Yes the Govt does science and medical research. CDC, FDA, USDA, NSF, and NIH are perfect examples. You are not breaking anything to me.
Those do some science and fund a lot of outside science. I don’t have a lot of faith in their results though (see below).
This is a perfect example of not understanding the distinction between Politicians and Career Civic Servants and their roles in Govt. Politicians are scum of the earth. They are power hungry ego maniacs whose chose their profession for the power it gives them. Politicians and their flock are in DC to support and implement the Presidents policies. Those people come and go on 2 and 4 year schedules. Civil servants spend their entire lives working for the good of the country. At times it may or may not be effective or efficient but it is not political.
Career Civic Servants are not. The avg Civic Servant in the State Dept, NIH, CDC, Dept of Defense, Energy, CIA, FBI etc.... will work for multiple administrations from both sides of the aisle. They are there to do the work of and protect the United States of American and up hold its Constitution. Their primary responsibility is not to any given Presidents agenda. Their primary responsibility is to the United States of America not its president not its politicians. I have lived in the DC area for a lot of my life. I know people who work for these agencies all their lives. My father worked for Health and Human Services for most of his Career. His politics did not effect his job. They did not enter into his decisions within his role as a public servant. He had his own political view but they were not part of his working life. This distinction is often missed by people who have never real time in the DC metro area.
Or maybe those in the DC bubble are blind to the fact that they are mostly working for their own careers and agencies rather than the public. Most of the programs have long outlived their usefulness, and the original purpose for which they were founded. When was the last time you heard of one declaring victory and packing it up? I thought not.
Also, if you have been able to watch what has been going on for the last three years and can say any of that baloney about unbiased civil “servants” working for the people with a straight face, you are still in the DC bubble.
And they DO work for the president, who appoints their bosses to implement his policies and agenda. That’s the way our system works. That’s how NASA (for example) turned into a global warming cheerleader and a Muslim outreach effort (in the direct words of Obama’s appointed NASA chief as coming directly from Obama). How’s that for nonpartisan unbiased aerospace science?
The heads of these agencies and the workers in them are there because they are experts in their fields. When their expertise is needed they are called upon to consult and advise the politicians.
No, they are there because they got hired to do a job and in most cases (not all) couldn’t get the equivalent private sector jobs. They are there for the same reasons that anyone stays in any job, with the extra protections of the civil service code to insulate them from the consequences of poor performance.
They are experts at producing the results their bosses want to see, which in some cases may overlap with doing and reporting actual science.
You should see me on a cynical day
Smart politicians keep their mouths shut and listen to the experts. They take the council and the recommendations and craft policies based on them.
“Smart politicians” (assuming such a thing can be found, let’s go with skilled or savvy politicians) take the expert advice for what it is - presumably but not always the best available assessment of the available data from somebody who knows almost nothing about anything outside that narrow expertise. Which makes them qualified to talk about the the technical aspects of the issues but utterly clueless about balancing it against all the other risks, costs, opportunity costs, first, second and third order consequences, etc...
That’s what good business leaders and sometimes skilled politicians are able to do. There are multiple dimensions to any issue. This one is no exception. An epidemiologist is an expert in disease spread but cannot possibly do a good job outside that skill set silo.
They don't craft policies that contradict the experts in order to make the numbers look better than they are. Smart leaders know when to lead and when to allow the experts in a particular field take the reins. Trump has not done this. It is not a political hatchet job to see how his off the cuff style had caused his administration and its response to this issue problems. I mean he stated that the number of cases in the US was going to be 0 by April. There is not a single expert in the scientific or medical community that would back up such and absurd statement. I understand that people support Trump but he has messed up on this one. He as messed up on the messaging and he has messed up on the response. Unfortunately for us his ego will not allow him to admit it and correct it.
Possibly true. But he has more and better info than you. You do realize that sometimes the government lies to us believing that it is for our own good right? We can debate about whether that is an ethical or useful way to deal with things but if the assessment is that calming people down is better (in both overall health and economic impact) than inciting a panic, then the expert’s “this is terrible and the best way to minimize loss of life is x,y, and z” may be technically true but only for direct disease impacts. How many more suicides will there be if we go into a serious recession? (A lot). How many won’t get other medical care needed if movement is restricted? How much more malnourishment will there be in a serious recession? There are indirect effects in the other direction too of course. If the virus really takes off and overwhelms the capacity of the health care system a lot of bad things happen too.
The point is that it isn’t black and white and isn’t simple.
That said, while I support Trump, he isn’t impressing me on this.
