Manufactured Emergencies
Unsustainable ways of operating, emergencies often result in unpredictable outcomes. Manufactured emergencies make unpredictable outcomes even more likely.
I first became interested in the sustainability beat when science journalism started to disappear from major newspapers. So my initial questions about sustainability were about the sustainability of science journalism itself.
In 1989, there were 95 U.S. newspapers with science sections (Brumfiel G. 2009). By 2004, there were 34 (Williams A, Clifford S. 2008). By the time I wrote my first major newspaper feature in 2005, The Dallas Morning News had cut its science section, too. So I had to re-work the article I had pitched into one that fit into the paper’s Healthy Living section. It didn’t really fit, but they published it anyway (“Picture Imperfect,” 7 June 2005).
As my colleague recently documented in the interactive graph below, it’s easy to see that newspaper publishers were cutting more than science sections.
I was a struggling freelancer in the mid-2000s, a profession I started in 2003 thanks to a summertime fellowship from the AAAS halfway through my master’s degree in applied mathematics. At subsequent science journalism conferences, financially successful freelancers talked about how we would all need to “brand” ourselves: become known for something individually, embrace these many new technologies for self-publishing (blogging, micro-blogging /Tweeting, podcasting, vlogging, etc.), and build our own following.
Instead, in 2007 I got my first full-time job in science journalism at Science magazine and worked under that organization’s brand. Science is a nonprofit. So are all the other science journalism outlets where I’ve been an employee. I’ve written, edited, and produced multimedia for many other nonprofit science journalism outlets, too. But not one of those nonprofits was a newspaper.
Those newspapers that still have science journalists on staff have seen their numbers dwindle, too. That decline in the number of newspaper-based science journalists is likely to accelerate if Congress does not challenge the Trump Administration’s deep cuts to science agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health — funding that Congress authorizes — because less science funding means fewer scientists doing science, which, in turn, means less need for science journalism. Anticipating such a decline in science and science journalism may help to explain The New York Times’s editorial decision last week that “9 Federally Funded Scientific Breakthroughs That Changed Everything” was fit to print — the kind of news that’s only “news” because it may be new to you.Generally, being a nonprofit is a sustainable business model for science journalism outlets. But, last week, the future of all U.S. nonprofits was threatened yet again when Republicans in Congress reintroduced the “nonprofit killer bill” into the Trump Administration’s tax plan. As Mother Jones reported it last fall, the previous version of the bill was defeated after it became evident how the bill “authorizes broad and easily abused new powers for the executive branch” as the ACLU put it in a letter signed by hundreds of organizations.
The new version of the nonprofit-killer bill, as reported by The Intercept, would also give the President “the power to strip the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit it deems a ‘terrorist-supporting organization.’”
But then, this past weekend, the nonprofit-killer bill was cut out of the Trump Administration’s tax plan just as quietly as it had been slipped in.
Tomorrow morning at 1:00 AM ET, the Committee on Rules will meet to discuss the latest version of the Trump Administration’s tax plan, a so-called “emergency” measure.
Emergencies are serious, often unexpected, and require immediate action. They’re not a sustainable way of operating. This “emergency,” while serious, was fully expected. It’s a manufactured emergency typical of how the Trump Administration operates.
Making this manufactured emergency even more challenging for Congress and less sustainable is the average age of U.S. Representatives — 57-58 years old — with the Chair of the Committee on Rules, Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), turning 82 next month. Late-night decisions are even less predictable among older people who are more likely to be tired at a meeting that starts at 1 AM. In such a late-night manufactured emergency meeting, one might miss out on someone slipping in again a provision that would allow the Trump Administration “extraordinary power to investigate, harass, and effectively dismantle any nonprofit organization… based on a unilateral accusation of wrongdoing.”
I hope one day to make SustainLab a nonprofit, particularly because by that point it will mean I can hire someone to take care of the “brand.” But these current and ongoing manufactured emergencies here in the United States— operating in the outdated Silicon Valley mode of “move fast and break things” (as I wrote earlier this month)—is making it hard for anyone to get their business done, whether in reporting on science, making furniture, growing and shipping cut flowers, testing water for pollutants, running universities…. But as I’ve also noted here on SustainLab, protests work, even if their results are not immediately obvious.
As of publication, there are 160 amendments already proposed to the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” some of them may be significantly more important to you, Dear Reader, than the nonprofit-killer provisions. But if you, like me, live in the United States and think meetings that start in the middle of the night are a unsustainable way of making decisions in response to a manufactured emergency and thus more likely to lead to unpredictable outcomes — whatever your political persuasion or ideology — consider contacting your representatives in Congress.
1 am meetings can not possibly be sustainable!