It seems that the Bush Administration has decided that executive branch agencies have to behave like the three monkeys: Speak no evil, see no evil, and hear no evil. According to articles in today’s Washington Post and the New York Times newspapers, last October, 2007, members of Vice-President’s Dick Cheney staff edited out six pages of proposed Congressional testimony of Julie L.Gerberding, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”)where the CDC was going to point out that global warming caused by greenhouse gases emitted from fossil fuels are a serious threat to public health.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/washington/09enviro.html?hphttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/08/AR2008070801442.html?nav=hcmodule

 A former senior EPA official Jason Burnett who had served as chief adviser to the Administrator of the EPA,  Stephen Johnson, has asserted in a letter to Senator Barbara Boxer,  Chairwoman of the Senate Environmental Public Works Committee, that both Vice President Cheney’s office and the White House Council on Environmental Quality requested that he “work with CDC to remove from the testimony any discussion of the human health consequences of climate change.” Apparently in the current administration, protecting energy companies from increased government regulations of fossil fuel emissions by censoring scientific testimony as to the serious dangers caused by global warming, is more important than the health of the public.

 We all learn in our Civics class in high school that our country is a representative democracy, and that we have three co-equal branches of government.  When I read the Washington Post and New York Times articles it made me wonder how “equal” are the co-equal branches. This situation brought to mind the quote of George Orwell from Animal Farm, that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The “editing” of the Congressional testimony was clearly an attempt by the Executive Branch to keep information away from the Legislative Branch.  When one branch of government keeps another branch of government from knowing relevant information it is keeping that information also from the people who elected that government. CDC is part of the Executive Branch, and by allowing a six page deletion of its proposed testimony, it is renouncing its duty to keep the public informed of health hazards.

 Maybe instead of teaching us in school that our government is made up of three equal branches our schools need to teach us how to actively participate in a democracy to preclude one branch of government from becoming stronger than the others. We need to learn how to get information from the government agencies that our taxpayer monies support.  The school system has to teach us how to use the Freedom of Information Act and any other administrative recourses that may be out there, at the state and federal levels, so that we may learn sooner rather than later what big government may not want us to know, or what big government may be too slow, or too unwilling, to recognize and respond to.