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.

There is a lot of evidence that polarization has sharpened along political lines, and the concern for an organization that doesn't have a political ideology is that will make it harder for us to be effective.

Q: How have you responded to the increased political uses of reports?

A: I think increasingly we've had to add a dimension to make sure the dissemination (of the research) is strictly bipartisan. The situation has gotten to the point where you can create a misimpression of bias by not being vigorously even-handed in the way you disseminate the research. So, we have paid increased attention to not only making the research fair, objective and balanced, but also to the dissemination to ensure that is balanced and fair.

Q: Do you worry that political leaders in a polarized environment simply won't perceive even-handed analysis as useful to them, where in winner-takes-all politics, anything that doesn't help me, hurts me?

A: Yep, that's definitely a danger.

Q: How have things changed over time?

A: We are finding there seems to be an uptick in the politicization in the results of research. One side seizes it and uses it as a club against another side. So, even though the research didn't begin, didn't espouse a political ideology, it is being used that way in the political debate. … Some recent work we did on military investment in alternative fuels, fairly technical analysis, but it is being seized by one side in the debate and is being used in a way that I think creates a risk we'll be seen as partisan when, in fact, the work is not that way, at all.

Q: What is your big worry?

A: We're not giving up, so don't view this as a conclusion, but I worry that there are some topics now where the policy options is just completely off limits, so polarizing. A few examples are gun control, another one is the question of national standards when it comes to K-12 education — there a full comprehensive look at reform ought to include a careful analysis of that, but that is one of the 'third-rail' issues very difficult to do that in a way that doesn't generate a polarized reaction. Another one is concern about the growing burden of health costs on the military and veteran systems.

Q: How has policy research changed over time?

A: There's been a change in the way that policy research has been financed, both for good and for bad. You've seen a growth of privately funded organizations, sometimes ideologically affiliated, sometimes affiliated with a political party loosely producing policy papers. But its also changed an organization like RAND, because we use philanthropy differently, not to advance an ideology but to fill in gaps or extend research or tackle those kinds of issues that might be too hot to handle for traditional government clients.

Q: If they are too hot to handle won't RAND get burned tackling them?

A: We're not worried about getting burned if we get a chance to do the work. An example is " The Invisible Wounds of War," that really put the issue of the psychological (and) cognitive impairments that veterans were experiencing on the policy map. We were not able to get the work started through what you might think of as the traditional client sources. It was philanthropically funded, and it really set the tone for what is now a major research effort not only at RAND, but lots of other places where traditional government (funding) sources have now picked up the issue.