Are politics putting policy debates 'off limits'?

— -- Economic troubles aside, at least one science-dependent industry is doing well — the think tank business.

Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actor and former California governor, has announced this week that he is opening one. "Science and evidence must play an important role when finding solutions to policy and social issues," read the announcement of the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy.

Maybe it is because we have more problems than ever, from economic woes to energy debates to wars in the last decade. Or maybe it is because we depend on science, from economics to climatology, more than ever to run a modern society, but the science-driven public policy report-writing organizations that we call think tanks are more prominent than ever today.

We can see this in ways large and small. On the big political stage this week, President Obama cited an economic analysis done by the Tax Policy Institute to attack the tax plans of his election opponent, Mitt Romney. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature team headed by physicist Richard Muller, made waves by announcing in a newspaper editorial that greenhouse gas emissions do, indeed, seem to be responsible for global warming, just as suggested by climate scientists over recent decades. And the RAND Corp. released a long-awaited report suggesting the U.S. Forest Service emphasize water-scooping airplanes to battle forest fires, instead of slower flame-retardant-carrying aircraft and helicopters.

All of the reports generated controversy, even the scooper airplane one, with Forest Service chief Tom Tidwell disputing the recommendation in the report, which was commissioned by his agency. Think tank reports surrounding the safety of the nationwide boom in hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" — drilling for natural gas and oil by fracturing rock layers with chemical-laced water — came under fire last month, when a Bloomberg News report cataloged links between industry funding and academic study authors.

One of the people most concerned about the integrity of public policy reports is Michael Rich, the head of RAND. RAND is perhaps the pre-eminent public policy research organization, founded in 1948 and best known for its national security studies, but with broad expertise in issues ranging from education to energy policy.

USA TODAY interviewed Rich recently, touching on some of the issues raised by the controversies and his deeper concerns about think tank reports. Here are some of his views:

Q: Are you concerned that it has become harder for public policy organizations to tackle controversial issues?

A: Over the years, we have been able to tackle lots of controversial issues. We conducted the original study on the prospect of integrating gays in the military, we worked on women in combat, we've worked on a whole variety of illicit-drug-related issues. Frequently that work, when you call the shots as you see them, it generates anger or controversy in the first place. Sometimes the anger comes from the left, and sometimes it comes from the right. Frequently it comes from all over, because the problems are complex, the analysis is complex. Sometimes the controversy is along partisan lines, sometimes it is not.