WASHINGTON -- A former NASA political
appointee accused of trying to muzzle
the U.S. space agency's top climatologist said at a March 19 hearing of the
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that he never censored anybody.
George Deutsch,
an unpaid intern on U.S. President George
W. Bush's 2004 re-election campaign who went to work for NASA public
affairs the following year at age 23, was thrust into the media spotlight in
early 2006 when the New York Times reported he took part in an effort to
keep James Hansen, the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies
(GISS), from speaking freely about global warming to
reporters.
Deutsch no
longer works for NASA and the U.S.
space agency has been praised, including by Hansen, for the revised public
affairs policy it issued in the wake of the controversy affirming the right
of its scientists to speak to news media about their research.
Interference?
Rep. Henry
Waxman (D-Calif.), the committee's chairman, said he
was holding the hearing to investigate allegations that the Bush administration
has interfered with the work of government climate scientists in an effort to mislead
the public about the causes and consequences
of global warming.
Most of the
hearing was devoted to charges that the former chief of staff for the White
House Council on Environmental Quality, Philip Cooney, sought to water down the
government's strategic plan for climate
change by replacing crisp statements from scientists with equivocating
language that Waxman said was intended to "inject doubt in the place of
certainty."
Cooney, an
attorney who spent 15 years at the American Petroleum Institute before
accepting the White House job, said the 180 edits catalogued by Waxman's staff were
"suggestions," not "hard edits," made in the course of a routine interagency
process. He said many of his suggestions did not make it into the final draft.
When the
hearing occasionally turned to the question of political interference at NASA,
neither Hansen nor Deutsch dropped any bombshells and lawmakers were unable to
coax many new details from the witnesses.
"I never
censored Dr. Hansen, and I do not believe others at NASA did either," Deutsch
said. Hansen, in his written testimony, suggested that a deeper inquiry is
necessary if lawmakers want to find out what really happened at NASA in late
2005.
"My
suggestion for getting at the truth is to question the relevant participants
under oath, including the then NASA Associate Administrator for Earth Sciences,
who surely is aware of who in the White House was receiving and reviewing press
releases that related to climate change," Hansen wrote.
While
Democrats reserved their fire for Cooney, whom they painted as a shill for the
oil industry, several Republicans on the committee, led by Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.)
accused Hansen of politicizing global warming, and scoffed at the idea that
Hansen had been muzzled by anyone. Noting the abundance of interviews Hansen
has done in the past year, Issa said, "you're one of
the most googleable people on the face of the Earth,
so the message is getting out."
Public
Affairs
Hansen
testified that NASA public affairs first attempted to place new restrictions on
his public statements and dealings with the media following a widely covered
talk he gave at a scientific conference in December 2005 warning of a "grim
[environmental] scenario" unless growth in greenhouse
gas emissions was halted by 2025. Shortly after the conference, Hansen went
on ABC's "Good Morning America" to discuss a new global temperature study by
GISS showing 2005
had been the warmest year on record.
"NASA
headquarters public affairs was furious about the
media attention, their anger being sparked by a call from the White House
objecting to the publicity on global warming," Hansen testified. "The upshot
was a new explicit set of constraints on me, including a requirement that any
media interviews be approved beforehand and that headquarters have the 'right
of first refusal' on all interviews, that I provide my calendar of all planned
talks and meetings, and that I obtain prior approval for every posting on the
GISS Web site."
Deutsch
said Hansen was known for disagreeing with NASA public affairs practices, a
point that "created a level of frustration among my higher-ups at NASA, who
wanted to know about interviews before they happened, instead of afterwards."
Deutsch
said his superiors "expressed their frustration to me and, collectively, we
expressed our frustration to Dr. Hansen's personal press representative, Leslie
Nolan-McCarthy."
Deutsch did
not elaborate on his interaction with Nolan-McCarthy. But an e-mail written
around the same time by Mark Hess, a career civil servant who runs public
affairs at NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Md.,
detailed the guidance he had received from NASA headquarters on managing
Hansen's press relations.
"Leslie
[Nolan-McCarthy] is putting together a note which recaps what HQs [sic] has
directed (not asked) us to do with regard to 'monitoring' the work of [the
Goddard Institute for Space Studies] and Dr. Hansen in particular," Hess wrote
in the Dec. 19 e-mail to Hansen's Goddard-based supervisors, Franco Einaudi and Laurie Leshin. "I
think we need to discuss this with you because I don't feel that in some
instances, some of what they are asking us to do falls into the [Goddard Space
Flight Center] to [Science Mission Directorate] reporting chain, not public
affairs (e.g. they are asking we keep track of his schedule, his speaking engagements,
his media interviews, all the science papers being submitted from GISS, all the
content on the GISS Web site, etc., etc.)"
Hansen said
he realized the restrictions were going to be an impediment when NASA public
affairs "barred" him later that month from granting an interview to National
Public Radio.
The
Ninth Floor
Deutsch
admitted his intervention in the interview request, but told the committee he
was just following established NASA procedure when he took the request to his "higher
ups" in public affairs for their input. Deutsch said NASA's press secretary at
the time, Dean Acosta, decided to offer NPR interviews with senior NASA Science
Mission Directorate personnel instead of Hansen.
"I took it
to the ninth floor and discussed it with my higher ups," Deutsch said. "They
thought it over and said, 'hey, we've got three other qualified people'"
Deutsch
said the three people NPR was offered as a substitute for Hansen were then-NASA
associate administrator for science, Mary Cleave, her deputy Colleen Hartman,
and Jack Kaye, a senior Earth science official.
NASA
assistant administrator for public affairs, David Mould, disputed Hansen's
allegations that his press releases were censored or that he was prevented from
talking to the media.
In an
interview with Space News Mould said he and Acosta called Nolan-McCarthy
at GISS after the temperature story aired to express his frustration with GISS's refusal to give headquarters a "heads up" that they
were releasing information of interest to national media.
As for the
Hess e-mail concerning a meeting with Mould and Acosta discussing new
restrictions for Hansen, Mould said in a March 19 interview that it never
happened. "The meeting never happened. I never got that e-mail until some
congressional staffer showed it to me," Mould said.
Del.
Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) questioned Deutsch about an e-mail he sent to
NASA Web designer Flint Wild, a contractor, about changing science stories
posted to agency Web sites to insert the word "theory" after Big
Bang.
Norton said
she had no problem with calling the Big Bang a theory, but was concerned by
other portions of Deutsch's e-mail where he suggested NASA show deference to
other explanations of how the universe began, namely Intelligent
Design.
"A Silly Place"
Deutsch
said he now realizes that "a work e-mail is a silly place" to discuss such
personal views, but said that in the end, the only request he made of Wild was
to insert "theory" after Big Bang per Associated Press style.
"I only
sent this e-mail to Flint.
It was not a statement on NASA policy or anything like that," Deutsch said.
"The bulk of that is my personal opinion, my personal religious views - views,
I understood Mr. Wild to share. He was a Christian and I am a Christian."
Norton also
questioned Deutsch about statements he made on a radio program shortly after
leaving NASA in which he suggested that he was the victim of a partisan smear
campaign.
"I frankly
said a lot of that stuff out of anger," Deutsch said.
Resumes
Deutsch resigned from NASA
Feb. 7, 2006, after it was revealed that he had not graduated from Texas A&M
University despite
claiming on his resume that he had.
Deutsch told
the committee that he wrote his resume sometime in 2003 in anticipation of
receiving his degree, but withdrew from school "one course shy of graduation."
When the time came to apply for a position as a presidential appointee, he
said, he failed to update his resume to reflect that he had not graduated.
"To the
best of my recollection, I told the hiring officials I spoke to in the
administration, including at NASA, that I did not have my degree, and it was
never a problem," Deutsch said./span>
Deutsch's explanations
prompted one of the stranger exchanges of the hearing.
"I'm very
much impressed by you," Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) told Deutsch. "It sounds
like you got your resume out there, you had it
prepared in anticipation of graduation. If somebody ever raises that as a
question in your career, I would be happy to be a recommender for you to
straighten that out," Cannon said.
"Thank
you," said a visibly pleased Deutsch.
"Wanna hire him," deadpanned Waxman.
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