Who is going to pay for the data collection? If we can't trust the government, what are we paying taxes for?

The only reason we have good weather data is because the government maintains stations in remote places all over the country. Who else would maintain that?

I respect cynicism and questioning stuff but this is misplaced. You have to trust the government since they are potentially the least partisan source here. Yes the data can be misconstrued by legislators but the truth of the data cannot be in question. It’s healthy to question it but the solution is to require proof of non-sabotage. It takes a lot of money and resources to pull this data together. It’s compiled by organizations across the world and being the trustworthy anchor is the most efficient way to achieve this. With that the government agency has every incentive to be non partisan and operate with integrity.

I agree with your feelings but 'activists and independent scientists' do not have the resources to maintain that sort of infrastructure over the long term and will also be continually fending off attacks on their credibility. Institutions exist because volunteering has limitations.

Private companies can pay for their own data collection and if they have a dispute with the government's analysis, they can go to court.

Who exactly is going to pay for these non-governmental independent data collection/analysis efforts?

How about taxpayers pay for one analysis, private parties pay for theirs, courtrooms can resolve inconsistencies on a case-by-case basis.

This notion of "the government" is the wrong premise. The US government is (supposed to be, I should say) an elaborate system of checks and balances to enable self-correction mechanisms. The Trump administration has turned that into a travesty, obviously, but the system itself is explicitly set up to be split into three branches that keep each other in check, and thus supervising itself.

> how can we trust either its legislative or executive branch to ensure that their creations are effective or efficient?

Glad you asked. That's actually the job of the Inspectors General. One of the first groups of people Trump completely eliminated.

It was their job to stop things like corruption, waste, and fraud in the federal government.

Ah yes, we can't trust that our elected officials understand their duty well enough just fund Science and find out stuff works, so better throw up our hands and let the "market" do it.

Your view isn't controversial because it's daring, it's just plain nihilistic. It's just anti-government dogma which is cultivated by an incredibly cynical media atmosphere.

All agencies are ultimately accountable to the public via democratically elected leaders as the Supreme Court recently upheld. No part of the government is independent body, it’s in one of the 3 branches.

That doesn't seem controversial to me.

I wish the same were true of all federal organizations though. For example, CIA regulates itself with its own supervision too.

Other orgs do it too. I don't think they do it well.

Yes! We could pool our efforts though, in a larger organization (let's call it a democratic republic), vote on who should preside over it, be on the "board" and hire some people to run the day-to operations of the whole thing.

If a single organization proves too unwieldy, we could even have a federated solution.

Edit: another suggestion https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=48898415&goto=item%3Fi...

This makes no sense to me. National governments have no moral or legal responsibility to monitor the environment, because they also regulate pollution? Is this a joke?

Only private companies with some fantastical profit motive to install satellite and sensor networks all over and above the globe should do it, not the government?

> To that end, I hope the Trump administration's actions cause independent data collection and analysis by activists and independent scientists

Activists and independent scientists ... funded by whom? Data collected by whom? Data stored and distributed by whom? Data analyzed by whom? -- All of these roles are non-trivial, unlike your understanding of "the government" as a single monolithic entity; The government has/had different branches for the collection and study of climate vs (eg) the enforcement of emissions. The issue in our government today isn't the trust/separation of these different entities but the attack on them from above and abroad.