Other organizations are taking their action to the next level: court. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, for example, is stepping up to defend federal workers in and out of the courtroom. At the core of any functioning scientific workforce is the capacity to report research and findings truthfully — along with the freedom to call out misdeeds and errors and to express independent opinions. But this has never been easy in practice.
Part of the problem, said Tim Whitehouse, executive director of PEER, is that scientific integrity policies within the U.S. federal government have always been weak — voluntary rather than enforced. “They’re meaningless if the employees don’t have a way to report wrongdoing and have some level of protection,” he said.