Trump's latest order
Donald Trump, the new president of the United States, has recently ordered that federally funded scientists not be able to share their research with the press. Though this means that they are still allowed to publish their work in scientific journals, they will not be allowed to share their information with the press in the form of graphics, photography, outside news articles, or on social media.
For events like NASA social, which allows people from the United States to get involved with NASA launches in the form of media, it means that this program may be jeopardized in the future.
This also creates a wide arrange of problems for communications departments in the government sector for science research organizations. The organizations may be subjected to certain scrutiny when creating content for their social media pages if the program in which they work for is federally funded.
News communication halt
The news of the communications halt comes days after President Trump ordered that government agency social media accounts were told to hold off on posting content. Organizations have found a way to go around this specific order by creating unofficial twitter accounts. One example of this is the national parks twitter accounts, which created a new account this morning, tweeting facts related to climate change.
These tweets were later deleted.
Though Donald Trump has ordered a halt to the transfer of information from scientists to the public, a top official for the agriculture department officially rescinded the order. "In an email sent to scientists on Tuesday evening and obtained by BuzzFeed News, Chavonda Jacobs-Young, administrator of the department’s science arm, the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), told researchers the original order should not have been issued and “is hereby rescinded.”" Said an article, published earlier today by BuzzFeed news.
“The ARS guidance was not reviewed by me,” Michael Young, the acting deputy administrator of USDA, told the Washington Post. “I would not have put that kind of guidance out,” according to BuzzFeed earlier today.
Federal organizations are already required to follow strict protocol when publishing scientific documents, and this order by the President could prove to start a resistance from the science community after a week-long battle of halting communications from various government departments.
