When you work for a private company, you’re expected to conform to the employer’s wishes and work for the company’s best interests. If your conscience rebels against what you’re asked to do, your options are to either go along or quit. Thus, if Shell Oil sacks a scientist for speaking out about climate change, everyone understands and few people would question it.
The situation is more complicated in the public sector. Career public servants usually are hired to perform technical or professional tasks such as conducting inspections, issuing permits, adjudicating claims, etc. These workers often have job protection in the form of civil service laws, “good cause” statutes, and/or union contracts.
A limited number of public employees are political appointees who serve at the pleasure of an elected office holder; they typically have policy or staff roles of a political nature, and commonly rotate between public and private sector gigs with the ebb and flow of their party’s elective fortunes. They don’t expect to retain their positions after the administration leaves office; and everyone involved understands that’s how the game is played.
Then you have public universities and colleges, a subset of public employment with its own traditions and rules, where tenure and academic freedom afford a specialized kind of protection for intellectual and scientific objectivity. Scientists interested in finding and disseminating objective scientific truth often gravitate to academia because the freedom of thought they crave isn’t as valued or available in the private sector, or as well respected and protected in the government sector.
One of the privileges of a free people living in a democracy is their prerogative to elect stupid, ignorant, and venal jackasses to public office; and they sometimes do. The Founding Fathers understood that a free and open system of government is vulnerable to excesses, and built into our national charter sundry individual rights. For example, the winning side in our elections can’t imprison the losers for opposing them (at least on paper). Nor can people be deprived of their lives, liberty, or property without due process of law (except by the police).
In the 19th century, nearly all public employment was of a patronage nature. Government jobs were considered the “spoils” of winning elections. Fragments of the spoils system still survive, e.g. in the appointment of ambassadors; but, by and large, it has been replaced by the civil service reforms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The rise of an industrialized technocratic economy demanded that most non-political government jobs be filled with trained and competent professionals. You could not, for example, fly to the moon with a space agency staffed by untrained political appointees; you need scientists and engineers for that undertaking.
It is against this historical background that Florida Governor Rick Scott, a venal jackass, ordered Florida state employees to not speak of climate change. The problem isn’t that climate change is unscientific — the scientific community is united in saying otherwise, and there’s plenty of evidence before our eyes — but that solving it requires phasing out fossil fuels, which collides with powerful special interests.
As a governor, Scott not only has broad policymaking powers, but also is the senior executive of his state government. But public executives don’t have the free hand of a corporate CEO (which Scott once was, before entering politics). A governor’s absolute isn’t absolute; he can’t hire and fire civil service employees at whim. That’s the whole point of civil service laws. We don’t want politicians to have that kind of power, for fairly obvious reasons. For example, postal employees are protected from political interference because we don’t want politicians retaliating against rivals by blocking mail delivery to their homes and businesses. (Think “New Jersey” and “bridge” and “Chris Christie”.) Our government belongs to us, not the politicians we hire to run it for us, so we have every right to make the rules.
You can’t, of course, run any organization with mob rule. Someone has to be in charge, and that person needs the authority required to make things function. It’s a common practice for public agencies to designate an official spokesperson and direct its other employees to not speak to the press or public about official matters. But this is different from interfering with how a scientist or other professional does his work. Most people would recognize, for example, that it’s wrong for a superior to order a police detective to falsify evidence or frame an innocent suspect, or order a prosecuting attorney to lie to a court.
What if a governor wants a state scientist to lie about climate change, or at least not tell the truth about it? Not necessarily when testifying in court, but let’s say at a scientific conference? Or a policy planning meeting? What happens when a public employee can’t do his job because of political interference? What prevails then, the governor’s authority to make policy and supervise state agencies, or the laws meant to protect the public’s work from political interference?
In any case, there are well-established protocols for disciplining insubordinate government employees, and while suspensions and reprimands are standard and accepted fare, ordering a state employee to undergo a mental evaluation before he can return to work is unprecedented. Virtually everyone will recognize it for what it is — vicious mean-spirited harassment designed to compel an employee who can’t legally be fired to quit on his own.
This sort of conflict happens all the time in government, although it’s usually not this dramatic. In the big picture, I think Rick Scott may win this battle but has already lost the war. Climate change is real, is becoming ever less deniable, and fewer people are still trying to deny it. He’s on the losing side of science and reality. By abusing a lowly state employee who’s on the right side of the issue, he’s simply highlighting how wrong he is, and drawing attention to his abusive tendencies, much as Chris Christie does when he puts down citizens who disagree with him on legitimate issues for public debate.
It’s funny how these things work. As we’ve seen many times in history, an incident that seems trivial at the time can unleash gigantic forces with far-reaching and long-lasting consequences. That’s what happened last summer when a white Ferguson cop harassed one black teenager too many. I can’t predict what forces Scott is playing with, or where this might go, but my guess is ordering retaliating against a state scientists for speaking about climate change at a professional conference by suspending him and ordering him to undergo a mental evaluation as a condition of returning to his job is a bridge too far, and I have a sense that this case is going to grab a lot of people viscerally, and where it leads will be a place Scott didn’t intend to go.
Photo: Does Florida Gov. Rick Scott intend to incarcerate state employees who disagree with him in mental institutions?