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Waiting For The NASA Science Word Police

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
December 16, 2017
Waiting For The NASA Science Word Police

CDC gets list of forbidden words: fetus, transgender, diversity, Washington Post
“The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases – including “fetus” and “transgender” – in any official documents being prepared for next year’s budget. Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden words at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.” In some instances, the analysts were given alternative phrases. Instead of “science-based” or “evidence-based,” the suggested phrase is “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes,” the person said. In other cases, no replacement words were immediately offered.”
After report on CDC’s forbidden words policy draws outrage, HHS pushes back, Stat
A spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department said Saturday the agency remains committed to the use of outcomes data and scientific evidence in its decisions, pushing back on the characterization of a Washington Post report that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now banned from using words like “science-based” and “transgender” in budget documents. The spokesman, Matt Lloyd, didn’t respond to follow-up questions about whether the policy might apply more broadly, now or in the future, to other HHS agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration or the National Institutes of Health. A separate FDA spokeswoman said earlier on Saturday that the FDA hasn’t yet received or implemented a policy to avoid certain words in budget or policy work.
Keith’s note: What science-related words might be banned at NASA? “Science-based” or “evidence-based” seem to be natural ones since CDC can’t use them. “Climate change” is also a no-brainer since NASA studies a planet called Earth and NOAA and EPA have already had some guidance on that. With regard to Astrobiology “origin and evolution of life” might be a ripe target too. On the other hand, maybe we’ll get lucky and NASA will be forced to stop saying “notional” on every powerpoint slide they show and say “we’re just guessing” instead.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

27 responses to “Waiting For The NASA Science Word Police”

  1. Michael Spencer says:
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    You’d think that those with the authority to make these demands would have 1) better things to do with 24 hours, and 2) sufficient confidence that policy positions would stand by themselves, on their own merits.

    Perhaps someone more schooled in governmental nuance can respond here: has there been another case where Newspeak is so brazenly promulgated? What prior Administration sallied forth with a list of naughty words? Kennedy? Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Carter, Clinton, Bush, Obama? Anyone?

    • Paul451 says:
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      It’s not just the insanity of the list existing, it’s the extraordinary irony of such a straight up list-of-banned-words coming from the side of politics that screamed “Political Correctness!” at everything they didn’t like.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        For what its worth the HHS is disputing the story.

        http://abcnews.go.com/Polit

        HHS disputes report that it has banned CDC from using words like ‘diversity’ and ‘fetus’

        Given the political climate in Washington its probably a good example of different perceptions on what was actually stated.

        • Tim Blaxland says:
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          Well, they didn’t say the story was false, just a “complete mischaracterization.” Hard to know what that means actually.

          • fcrary says:
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            According to the story I read this morning, means someone said not to use those words and phrases. Not as an order, but as advice on how to get funding and budget documents past the current, conservative Congress. That might actually be good advice, but it’s still censorship. An informal “it wouldn’t be a good idea to say that” is functionally no better than an official ban on the words.

      • Jeff2Space says:
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        Doesn’t shock me at all. It’s all in the “messaging”.

        Several years ago, a huge employer was being slammed in the press because many of their employees were on government assistance. They countered by running TV ads touting the benefits offered to full time employees. Never mind that this company deliberately kept as many employees part time as possible by limiting the hours they worked.

  2. fcrary says:
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    I’d honestly like to prohibit some words and phrases, but those are the ones used to disguise their real meaning. “Best practices” as the management jargon for “the way we do things” would be high on my list. But I can’t see any legitimate reason to object to “evidence-based.” That doesn’t sound like an order to say what you mean. It’s even worse than some idiotic efforts to avoid offensive language (e.g. a university official once objected to a professor using the phrase, “a nip in the wind” because it contained an ethnic slur.) Are we still allowed to say that two plus two equals four?

    • Paul451 says:
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      “Best practices” as the management jargon for “the way we do things”

      In my experience, it’s “the way our vendor wants us to do things”.

      “a nip in the wind”

      Is that something you saw directly, or a friend-of-a-friend story? Because I recall that exact story being spread around USEnet more than 20 years ago. And like most such unsourced stories, it was completely made up. Like the Santa school that banned Santas-in-training from saying “Ho Ho Ho” because it offended women.

      (Actually, that latter was based on a true event, and occurred in my own city. Although the story was still garbage. Long ago, the main city mall had noticed that some trainees focused on shouting “HO! HO! HO!” at the kids, which was terrifying for the younger kids. So standard training was to remind them it was meant to be a jolly laugh and to think of it as “Ha… Ha Ha”, and particularly to go easy if kids were very young or seemed skittish. One year, it got emailed around as “political correctness gone mad”/”war on Christmas” and got picked up by NewsCorp/Fox.)

      • fcrary says:
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        As far as “best practices” are concerned, I’ve seen it in NASA calls for proposed instruments. It strikes me as both an order to be inefficient and a rhetorical trick to slam the door on any objections.

        The “nip in the wind” story must be a bit closer to thirty years old than twenty. I’ll cite the University of California Berkeley’s campus newspaper, from around 1990 (when I was an undergraduate there.) That’s not exactly on the level of the BBC when it comes to reliability, but probably better than the San Francisco Chronicle. If you saw it on the old sci.space.poilcy newsgroup, it was probably posted by myself or George Herbert (also a student at Berkeley back then and the moderator of the newsgroup.)

        I can’t remember if the administrator in question was at Berkeley or UC Santa Cruz. It amounted to someone discovering he had a computer on his desk, that documents existed in electronic format and he could run something called a “word search.” He didn’t bother to read for context before sending out warning letters.

        But I’ve run into similar things personally. A colleague objecting to the word “gobbledygook” because she wasn’t sure if it was related to an ethnic slur. Or someone being highly offended when I said Pan Am airlines had a good idea in the 1930s. (I was talking about building a hotel and making an overnight stay on transpacific flights, not the way they made flight attendants dress, but it took a while to explain that…)

  3. TheBrett says:
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    Definitely anything involving climate change, although they might – eventually – make an exception for storm-related stuff. In the CDC’s case, it sounds like they’re going after anything related to sexuality or gender first and foremost.

    Actually excluding “evidence-based” sounds almost like a parody, although the Trump Administration wouldn’t be the first to get censorious on words in scientific reports. The second Bush Administration did that as well with climate change.

  4. ProfSWhiplash says:
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    “On the other hand, maybe we’ll get lucky and NASA will be forced to stop saying “notional” “

    While they’re at it, perhaps they could also come up with something better to replace it’s spaced-out twin: “nominal”? (Hey, if Alan Shepard could say “everything’s ‘A-Okay’,” on his flight, why not go Old School?)

    • fcrary says:
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      Because “nominal” doesn’t mean “A-Okay.” It means things are going the way they normally do, which is typically closer to a SNAFU. But you can’t use that sort of language in government reports or press releases.

  5. John Thomas says:
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    Like the Associated Press saying not to use the term “Illegal immigrant”

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      The AP has been very clear about why the change was made. They discuss the inaccuracy of labels, and efforts to rid the AP Stylebook of all labels. For a cogent discussion: https://blog.ap.org/announc….

      If there’s an analogy here with what CDC is doing, I don’t see it.

      • Tim Blaxland says:
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        If nothing else, AAP provided a well-formed explanation for the change. I’d like to see the same for this case.

  6. Jeff2Space says:
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    This Administration’s banning of words in certain agencies is extremely troubling.

  7. Eric says:
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    According to Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald Director of CDC this is not true.

    The following article on the PBS New Hour website has details on what they say the story really is.

    https://www.pbs.org/newshou

    “But in follow-up reporting, The New York Times cited “a few” CDC officials who suggested the move was not meant as an outright ban, but rather, a technique to help secure Republican approval of the 2019 budget by eliminating certain words and phrases.”

    • ThomasLMatula says:
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      If true, then the use of this type of word-smithing has always been part of good grantsmanship, so really this is nothing new, except in the current political climate folks are trying to make seem something its not.

    • Daniel Woodard says:
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      Not an “outright ban”, just the “elimination of certain words”? “To help secure Republican approval of the budget”? That’s what was reported in the first place.

      “The assertion that HHS has ‘banned words’ is a complete mischaracterization of discussions regarding the budget formulation process.” In other words, the HHS spokesman flatly refused to say that anyone at CDC could actually use those words. He just didn’t want to reveal what was actually said in the discussions..Perhaps they never said the words were banned. Pehaps they simply said that anyone who used them would be terminated. Whatever was actually said, the HHS spokesman would not repeat it.

      Another statement from HHS:
      “the new guidelines were merely (non-mandatory) suggestions about how to present topics in budget documents”
      When is the last time anyone here has been given a “suggestion” by their budget authority with the assurance “Don’t say “science-based”.This won’t in any way affect whether you are funded or not. In fact, it’s just a thought. Don’t even worry about it.”

  8. BlueMoon says:
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    Were any “science-related” words or terms banned, or mandated, in Federal Agencies, from 2009 through 2016 due to Obama Administration policy desires and goals? If so, was that bad or not?

  9. Vladislaw says:
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    Making America Great Again … one banned word at a time..

  10. Jack Burton says:
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    Looks like it was fake news…………

    Revealed: Bogus ‘Trump Banned Words at the CDC’ Story Was Rooted in Suggested Guidelines From Liberal Bureaucrats

    https://townhall.com/tipshe

  11. Daniel Woodard says:
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    It is clearly not fake news. The policy was announced and reported by numerous CDC personnel and reported by several reputable newspapers. After it was unexpectedly revealed to the press and drew some bad publicity the management of course denied saying what they had just said. What remains to be seen is whether any research actually gets funding if it conflicts with the political goals of the administration.