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  • 2016-12-20 (xsd:date)
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  • Trump’s Budget Director Pick Asked Do We Really Need Government-Funded Research at All? (en)
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  • On 17 December 2016, President-elect Donald Trump nominated South Carolina representative Mick Mulvaney to lead the Office of Management and Budget. From the transition team statement: He has been characterized by many as a deficit hawk and is a member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of hard-line fiscal conservatives. As director of the OMB, he would run an organization that, in its words: On 19 December 2016, Mother Jones’ Pema Levy reported on one of Mulvaney's since-deleted Facebook posts, unearthed by a Democratic opposition research group named American Bridge. This post from 9 September 2016 came at a time that Congress was debating funding research into efforts to fight the spread of the Zika virus. In it, Mulvaney suggested the federal government (whose budget office he is now nominated to lead) might not be well served by funding science research at all: The post, though deleted, can still be viewed on a cached version of Mulvaney’s Facebook page. His argument against science funding (and science in general) seems to follow arguments made by other prominent Trump transition team figures: because science is sometimes wrong, or not clear cut, it shouldn’t be trusted. In defense of his opposition to funding Zika research, the remainder of this 9 September 2016 post cited a recent study that cast doubt on the viruses connection to infant microcephaly: The information to which Mulvaney is referring comes from a press release provided by the New England Complex Systems Institute, and posted on the science news aggregator ScienceDaily.com on 24 June 2016. The findings that Mulvaney cites to are summarized in that release: In the final portion of Mulvaney’s post, he incorrectly asserts that this scientific information came from the New England Journal of Medicine because the press release cited a study from that journal. The NEJM study cited in the release — a review of data from Brazil’s Zika epidemic — concluded the exact opposite: And, as it turns out, so did the New England Complex Systems Institute. A closer look at the actual reports reveals that the NECSI had been releasing semi-monthly reports on Zika in Colombia since May 2016. Early on, they found no evidence to support a connection between the virus and microcephaly. Later data, however, revealed that more time was needed to see the effects of the virus in children born to Zika infected mothers. In their August report (the final one in this series), they stated: Mulvaney has not commented on his reason for deleting the post. (en)
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