Jay Inslee: Washington's 1st Congressional District
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Funding restored for university logging study
Decision comes one day after call for investigation
9 February 2006
One day after U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee called for an investigation into a Bureau of Land Management decision to suspend funding for an ongoing study by an Oregon State University graduate student, the agency reversed course and restored the federal research grant.
The decision to continue funding the final year of a three-year, $300,000 study on the effects of logging in the wake of forest fires was reported late Wednesday. Inslee, a member of the House Resources Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health, wrote a letter on Tuesday requesting the Department of Interior's inspector general to examine if the funding freeze was justified or punishment for the publication of an article in the journal Science that did not support the administration's stance on the issue.
"This is an encouraging development, but it's just one of many cases where the administration has allowed politics to pollute the scientific process," said Inslee.
In one recent example, a public affairs official at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been accused of threatening the agency's top climatologist and preventing him from talking to reporters because the scientist's views bucked the administration's stance on global warming. The spokesman - a Bush administration political appointee - resigned his post at NASA on Tuesday.
Click here to read Inslee's letter to the Interior Department inspector general.