Science,What Science?

       Aargh Matie, there's skullduggery afoot in Congress this week. Well. I suppose that can be said of any week. In fact you could almost say that of every week, except that Congress is only in session about half the time. Anyway the skullduggery going on this week, in the House of Representatives, is a backdoor attempt to sidestep science in order to make life much easier for business and industry and much more difficult for government agencies. And you and I.
       You could say that it's an attempt to make government much smaller. You could say that, except it's actually going to make government larger. Well, unless the government agencies have their budgets shrunk, which is also in future plans. No, the problem here is that the House is trying to take legislation out of the hands of science and turn it over to industry and business. At least as it pertains to legislation concerning health and safety associated with workers, food and consumers.
       The bill the House is working on is a revival of the 'Regulatory Accountability Act'. It sounds like a fair and equitable idea to have accountability on legislation. Except that there's already more than ample accountability. That's why government is so big now. But the RAA bill will ad as much as 74 new procedural requirements to agencies before they can bring it to a vote. And none have anything to do with science. We're talking about things like food safety laws and health safety and worker safety.
       To put this into perspective, let's say you have a job of putting twelve screws into a part to assemble the product. Then suddenly the boss says he'd like to change it from twelve to 74 screws. But do it in the same amount of time.
       Here's the thing. A group of Congressmen have been trying to get this bill passed, in one form or another for about thirty years according to the 'Live Science' website. But now with a larger group of anti-science representatives in office and a majority of both houses, they feel there's a better chance to push the bill through. Well, we elected them, we're stuck with them, and what they do that might harm us is also our fault as much as it is theirs. Feel better now?