Protecting Scientists and Scientific Integrity - Home

Fish Passage Center numbers showed dramatic declines in salmon passing through the eight dams on the Columbia and lower Snake rivers since 2001

Public agency scientists, particularly at the federal level, are under growing political pressure to alter, dilute or suppress their findings on issues of economic impact or controversy. When scientists find themselves in the political crosshairs, with their careers threatened, they call PEER.

In cases spanning the country and crossing disciplines from botany to economics, PEER—

• Provides legal defense to scientists targeted because their work is politically inconvenient. Our defense of the staff of the Fish Passage Center is but a sample of our scientific docket of cases;
• Exposes scientific fraud and manipulation by political managers. PEER seeks to hold the science manipulators accountable; and
• Pioneers new legal paths to debunk political science substituting for real science. For example, PEER has turned one of industry’s own tools, the Data Quality Act into a powerful mechanism to challenge alterations of agency science for non-scientific reasons. See our use of the DQA.

For more than a decade, PEER has worked with and on behalf of scientists in a unique way to empower them in confronting their own agencies and the political and commercial forces behind scientific perversion.