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posted by cmn32480 on Friday March 16 2018, @07:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-didn't-sign-up-for-it dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @09:29PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @09:29PM (#653809)

    of Trumpenfuhrer and his brownshirts.

  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @10:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @10:13PM (#653830)

    The EPA is full of horrible people.

    Start with them being government workers who care about your success less than the workers at the post office, department of motor vehicles, or tax office at any level of government. These are people whose job is to be an impediment to getting shit done. This is the opposite of making America great.

    Then, they are all a bunch of tree-hugger activists. They are kind of like Greenpeace or the Sierra Club, but with real authority.

    Who would want such a job? It's only the worst of the worst. These are people who are not fit to make you a burger. Some of them may be fit to scrape gum off of sidewalks.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @03:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @03:02AM (#653923)

    Careerism reveals its downside. Especially when the boss dislikes people like you and enjoys firing them.