The US Department of Agriculture has banned scientists and other employees in its main research division from publicly sharing everything from the summaries of scientific papers to USDA-branded tweets as it starts to adjust to life under the Trump administration, BuzzFeed News has learned.
According to an email sent Monday morning and obtained by BuzzFeed News, the department told staff — including some 2,000 scientists — at the agency’s main in-house research arm, the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), to stop communicating with the public about taxpayer-funded work.
“Starting immediately and until further notice, ARS will not release any public-facing documents,” Sharon Drumm, chief of staff for ARS, wrote in a department-wide email shared with BuzzFeed News.
“This includes, but is not limited to, news releases, photos, fact sheets, news feeds, and social media content,” she added.
Indeed, the last tweet from ARS’s official account was sent the day before Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
Though the terse internal note did not explicitly mention the new presidential administration, department scientists around the country interpreted it as a message from Trump that […]
I think that like all other agencies the USDA has become the handmaiden of industry. Are they protecting us against GMO’s or the pesticides that are killing the bees?