The left wing of the Democratic Party (which might be all that’s left of the Democrats these days) was not the only constituency that lost patience with Barack Obama during this past week. While the professional left was gaining all the television coverage with their fulminations regarding Obama’s acquiescence on tax increases, a less hysterical special interest group was also expressing its displeasure. The scientific community has decided that it had enough of his broken promises as well.

Back in 2008, Obama, the mainstream news media and the Democratic Party frequently sang in harmony charging the outgoing Bush administration of hostility toward science. Whether it was the environment or fetal stem cell research, the Bush administration was accused of either pressuring scientists to alter their data or of simply ignoring results when that data was proved inconvenient to their policy priorities.

In truth, the Bush administration’s disdain for the purity of science differed only in its methodology from the Clinton years, where vast riches were dangled before the faces of scientists who would return the acceptable data. But there was less complaining about those tactics.

In his inaugural address, Obama gave the politicized scientific community reason to believe that it would help steer the country when he promised that his administration would “restore science to its rightful place.” The scientific community interpreted this to mean that the wisdom it revealed through research would inform policy decisions and that science would trump such trivialities as morality. But judging from the results (and science is all about results), it is clear that Obama meant something very different. In Obama’s America, the proper place for science is in service to the throne, which should surprise no one. In an episode that has been conveniently swept under the rug of history, in the summer of 2009, the Obama administration also tried to use the National Endowment for the Arts to steer the art community toward projects that glorified the person and the policy objectives of Barack Obama.

In an article published in the December issue of The New Scientist, the magazine’s editors complained that science was suffering treatment every bit as shabby as it had endured during what the magazine chose to characterize as “the dark days of George W. Bush’s presidency.”

The New Scientist pointed out that nearly a quarter of all federal scientists working in food safety had been ordered by their politically appointed superiors to manipulate data that they elucidated in their research to conform to the administration’s political agenda. And during the Gulf of Mexico oil spill fiasco, a report produced by government scientists on the effects of the spill was heavily edited by the politicians to support a policy position that Team Obama had already decided upon when it asked for the report.

The Obama administration had made up its mind that it wanted to impose a six-month oil exploration moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico, and generated a document that was supposedly the product of scientific research. The administration even claimed that the document had been peer-reviewed. It had not been.

The Union of Concerned Scientists conducts regular surveys through its Scientific Integrity Program, looking for political interference in the conduct of science. According to its results, in at least one area the “war on science” has actually gotten measurably worse since Obama took office. A survey taken by UCS in the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Nutrition revealed that in 2010, 16 percent of the scientists working there had been asked to manipulate data to serve political agendas. During the Bush years, that number was only 10 percent. Twenty-three percent of all scientists working in the field of food safety at the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that they had been asked to “inappropriately exclude or alter technical information” by their superiors.

What is particularly disturbing is that The New Scientist reports that, under this administration, scientists are afraid to speak out publicly. During the Bush years, it was quite common for scientists to take their complaints to a press that shared their disdain for that occupant of the White House. Today’s scientists are not just being asked to forge data, but they’re afraid to complain about it. Whatever one has to say about the Bush administration’s treatment of science, at least the scientists themselves were not living in an environment of fear.

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Costello is a research technician at Washington State University. His e-mail address is kozmocostello@hotmail.com.