Trump has yet to name a Science Adviser or indicate leading candidates

>Every president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has had a science advisor, though the influence of the position, and the extent to which it has kept presidents from neglecting or misusing empirical evidence, has varied considerably throughout the years. Richard Nixon even got rid of the position for a time. John Holdren, President Obama’s science advisor, has had much more influence in the White House than did George W. Bush’s advisor, John Marburger.

>At this point in 2009, Holdren had already been on the job for weeks. Trump isn’t necessarily behind schedule, though—George W. Bush didn’t name Marburger until June 2001.

>Trump is under no legal obligation to appoint a cabinet-level science advisor like Holdren has been for Obama. The president must name a director for the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which Congress created in 1976 to advise the president and coördinate scientific and technological initiatives between government agencies. After that it’s up to him to decide how much “stature and access” to give the position, says Robert Atkinson, founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan technology policy think tank. And it’s unclear whether Trump would marginalize OSTP and even how much he cares about advancing science and technology policy.

>Obama cared “as much as a president can care about this stuff,” Atkinson says. Obama made Holdren—who has engineering and physics degrees from MIT—part of his inner circle for many policy decisions. And with Holdren as director, the OSTP took on a broad range of projects, from climate change research to the Precision Medicine Initiative, which is aimed at developing new drugs and therapies that are tailored to individual patients’ bodies. It also coordinated efforts by multiple government agencies to help make the U.S. more competitive in the area of high-performance computing.

>Whatever Trump ends up doing with his OSTP, we should hope he sees scientific thinking and evidence as assets, not impediments. Science is “the best protection a president has against being fooled, or fooling himself, so I hope he’ll find a science advisor who will help convince him of that,” says Holt. “Reality has a way of exposing decisions that aren’t made on the basis of the best evidence.”

>>123481
Government shouldn't be incharge of any science to begin with. Too much of our tax dollars are going towards frivolous research project. Science and research should be between private citizens and the market.

>>123488
Corporate shill pls

>>123488
oh this is some retardery

We already know what a science adviser would say.

>liberalism is the best especially global warming

Message received. No need to pay a salary to be reminded of that.

in b4 he finds a chiropractor that was an early supporter

didnt he already pick one?
the guy that pioneered parallel computing.

i remember liberals bitching about it.

>>123488
You are fucking stupid. Basic research is how we make the initial breakthroughs required to make a product palatable for the market. Look at CRSPR. That shit was discovered through looking at the bacterial genomes and trying to understand the cause of islands of repetition.

It is also worth pointing out that only a single nobel prize in biology has been given to a person working in industry.

>>123575
These are the same people that can barely pass college algebra and basic science courses, yet they're all qualified to speak on scientific matters.