They may study cow waste, however their research is anything but.

A team of University of New Hampshire environmental scientists is speaking out against Senator Tom Coburn's claim that their $700,000 research grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture is an example of needlessly frittered taxpayer dollars. ($700,000 is .00007% of the $1 trillion federal deficit. The tax cuts for the rich Coburn championed? Don't ask). 

Last week, the conservative Oklahoma Republican released the "Wastebook" report, his annually disingenuous catalog of 100 'wasteful' federally-funded projects. Coburn cited the New Hampshire researchers' work as Number 58 on the list for its wasteful goal of examining “greenhouse gas emission from organic dairies, which are cause by cow burps, among other things.”

The scientists shot back that Coburn was flat-out wrong. They told ABC News the senator "cherry picked" quotes and took their work out of context.Their work is actually extremely valuable to the rapidly growing organic farm industry, and their ultimate goal was to create software to improve environmental management at these dairies.

This is far from the first anti-intellectual attack that "fiscal conservatives" have launched on basic government-funded science, health and environmental research.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of government agencies whose specific job it is to investigate government fraud and waste in a non-partisan way—the U.S. Government Accountability Office and Agriculture Department inspector general, to name a few.

If Coburn is going to accuse scientists of waste by creating a report, using taxpayer dollars to pay his staff's salaries while they cherry pick examples, he should at minimum give the accused a chance to respond.

Tell Coburn to back off. Sign our petition to Coburn to stop wasting taxpayer dollars by creating a Wastebook report.

Photo credit: Paul Stevensen via Flickr