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The Trump administration has frozen grants and contracts by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to ProPublica, and blocked employees from providing updates on this change via social media. This could have big effects on the agency's budget and severely undercut its efforts.
In an email obtained by ProPublica, one EPA contractor writes that: "The new EPA administration has asked that all contract and grant awards be temporarily suspended, effective immediately. Until we receive further clarification, this includes task orders and work assignments."
Also, employees have been banned from providing updates to reporters or on social media. The internal memo specifies that no press releases will go out to external audiences, there will be "no blog messages" and media requests will be carefully screened. (Interestingly, the Department of Energy, a fellow federal agency, recently released new guidelines that specifically protects contractors and ensures that they can state their personal opinions.)
Source: The Verge
takyon: Here are some related stories happening at the same time:
USDA scrambles to ease concerns after researchers were ordered to stop publishing news releases, other documents
USDA disavows gag-order emailed to scientific research unit
Commerce nominee Ross promises to protect "peer-reviewed research" at NOAA
CDC postpones climate conference ahead of Trump takeover
Badlands National Park goes rogue with climate-change tweets
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 26 2017, @08:46PM
Really? Is this "alternative history"? Don't recall any climate change deniers in the USDA or NASA or EPA being muzzled when the last legitimate President of the United States took office. We need citations for this one.
From here [nytimes.com]:
Longtime employees at three of the agencies — including some career environmental regulators who conceded that they remained worried about what President Trump might do on policy matters — said such orders were not much different from those delivered by the Obama administration as it shifted policies from the departing White House of George W. Bush. They called reactions to the agency memos overblown. On Wednesday, Douglas Ericksen, a spokesman for the E.P.A., said that grants had been only briefly frozen for review, and that they would be restarted by Friday.
“I’ve lived through many transitions, and I don’t think this is a story,” said a senior E.P.A. career official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media on the matter. “I don’t think it’s fair to call it a gag order. This is standard practice. And the move with regard to the grants, when a new administration comes in, you run things by them before you update the website.”
There you go. I think it's nice that the press is actually watching this time, but we need to remember the synergy of confirmation and observation bias that you display. Because you didn't know of the time Obama did this and did know of the time Trump did this, it became "muzzling".
And the switch to NASA was real clever! Old sleight of hand stuff, right there! As another AC said, almost up to frojack levels! On SoylentNews, we like our Herring Red, because only dead fish go with the flow (thanks, Sarah), and a Trump supporter rots from the head down.
Going from a pretty innocuous transition of power procedure to shutting down of some Canadian libraries and then extrapolating from that shut down to "erasing history" is overblown rhetoric. Did NASA intend to "erase history" when it reduced the holdings and size of its institutional libraries over the decades? Or the many libraries of colleges? There's plenty of cases where people close or reduce libraries with the usual consequences of doing so. We don't hyperventilate over it as intentional erasing of history in those cases.
And the bizarre thing is that this isn't a red herring. It's merely an observation which several posters, including you, dear aristarchus, choose to misinterpret as actions of Trump and even Harper were misinterpreted in this very thread. It's a pattern (to use the vernacular of coding, an "anti-pattern") of irrationality.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday January 27 2017, @07:28AM
including you, dear aristarchus, choose to misinterpret. . .
Did you see that? khallow finally called me "dear"! Be still my beating heart!
Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Rick, in Casablanca [youtube.com]