The Fifth Risk(23)
After that she thought she was done with government. “Then 9/11 happened,” she said. “I had an emotional response: What can I do? It made me realize there were very few people who had ever had the experiences I had had.” She was able to explain the various threats to the food supply as few could, for example. She understood how genetic engineering might be used as a weapon of mass destruction. She knew that a microbe could bring down a civilization. She returned to government. For the last six years of the Obama administration she’d been the Department of Agriculture’s chief scientist.
The same qualities that had led her to minimize the importance of her feelings had made her an excellent supervisor of science. Though she didn’t seem to care one way or another how she was addressed, no one thought of her as “Cathie.” She was always “Dr. Woteki.” “She was great at her job,” said Tom Vilsack. “She was very adamant about keeping politics out of science. If I called and said,” How about we delay the announcement of that grant for a week or so,’ it was” Hands off my science!’”
We don’t really celebrate the accomplishments of government employees. They exist in our society to take the blame. But if anyone ever paid attention, they would note that Woteki’s department, among other achievements, had suppressed the potentially catastrophic 2015 outbreak of bird flu. They’d created, very quickly, a fast new test for the disease that enabled them to cull the sick chickens from the healthy ones. Because of their work, the poultry industry was forced to kill only tens of millions of birds, instead of hundreds of millions. In the early 1990s, the USDA had also dealt with the outbreak of ring-spot virus in papaya trees, when the papaya industry in Hawaii faced ruin and extinction. Inside the little box marked “Science,” the USDA helped genetically engineer a papaya tree that was resistant to ring-spot virus.
The worst I could get anyone to say about Cathie Woteki was that she had an unusual sense of humor, at least by the careful standards of the Department of Agriculture. The jokes of scientists sometimes feel like experiments gone wrong, and she was very much a scientist. Her car license plate read DR WO. No one at the USDA called her that, or could imagine doing so. At Secretary Vilsack’s small office Christmas dinner for top USDA officials, Cathie’s scientist husband came wearing an elf hat. “No one knew why,” says a USDA staffer. “She had looked at her husband dressed as an elf and said,‘Yep, that’ll work.’ She never explained it. It was actually kind of endearing.”
The first time we spoke wasn’t long after Trump had nominated her replacement. His name was Sam Clovis. He had a doctorate in public administration from the University of Alabama but no experience in science. He’d come to prominence in 2010 as a Rush Limbaugh–style right-wing talk-radio host in Sioux City, Iowa. As Iowa chairman of Rick Perry’s 2016 presidential campaign, he’d ripped Trump loudly and righteously for having “no foundation in Christ.” Then he’d quit Perry’s campaign to become co-chairman of the Trump campaign, declining to address rumors he’d done it for the money. (“I’m not going to talk about how much money I’m getting paid,” he told the Des Moines Register. “It’s just not going to happen.”) His appointment as the USDA’s chief scientist felt like a practical joke to those who had worked there: this was the place that, back in the early 1940s, had taken Alexander Fleming’s findings and effectively invented penicillin. It had triggered the antibiotics revolution. It had coped with blights and outbreaks. The consequences of the science it funded—or did not fund—was mind-boggling. The person Clovis was replacing had taught at universities, worked in the White House, and, along the way, been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
“They are going to politicize the science,” said Woteki. “My biggest concern is the misuse of science to support policies.”
In recent years, much of the department’s research has dealt with the effects of climate change. The head of science directs nearly $3 billion in grants each year. Woteki directed the science that leads to nutritional standards for schoolchildren. She set research priorities. Hers had been food security; domestic and global nutrition; safety of the food supply; and figuring out how best to convert plants into fuel. “All of that has to be done in the face of a changing climate,” said Woteki. “It’s all climate change.” It might sound silly that the USDA funds a project that seeks to improve the ability of sheep to graze at high altitudes—until you realize that this may one day be the only place sheep will be able to graze. “We’re going to become even more reliant on the efficiencies that come from the investment in science,” she said. One-quarter of the arable land in the world is already degraded, either by overfarming or overgrazing. “Changing temperatures and changing rainfall patterns will force changes in the way crops are grown and livestock are raised,” she said. “The changing climate brings new risks of food-borne disease. Even the pathogens are influenced by temperature and humidity.”
If the Trump administration were to pollute the scientific inquiry at the USDA with politics, scientific inquiry would effectively cease. “These high-level discussions really worry me,” she says. Research grants will go not to the most promising ideas but to the closest allies. “There is already good science that isn’t being funded,” she said. “That will get worse.” Junk science will be used to muddy issues like childhood nutrition. Maybe sodium isn’t as bad for kids as people say! There’s no such thing as too much sugar! The science will suddenly be “unclear.” There will no longer be truth and falsehood. There will just be stories, with two sides to them.