Should Scientists Dictate Policy?

By W. David Montgomery

The recent tergiversations of the CDC on masks, vaccine effectiveness and potential lockdowns bring the belief that policy should be dictated by “scientists” into question once again.  And the answer is so clearly “No” that a review of where that belief originated and how it has taken over may be worthwhile.  In any event, that is what I am attempting.

The origins, as many philosophers have pointed out, are in the Enlightenment, and its belief that through rational, empirical inquiry humankind could learn everything there is to know and use that knowledge to achieve human and social perfection.  The empirical evidence against that belief has been overwhelming, from the immediate turn of the rational French Revolution to murderous Terror to horrors of the First World War, scientific endorsement of genocide in the name of eugenics and the deaths of hundreds of millions under the “scientific socialism” of Stalin and Mao. 

Nonetheless, the Progressive movement in the late XIXth century – perhaps lacking the XXth century’s additional proofs of Original Sin — retained the belief that all social and economic ills could be cured if only experts were put in control of the levers of policy and economy.  This was the origin of the American technocratic state, and I am getting close to the original question of policy dictated by “science.”

The Progressive Party arose to combat what were then seen as the evils of industrialism, particularly their effects on workers and consumers.  That concern was expressed in novels of Sinclair Lewis, the political alignment of Republicans like George Norris and Robert Lafollette with Democrats like William Jennings Bryan, and the formation of the Progressive Party to elect one of my most admired Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt.

One wing of Progressivism – not Teddy’s — was convinced that those problems, and new ones appearing in the more complex economy of the early XXth century, could only be solved by means of top-down, centralized solutions devised by experts. 

An interesting article in the progressive journal Dissent lays out their thinking:

As progressives knew, egalitarian political regimes are not well-suited to streamlining policy. Shifts in public opinion, rhetorical disfigurement of the facts, and other innumerable vagaries of democratic government render efficiency and majority-rule politics infrequent bedfellows. 

Thus, the progressives often sought reform by top-down means. Though they were truly concerned with the welfare of the downtrodden, underserved sections of the United States, they looked to experts to address their welfare. This is not because they were illiberal or anti-democratic, but because their faith in scientific analysis of public problems was in tension with their principles of democratic egalitarianism. At their most technocratic, progressives believed that political solutions needed scientific backing, rather than democratic political procedures, for legitimacy. 

The New Deal made this approach permanent with its proliferation of independent regulatory agencies and expanded government departments dedicated to solving the problems of agriculture, commerce, health, housing, labor, transportation and “human services”.  In its reconstituted 1970s form it added education, energy and environment.  In 1938 the dean of Yale Law School defended this, saying “The administrative process is, in essence, our generation’s answer to the inadequacy of the judicial and the legislative process.”

When I arrived in Washington in that era of reconstituted Progressivism there were still limits to the rule of experts.  The essay in Dissent again puts it well:

At their best, progressives demanded a return to the facts of the American political situation. If a scientific analysis of policy choices could reveal the actual consequences of each available option, perhaps those who would confuse and manipulate the citizenry would have a more difficult time concealing their biases. When progressives prioritized their egalitarian ends over any suggested technocratic political means, they usually were able to hedge against the latter’s overreaches.

That time is long gone.  When I arrived in Washington, Congressional staff used hearings to educate their members about legislation under consideration in their committees, knowing the members limited attention span and reading comprehension.  Save for oversight hearings designed to berate Executive Branch appointees, witnesses were treated with respect if not agreement.  Even in the Department of Energy, the Assistant Secretary for whom I worked defined our job as in the quotation above: explaining to the Secretary the likely consequences of different decisions.

By the time I retired that was no longer the case across the board.  While Congress increasingly used hearings to get witnesses to give them talking points for their favored policy, or to state the points themselves, executive departments and agencies relied on their own internal experts to decide what to do.  Those experts increasingly came to be, at least in the energy and environment field that I know well, to be recruited from one point of view about the agency’s mission and how to carry it out.  Wide-ranging decisions were made inside agencies over which Congress had abandoned control.  This was the Administrative State lamented in particular by Philip Hamburger, Chris DeMuth, and Richard Epstein and temporarily shackled by President Trump.

David Brooks wrote in 2010, long before Dr. Fauci, that “When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era.…, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems…. It’s being led by a large class of educated professionals, who have been trained to do technocratic analysis, who believe that more analysis and rule-writing is the solution to social breakdowns, and who have constructed ever-expanding networks of offices, schools and contracts.”

Congress, for the most part, had ceded its authority to these agencies in the laws that created them and expanded their domain.  Its fitful oversight was mainly directed at obtaining favorable treatment for constituents (a major reason why Congress tolerates irrational regulation to create opportunities to “help”) and browbeating Executive Branch witnesses with perfect hindsight.  Not that the browbeating was undeserved, considering the arrogance with which those agencies laid out their perfect scientific understanding of what had to be done.  That gets us closer.

Back to my own experience.  Regulatory policy in the Environmental Protection Agency came to be dominated by public health researchers and staff trained in those fields and public administration at Duke and Harvard.  Their contractors providing research supported their views about guiding policy.  In particular, the agency took its cue from language in their basic laws that pollution was to be reduced to a level at which there was no damage to human health.  The Clean Air Act, for example, has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to ban any consideration of cost in setting air quality standards.

The enthusiasm of the environmental movement in the 1970s, not to mention the conscious intentions of its activists, led to a feeling that everyone was entitled to a perfect environment.  For some long time, that goal did not matter, because EPA retained control over how quickly to get health effects to zero, and it used that loophole to bring in cost-benefit considerations.  Then two things happened.  1. Courts intervened, in the famous “sue and settle” cases in which EPA staff helped environmental groups to be sue their agency and then settled on accelerated schedules now under court order.  2. Science kept moving the goalposts, with ever more sensitive measurements of concentrations in the atmosphere and increasing efforts to detect statistically an effect on health on some segment of the population, however small. The more sensitive tests allowed measurement of smaller and smaller concentrations of particles, which then made possible further “scientific” calculations to connect the newly discovered pollution to health effects, leading to regulations to reduce to zero emissions that had already been reduced by over 99% from pre-1970 levels.

Protests of economists and affected industries that the last 1% would cost more than all the previous regulations combined – the law of diminishing returns – were not met with recognition that there are other matters in addition to physical health that affect the common good, but with moral indignation and accusations that we did not care about the little girl with asthma and many other health problems who would die if she lived outdoors and the regulations were not implemented.  There is no space to describe all the fallacies and rhetorical abuses in those responses, but the primacy of health over all else and the moralizing responses should be familiar.  This obsession with physical health and mortality over all else arises again in COVID. 

Even though we are often rightly lumped together with other technocrats, economists were actually the few dissenters there to the scientist’s definitions of goals and means.  Increasingly EPA’s Science Advisory Board, known as the SAB, moved from providing scientific advice about the quality of research and reasonable guesses at the effects of different policies, they took on the role of telling the Administrator exactly what regulation to promulgate.  That is exactly the case of what they did in the case of setting new air quality standards.

There is a big difference between advising within the limits of one’s expertise about what consequences might follow and telling the Administrator what to choose.  The latter has increasingly become the privilege that technocrats – which includes most physical, social and medical scientists working for or supported by energy and environmental agencies — claim.

So the absurdities perpetrated by Dr. Fauci and the CDC are not new, but the immediacy of the consequences of their decisions and the weakness of the “science” on which they are based has exposed them.  That test has largely been lacking for prescriptions of “follow the science” to solve climate change, because no matter how extreme the forecasts of environmental calamity and how costly and potentially ineffective the solutions might be, everything happens too slowly to assign blame.   It is even the case for impossible air quality standards, which take time to play out through further proceedings to set state implementation plans and regulatory guidance for industry. By the time they have widespread effects, their responsibility will be clouded by many other intervening events that might be blamed or make up for their harm.

The effects of incorrect predictions and damaging policies adopted in response to COVID have shown up far more quickly than they do in environmental policy.  Thus, the hidden but increasingly pervasive and threatening mistake of “letting the science tell us what to do” has been revealed to everyone.

The problems with relying on science and scientists are three: 

1. Science is a process of inquiry, never satisfied with current knowledge, subjecting everything to test and welcoming critical analysis.  Therefore, statements that “science says” or that “there is consensus among scientists” are nonsense.  Often the alleged consensus is among scientists on some topic far beyond their expertise as research scientists – like the costs and benefits of lockdowns. 
2. Even if scientists do agree about some facts, facts do not on their own imply decisions.  The ancient rule of logic is that to decide on an action it takes facts describing the situation and possible consequences of actions and a system of values that applies to the actions; these two taken together then imply what should be done.  This is not to deny that some cases are easier than others—or even obvious–when a system of values is internalized.  
3. Scientists speak, not science.  In addition to the grammatical error in attributing statements to a method of inquiry rather than a person, scientists apply their own objectives, often based on professional nearsightedness and political views, to fill in the step of moving from the “fact” to the “should.”

Therefore, scientists have no more business dictating policy, individually or as a group, than you or I.  They may be far more acquainted with the “is” and the “might be”, but have no more claim to know what to do based on that than you or I.  One of our problems, of course, is that as a country we now have no built-in system of values, as we once did.  We also have an educational system that largely fails to teach ancient rules of logic or how to debate critical matters thoughtfully and unemotionally.

That then is the great temptation to scientists, to ignore the legitimacy of citizens opinions and democratic solutions, because of conviction that their knowledge is so superior to ours and the matter so important or urgent that they must decide for us.  That is why the Progressives believed in technocracy.   Democracy is too slow and ignorant to solve problems; we must do it for them.

But doing it for them necessarily means imposing the values of those technocrats on the rest of us.  And when those values are formed by narrow professional objectives, there is a problem.  Dr. Fauci like EPA’s public health constituency are trained that saving lives is their mission.  

When a disease attacks, the goal of the CDC is to wipe it out, whatever it takes.  As a professional passion, that is noble and serves the common good.  Translated to a value system to guide public policy, it is deficient.  Minimizing deaths from one disease is not a valid goal for national policy.  As anyone not so fixated on one disease easily sees, the policies Dr. Fauci and the CDC recommended and implemented had harm that spread out from increased deaths from suicide and overdose, to deteriorating measures of mental health and crime, to the economic burden of lost jobs and closed businesses.  “Follow the science” became a mantra for ignoring common sense, as well as ruling out even complete evaluation of the effects of policies by other technocrats.

Then there is the apparent belief among scientists that even highly uncertain deductions should be used to choose policies that will protect against even the most extreme possibilities.  We have seen this over and over in the claims that climate change is an existential threat, based on citing the most extreme results of mathematical models incapable of empirical testing – and despite the fact that other equally (in)valid models say the opposite.

Like bettors on horses, the COVID scientists have made prediction after prediction that proved untrue and latched on every new set of observations or unpublished research to try one more time to get it right.  Their stubborn insistence that they have it right this time should send them to Gamblers Anonymous.

Thus, this is another opportunity to re-examine the progressive expansion of the administrative state in which experts dictate decisions that they are neither fit nor elected to make.  The deference of other technocrats to the narrow-minded experts that have taken over the highest levels of policy-making is puzzling.  Unless it is an example of now it is your turn, you can become temporary dictator based on a disease threat.  That will prepare citizens to accept me, when it is my turn to take the reins to solve another threat, maybe right-wing terrorism or systemic racism.  

Reasserting democracy, and making sure elected leaders are given responsibility and held responsible for decisions instead of delegating them to technocrats, is the hoped-for solution.  Dr. Fauci has certainly made its necessity obvious.  But whether the current incumbents are willing to give up the power and privilege they retain under the current system has always been doubtful.  And to make real change the organic legislation of many agencies must be rewritten.  That is an action it is hard to imagine happening.