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Academics Need Not Apply: Trump's Agencies Cool to Professors

Academics Need Not Apply: Trump's Agencies Cool to Professors

(Bloomberg) -- As the Trump administration looks to puts its mark on scientific agencies, something has mostly gone missing from the ranks of new arrivals: university scientists.

Four experts from institutions of higher education were on assignment to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in September 2016, the last year of the Obama administration, through a temporary-transfer program called the Intergovernmental Personnel Act. A year later, there were none. Similar drops occurred at the Department of Energy, the Office of Science and Technology Policy and elsewhere.

"There seems to be this mantra that if we can get these pesky scientists out of the way, then that will make things easier to deregulate," said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Passed by Congress in 1970, the Intergovernmental Personnel Act lets experts from postsecondary institutions or other levels of government join a federal agency temporarily, typically for a year or two, to work on a specific assignment. Those temporary staff are commonly referred to as IPAs; they can be paid by the agency to which they’re loaned, by their regular employer, or a mix of both.

Bloomberg News filed open-records requests last September with eight research-oriented agencies and offices seeking information on people on temporary assignment through the program. The data show fewer academics at the agencies run by political staff, while agencies run by nonpolitical career staff have seen little or no change from the previous administration.

Paul Verkuil, a former chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States, whose job was to make the federal bureaucracy more efficient, said the temporary assignments from colleges and universities are designed to give agencies access to expertise they can’t find internally.

Academics Need Not Apply: Trump's Agencies Cool to Professors

"You get really good talent for a short time when you have important needs in specific areas," Verkuil said. "You also get them at a very good price," he added, saying the arrangement is generally less expensive than using private-sector consultants.

The Office of Personnel Management, which is akin to the federal government’s human-resources department, has urged agencies to use the program more often. "Agencies do not take full advantage of the IPA program," the office says on its website, adding that the short-term transfers "can help agencies meet their needs for ’hard-to-fill’ positions."

Yet under the Trump administration, the number of specialists on loan from universities and colleges has decreased in some agencies and offices between September 2016 and September 2017.

One of the academics who worked for the EPA through the temporary-transfer program was Mark Dickie, a professor of economics at the University of Central Florida. Dickie’s specialty is estimating the economic consequences of reduced environmental health risks; during his year at the EPA, he worked with the agency’s National Center for Environmental Economics, to help improve EPA’s ability to measure the costs and benefits of major regulations.

Dickie says there’s no reason he can see why that office would no longer want academics on loan to their office to pursue that type of work. "So if there is a change," he said, "it would be with the new folks in the new administration."

Temporary Transfers

The EPA said in a statement that the agency hasn’t stopped using the program but that so far as the agency was aware, no one from any universities or colleges has applied for a temporary transfer to the EPA.

Myron Ebell, who led Trump’s transition team at the EPA, said he thought that the Obama administration tended to recruit academics who shared its views. Ebell said he favored "fewer regulators and fewer contractors." But he said that wasn’t a good reason to stop bringing specialists from universities and colleges into government.

"It’s one of the values of having outside academic advisers, to solicit a wide variety of knowledge and opinion," Ebell said. "You’re still going to need advice."

The EPA isn’t the only place to see a drop in the number of academics on loan to the federal government. In September 2016, there were 12 people from institutions of higher education assigned to the Department of Energy, according to documents obtained through an open records request. By last September, that number had fallen to eight.

The department took five months to provide the data in response to Bloomberg’s open-records request. The communications office didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

The decline was even more pronounced at the White House Office of Science and Technology policy. That office had five people on loan from institutions of higher education in September 2016, documents provided in response to an open-records request show. A year later, it had just one.

John Holdren, who ran the science and technology office as President Barack Obama’s science adviser, said the drop in the number of academics reflects the tone set at the top.

Obama was a magnet for science and technology talent, Holdren said by email. "Because it was clear to everybody that he understood how and why" science mattered in the nation’s agenda.

‘Talent Repellents’

By contrast, Trump, along with his picks to lead major scientific agencies, act as "talent repellents, because they appear to know little and care less about the value of insights from S&T in shaping public policy," he said, using an acronym for science and technology.

The academics working temporarily in the science and technology office served in a variety of senior roles. A professor from George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health was assistant director for precision medicine and bioethics; the founding director of Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy was the White House deputy chief technology officer.

Beth Kerttula, who took a leave from Stanford University to join the office as director of the national ocean council from 2014 to 2016, said the administration sought her because she already had experience working with state governments on coastal management.

"There’s a small group of people that do the kind of work I was doing," Kerttula said.

By September 2017, just one of the five academics working at the science and technology office a year earlier were still there; no new academics had joined through the program. In a statement, the office said the drop could reflect the normal churn between administrations, adding that two additional academics have since joined.

The change in administration doesn’t seem to have affected all agencies equally, though. The decline in academic representation occurred mainly in places run by Trump appointees or political staff. By contrast, agencies and bureaus with acting, non-political directors saw no change, or even an increase, in academics over the same period.

For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which was run by a career civil servant until October, had the same number of academics on temporary assignment in September 2017 as it did a year earlier. At the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA, both of which were run by career staff during Trump’s first year in office, the number increased slightly during that period.

Academics don’t want to take time away from their jobs to work for an agency that doesn’t care about what they do, said William McDowell, a professor at the University of New Hampshire who was assigned to the National Science Foundation from 2013 to 2014.

"When the work generally isn’t valued, and the work climate is so uncertain, of course people are less likely to want to serve," McDowell said. "You want to be useful in your work life. You want to do something effective."

To contact the reporter on this story: Christopher Flavelle in Washington at cflavelle@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jon Morgan at jmorgan97@bloomberg.net, Elizabeth Wasserman

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