Trump Administration Prohibits CDC Policy Analysts From Using the Words 'Science-Based' (washingtonpost.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader hey! writes: On Friday the Washington Post reported that the Trump Administration has forbidden the Centers for Disease Control from using seven terms in certain documents: "science-based", "evidence-based", "vulnerable," "entitlement," "diversity," "transgender," and "fetus".

It's important to note that the precise scope and intent of the ban is unknown at present. Scientific and medical personnel as of now have not been affected, only policy analysts preparing budgetary proposals and supporting data that is being sent to Congress. So it is unclear the degree to which the language mandates represent a change in agency priorities vs. a change in how it presents itself to Congress. However banning the scientifically precise term "fetus" will certainly complicate budgeting for things like Zika research and monitoring.
According to the Post's article, "Instead of 'science-based' or 'evidence-based,' the suggested phrase is 'CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes."

The New York Times confirmed the story with several officials, although "a few suggested that the proposal was not so much a ban on words but recommendations to avoid some language to ease the path toward budget approval by Republicans."

Comments

They must go nuts

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who had to work with crassly incompetent bosses, too, I can feel for them. This must really be really painful. The best thing they can do is leaking every bullshit those Trumpist idiots are demanding and destroying to the press.

Re: They must go nuts

[unrtst]

I love this little thread! It seems to embody the discourse for many of this years issues.
* Someone takes a side on something
* Other people adamantly disagree
* Others join first side, still no reasons presented
* Second side states some nearly-fact, and references it as why they are correct
* First side barely rephrases the same fact, and uses it to claim they are correct
* A back and forth ensues, each saying, "no, it's because $same_fact"
* Side note: one of the parties doesn't actually believe the fact, so they can't even fall back to agreeing on that

Regarding that last point, it means the two sides here probably won't agree that Monsanto is awful and needs broken in a variety of ways, even though "big evil gmo company" is the shared fact.... though someone from both sides WILL agree to that, and it just leaves everyone frustrated, wondering how nearly everyone involved can be saying essentially the same thing and arriving an completely opposing opinions.

FWIW, I blame language, or the poor or inaccurate use of it.

Re: They must go nuts

[Anonymous Coward]

> Jim Crow was a Democrat

You're semantically-correct, but effectively wrong. Today's "Republican" and "Democratic" parties BOTH differ in important, fundamental ways from the parties bearing their names 50+ years ago. We've had at LEAST 2 or 3 MAJOR partisan re-alignments over the past 150 years where the names remained the same, but the members (and their personalities) got shuffled and switched around.

Abraham Lincoln was most assuredly NOT a "limited-government states-rights evangelical conservative", any more than Thomas Jefferson was a welfare-state environmentalist who advocated the poor, powerless, black, or otherwise-disenfranchised.

Both parties are volatile, fragile coalitions. In countries with proportional-representation parliamentary democracy, the coalitions are formed by elected officials after each election. In countries with first past the post elections (regardless of whether you call the resulting body a "congress" or "parliament"), you inevitably end up with 2 strong parties that shuffle back & forth, with a third group that occasionally coalesces into a stable third party, and the coalitions are effectively formed BEFORE the election.

This is why Republicans in Congress keep ending up hamstrung by their most extreme right-wing members, instead of kicking them to the curb and forming working coalitions with the least-liberal Democrats. The leaders of BOTH parties know that the result would eventually be another reshuffling that would probably result in a hardcore right-wing evangelical party big enough to keep Rs and Ds from getting clear majorities, while the Rs and Ds themselves were BOTH dragged towards a more ambiguous center neither party WANTS to be at, with neither Rs nor Ds likely to achieve solid, stable majorities for a long time afterwards. So conservative-leaning Democrats are pressured into NOT forming coalitions with Republicans, and Republicans aren't allowed to even THINK about forming a temporary coalition with any Democrats, even if such a coalition could steamroll over the extremists in both parties... both parties will automatically sacrifice short-term victories for the sake of long-term stability.

Re:She's a witch!

[Just Some Guy]

Only Christianity and Judaism maintain that God created a material reality that was (1) separate from Him, and (2) knowable.

LMAO. Trends come and go in all religions. The Islamic Golden Age was a time of amazing scientific and philosophical progress, but they gave it up. Catholics rejected science, then eventually came to embrace it. Protestants loved science, then modern evangelical sects came to despise it.

I was raised Southern Baptist, but wholly abandoned it because of their insane insistence that reality was wrong. When a man tells you the sky is green and Jesus rode a dinosaur, it's awfully hard not to laugh at his opinions on anything else. Whatever else I might think about their organization, the Catholic church seems to be pretty good about science these days. I don't hear anything bad about the scientific beliefs of mainstream protestant groups (that is, ones that aren't American extremists). That said, Hindu and Taoist countries are doing lots of amazing science, and the OECD says that lots of barely religious countries are beating the US in science education.