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A survey of U.S. government scientists by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) was flagged as spam at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Computer Security Incident Response Center. UCS's Center for Science and Democracy director has attributed the low response rate at EPA and other agencies to a "culture of fear":
A periodic survey of U.S. federal scientists by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) caused a bit of a kerfuffle at U.S. EPA last month. For the ninth time since 2005, the science advocacy group sent out a survey to more than 63,000 federal scientists across 16 agencies to gather information about what's happening inside the federal government in relation to scientific integrity. Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at UCS, said his staff reached out to the agencies to let them know the survey was forthcoming: a memo EPA apparently missed.
"The unannounced, unauthorized, and perhaps illegal message found below this message was sent to me today," Brian Melzian, an EPA oceanographer in Rhode Island, wrote in a Feb. 12 email to EPA's Computer Security Incident Response Center (CSIRC) and others obtained by UCS. [...] Melzian continued: "Finally, if the message found below is legitimate and not bogus, these organizations have been grossly negligent and incompetent for distributing this message without first being authorized and approved by EPA." Rosenberg said while UCS did inform EPA the survey was coming, he is not required to do so and it's up to the agencies to choose whether and how they inform employees about it.
[...] While the survey will remain open for another couple of weeks, the response rate so far has been low — a fact Rosenberg attributes to fear of retaliation. "It suggests the climate and culture for scientists is really fearful," he said. "The culture we've seen more broadly in this administration has been either dismissal or hostility toward science." A spokesman for EPA said it didn't make sense to him that employees would be afraid to fill out the survey since it is anonymous but declined to comment further.
As of March 2, response rates for EPA hovered around 2 percent, with 296 completed surveys, compared with NOAA's response rate, which was 4.1 percent with 460 completed surveys. Still, in 2015 NOAA's response rate was 19.6 percent with 2,388 completed responses.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by lgsoynews on Friday March 16 2018, @08:30PM (1 child)
They miss the point. When you work in an organization where fear and ass-covering rules, people start being afraid of everything, even if it's completely irrational.
Plus, it's already hard enough to get people to participate to anything, because the bigger the organisation, the stronger the apathy, as anybody who has ever worked in a big org knows (yes, I have). If you add fear & uncertainty, do you REALLY think that answering surveys will be the most important thing for your "headcount"? (I use that ugly "headcount" word on purpose because all big orgs have that dehumanization going, sometimes to an amazing extent).
Don't expect people who are treated badly to be involved with their company/organization.
(Score: 1) by Goghit on Sunday March 18 2018, @03:19AM
I agree with you. I saw this during the Harper regime in Canada; it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. Upper management might be mouthing platitudes like this spokescritter but there's far too many middle management vermin in an authoritarian regime that will fuck you up if you're not careful. A number of us switched to using our home emails for associations, professional development, casual professional chat-chat, and anything that else that wasn't directly goverment science business.