Through spring and summer of 2020, the Trump administration attempted to "alter or block" more than a dozen scientific reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention related to the pandemic, a top House lawmaker alleges. Rep. Jim Clyburn, who chairs the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, wants more information about this deadly politicization of public health.

As usual, the administration has been uncooperative — so much so that Clyburn's panel last month finally subpoenaed two top U.S. health officials. Good. This is urgent information to pursue, even if it can't be fully exposed until after the current president exits.

Of the many ways President Donald Trump has failed America during the pandemic, one of the most damaging has been his subversion of science to politics. Trump's distrust of science has long been evident on other issues, so it wasn't especially surprising that his impulse regarding the pandemic was to try to muzzle any scientific information that clashed with his overriding goal of downplaying the crisis.

In a letter last week to Alex Azar, the Health and Human Services secretary, and CDC Director Robert Redfield, Clyburn wrote that the administration's efforts "to interfere with scientific work at CDC were far more extensive and dangerous than previously known." The subcommittee's subpoenas of Azar and Redfield demand "full and unredacted" documents to get to the bottom of that interference.

It's already been alleged that Redfield ordered the deletion of an email that appeared to show such interference. Clyburn's letter further alleges that then-HHS spokesman Michael Caputo — a fervent Trump loyalist — "aggressively bullied and retaliated against CDC staff who provided truthful information to the press without his permission."

Among other instances of politics tainting science, the letter alleges, was the handling of a CDC report referencing a coronavirus outbreak that occurred at a Georgia summer camp even though the camp had adhered to CDC guidelines. Rather than ponder what that might mean about the guidelines, a political appointee angrily complained that the report would undermine the administration's push to reopen schools. "It just sends the wrong message as written," the political appointee wrote. The report was ultimately scrubbed of any reference to the summer camp outbreak.

It's difficult to miss the philosophical thread between anecdotes like that and Trump's suggestion last summer that an acceptable way to address rising coronavirus cases was to do less testing so it wouldn't be as evident. This deadly willingness to put public relations ahead of science is modeled right from the top.

America will soon be led by a new administration that can be expected to listen to the scientists rather than muzzle them. But that doesn't diminish the importance of establishing how these failures happened, and how to prevent them from happening again.

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