to recognize this, and the only question left is whether he'll be fired for saying so. Stay tuned.

Drum cites Chris Mooney's great "Requiem for an Office", written on the tenth anniversary of the closing of the Office of Technology Assessment by the Newt Gingrich led Congress. Money writes:

following the "Gingrich revolution" of 1994, incoming congressional Republicans dismantled their authoritative scientific advisory office in a stunning act of self-lobotomy. Obsessed with shrinking government, Gingrich's acolytes denounced OTA for being too slow in its assessments and (some added) suspect in its political orientation. The late Cong. George Brown of California, leading the Democratic minority on the House Science Committee at the time, memorably countered that the agency had served as Congress's "defense against the dumb," and continued, "it is shameful that OTA was defenseless against a very dumb decision by Congress."

Mooney gives the last word to Jack Gibbons, the former Director of OTA, and I can do no less:

A signatory to a prominent 2004 statement by the Union of Concerned Scientists denouncing the Bush administration's scientific stewardship, Gibbons told me that while science has always been politicized to some extent, "It's never been this blatant or this bad. We almost wistfully think back to the Reagan years." But he also explained how OTA, had it remained in existence, could have served as a partial check on rampant science politicization and misrepresentations of scientific information. The office might have prepared an independent assessment of the number of available embryonic stem cell lines, for instance, so that Congress wouldn't have had to trust President Bush's woefully incorrect claim that "more than 60" such lines were in existence as of August 2001. OTA might also have helped set the record straight on the science of climate change--a task it could have accomplished in congressionally endorsed studies that would have been hard to ignore.

OTA, Gibbons added, defused politicized science disputes by providing an authoritative, baseline body of information that all sides could accept. Characteristically, Gibbons reached into his grab bag of quotations in order to accentuate the point. He invoked the words of Patrick Moynihan, the late Democratic senator from New York: "We can each have our own opinions, but we cannot each have our own facts." That's a lesson whose value, we can only hope, will ultimately prevail upon Congress--whether Republican-controlled or otherwise.