Federal officials took more than four months to create an eight-paragraph announcement that energy-related data had been manipulated for nearly two decades, according to internal U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) documents.
USGS Regional Director Max Ethridge said Jan. 19, 2016, that a webpage making the manipulation public was in the works. That announcement wasn’t posted to the agency’s website until May 25, according to the documents TheDCNF obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
USGS “is developing an announcement … indicating that the data analysis from the Inorganic Section of the Energy Geochemistry Laboratory is suspect for the period of 2008-2014, and the laboratory facility is being closed,” Ethridge wrote to agency Director Suzette Kimball and Deputy Director William Werkheiser. (EXCLUSIVE: Congressman Says Fed Lab Closure For Data Manipulation Is ‘Suspicious’)
The announcement posted online more than four months later also noted that data was manipulated from 1996 to 2008, meaning information was distorted for 18 years. A public notice regarding the first instance wasn’t posted until 2010. (RELATED: Federal Lab Forced To Close After ‘Disturbing’ Data Manipulation)
USGS also delayed notifying scientists – both in and out of the government – who used the lab that their work may have relied on distorted data.
“The end users … are being notified that the data analysis is suspect, and therefore any published papers which are based on the suspect data should be carefully evaluated and possibly retracted,” Ethridge said in the memo, written more than a year after the manipulation’s discovery.
The uncovered announcement delay is just the most recent development highlighting USGS’s glacial response to the data manipulation. The agency knew of both instances years before they were stopped, investigated and announced, TheDCNF previously reported. (RELATED: Federal Lab Ignored Environmental Data Manipulation For YEARS)
“Although management discovered the incident in late 2014 … employees had suspected quality-related problems with the laboratory for many years,” a June 2016 Department of the Interior Inspector General report said. “USGS has had ample time to make a public announcement.”
Kimball, for example, agreed in March, 2015, to contract an external audit for the federal program that led the lab, but that review still hasn’t happened.
USGS has refused to say if anyone has been punished for the distortion, which consisted of two analysts calibrating equipment far beyond reasonable measures. They compromised an estimated $108 million worth of energy-related research, including topics such as uranium in the environment and U.S. coal reserves, according to the inspector general. (RELATED: Federal Lab Refuses To Reveal Who Manipulated Environmental Data For Two Decades)
USGS did not respond to TheDCNF’s requests for comment.
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