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Paper short abstract

Failures of advisory bodies before or during a crisis are conventionally corrected in the US through legal action. A populist regime has politicized the courts and the enforcement of judicial orders. Any solution must address this legal crisis, most likely by collaboration between opposing experts.

Paper long abstract

This paper highlights one dimension of scientific advice before and during crises, namely the limitations imposed by politics on advisory bodies. Examples include the removal or retirement of experts at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as well as reduction in funding for university research supporting those agencies. Failures on the part of advisory bodies before or during a crisis—whether they are ineffective, producing misinformation, or doing nothing—are, in the US, conventionally addressed through legal action against, for example, a government agency for its respective failure to regulate, to protect public health and safety, and to correct false information. Public interest groups independent from the government, with their own experts, bring such actions. However, once courts of law become politicized, through (i) appointing judges whose decisions will support the current political regime, and (ii), in the case of judges who rule against a government agency, a department of justice that will not enforce orders from a judge who remains independent from the government, the situation appears to be rather hopeless.

As an alternative to unproductive litigation, collaboration is essential between experts on both sides of any controversy concerning the appropriate responses to a crisis. STS, with its critique of idealized images of science and its modest view of science as inevitably uncertain, provides a model for dialogue. While some critics consider collaboration impossible because one side is anti-science, both sides in recent crises claimed (different) scientific evidence and data.