18 Months Late and Counting, But US Scientific Integrity Guidelines Promised By Year's End. (December 15, 2010)

When Barack Obama ascended to the US Presidency on January 20, 2009 he promised he would  "restore science to its rightful place." It was in response to repeated criticism of the Bush Administration's handling of scientific advice. Then in March 2009, he laid out the basic principles which would be expected of federal agencies, and  instructed the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), John Holdren (pictured), to create guidelines for the agencies within 90 days, i.e. July 2009.

In June 2010 Director Holdren in a blog said that the process had been more "laborious and time-consuming" than expected. "Determining how to elaborate on the principles set forth in the Memorandum in enough detail to be of real assistance in their implementation, while at the same time retaining sufficient generality to be applicable across Executive departments and agencies with a wide variety of missions and structures, has been particularly challenging,"  but he expected to be able to present President Obama with a policy document in a couple of weeks.

On October 19, 2010 the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy found itself in court over its failure to respond to an August 2010 FOI request  by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a Washington DC-based advocacy group, in regard to the recommendations to ensure scientific integrity in government.

Yesterday, at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco ScienceInsider's Eli Kintisch  reported: "Getting the [federal] agencies and the White House to agree "has been a more-challenging task than expected," admitted Holdren in his talk on science policy in the Obama Administration that he delivered yesterday to more than 700 attendees. But he said the guidelines would be out by the end of December, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Administrator Jane Lubchenco said later that they could appear as soon as this week.

Professor Holdren went on to tell the attendees that the delay was  "not for lack of trying … we are very close."

He later told Mr Kintisch that to get: "all the various [agency] stakeholders" to agree had proved tricky, as had balancing the detailed recommendations with the needs of each part of the federal government, and he then admitted that the guidelines are among administrative tasks that were the "most boring part of what we do but not unimportant."