Davis Merritt: Newspeak invades U.S. budget process

New presidential administrations, particularly those run by people with only business or military backgrounds as opposed to governing, scientific or academic ones, face a steep learning curve.

And they learn some things faster than others.

For instance, in the current administration, criticism isn’t easily tolerated and frequently is dismissed as disloyalty or subversion. From the very top down, it has not yet learned that all criticism is not malicious and therefor it has been unable to reap the benefits of honest criticism.

On the other hand, asserting unilateral authority comes as naturally to this administration as its next breath, and it has learned quickly how to reconstruct its version of reality through vocabularic fiat.

Early on, the new leadership at the Department of Agriculture decided that the best way to fight global warming was to ban that phrase and also “climate change.” Problem solved, right?

Well, actually not, because the weather stubbornly refuses to sit still. So the approved words for department memos, budgets, etc., became “weather extremes.”

But the Orwellian orgy did not stop there. Bianca Moebius-Clune, the department’s director of soil health, was uncomfortable about references to the goal “reduce greenhouse gases,” and ordered the substitution of “increase nutrient use efficiency,” thus turning a negative but accurate description of a real danger into a positive-sounding but misleading evasion of reality.

And last week, the locutional illness invaded the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at its Atlanta headquarters, proving that distance from Washington, D.C., is no protection against rampant foolishness.

The CDC, as the government’s primary overseer of the nation’s health, has among its 12,000 employees thousands of people who have dedicated their lives to scientific pursuits, which require, above all, cool objectivity and respect for demonstrable truth.

But they were ordered last week not to use the phrase “science-based” in their presentations to the Office of Budget Management (OMB) in Washington. Though they were given no explanation, it’s safe to assume that “science-based” are words that trigger negative responses in the Donald Trump administration.

Neither are they allowed to use “evidence-based.” Instead, they were ordered to substitute into their budget proposals, “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards.”

Roughly translated, that can only be a signal that the science being discussed has been diluted by the inclusion of “community standards and wishes,” no matter how unscientific, ignorant or prejudiced those standards and wishes might be.

But Alison Kelly, a senior leader in CDC’s office of financial services, didn’t stop there. Also banned in CDC budget documents are “fetus,” “transgender,” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” and “diversity,” all, apparently, hot buttons for the administration’s enforcers of conservative Newspeak.

Kelly did not offer alternatives for those other banned words. She did not, for instance, suggest how researchers dealing with the Zika virus could describe or justify their work on a disease that, in its most damaging form, affects fetuses. Or how the CDC could present work on physical and mental matters that affect transgender people if the very existence of transgender people has been bureaucratically erased.

As Mara Keisling, executive director of the Center for Transgender Equality, put it, “The Trump administration is full of dangerous science deniers who have no business near the American public health system…. They are actually going to kill Americans if they do not stop.”

And kill meaningful language along the way.

This story was originally published December 19, 2017 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Davis Merritt: Newspeak invades U.S. budget process."