Pork versus Science

According to the Washington Post, John McCain tends to complain about strong science projects with important implications as he justly complains about unwarranted pork barrel legislation. He of course goes on to vote for the bills including the pork barrel legislation. Some quotes:

If you've heard Sen. John McCain's stump speech, you've surely heard him talk about grizzly bears. The federal government, he declares with horror and astonishment, has spent $3 million to study grizzly bear DNA. "I don't know if it was a paternity issue or criminal," he jokes, "but it was a waste of money."....

Actually, it was a scientific and logistical triumph, argues Katherine Kendall, 56, mastermind of the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project.....

Kendall, on orders from her superiors, will not directly respond to McCain ("I really can't wade into that"), but she clearly doesn't find his jibes amusing, much less accurate. The truth is, her project is focused not on the DNA of grizzly bears, but on counting them.

As a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, she set out to get the first head count of grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem. She and her co-workers at the USGS have used DNA primarily as a bear-identifying tool. Her project also employed barbed wire and homemade bear bait brewed up from rotten fish and cattle blood.

"There's never been any information about the status of this population. We didn't know what was going on -- until this study," Kendall said.

This was an astonishingly ambitious research project involving 207 paid workers, hundreds of volunteers, 7.8 million acres and 2,560 bear sampling sites. The project did not cost $3 million, as McCain's ad alleges, but more than $5 million, including nearly $4.8 million in congressional appropriations. It had a strong advocate in Congress in Montana's three-term senator, Conrad Burns, a Republican who was defeated in his reelection bid in 2006.....

Grizzly bears in northwest Montana are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. But Kendall's project -- the results of which will be published soon in a scientific journal -- revealed that there are more grizzlies than anyone had realized. That suggests that three decades of conservation efforts, costing tens of millions of dollars, have paid off.

This could have long-term implications for the Northern Divide grizzlies, possibly including their removal someday from the threatened list. Delisting them would restore management of the bears to state control after decades of federal oversight.

"It was extremely well executed and well worth the money," said Sterling Miller, a bear researcher working for the National Wildlife Federation. "Someone like McCain should be delighted, in fact. The Endangered Species Act works.".....

The project found a powerful ally in Burns, who chaired the subcommittee overseeing the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey. Burns, Kendall said, added $1 million to the USGS budget in 2003 and pushed through add-ons for the next four years.

That got the attention of McCain, who every year puts out a list of what he considers egregious or laughable pork-barrel projects. He has gone after wasteful military projects and corporate tax breaks, but for rhetorical purposes he's shown a fondness for mocking money spent on dubious-sounding projects involving plants and animals......

He has criticized the $2 million spent on Oregon's Groundfish Disaster Outreach Program, the $280,000 spent on asparagus technology in Washington state, the $600,000 for peanut research in Alabama.

"One of our all-time favorites, made famous a number of years ago, is money that was spent to study the effect on the ozone layer of flatulence in cows," McCain said in 2003.......

For McCain, bears have been, like cows and peanuts and asparagus, good material.

Comment: Let us not trade the Bush science policy for an equally bad policy in the future administration. JAD