Is the Obama Administration trying to lift the research exemption on studying public officials?

Right now the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which writes the rules on what can and can’t be permitted in human subjects research, is in the process of rewriting its whole ethics code. It issued a set of proposed regulations in September, and January 6 marked the deadline to submit comments on those proposed changes.

Overall, social scientists are pleased with the direction these new rules are pushing: If finalized, surveys and low-risk experiments would no longer be held to the same standard as medical trials, which researchers find unduly burdensome.

But snuck into the 300-plus pages of proposed rules is one line suggesting the government intends to close the major loophole that makes studying public officials practically possible.

When academics want to conduct any sort of research on humans, their research plans must first be scrutinized by an ethics body to ensure that the research won’t harm the participants involved – or, if risks are inevitable, that they’re at least minimized.

These bodies are often called institutional review boards, or IRBs, and every university or research facility that conducts studies on humans has one.

Though each board operates independently, they are all bound by a set of government rules that direct them to mandate particular safety and privacy requirements.

For example, the federal government directs IRBs on when to require researchers to ask for consent before performing studies on humans. It has also designated several vulnerable populations, including children and pregnant women, that require additional safeguards.

The exemption, first written into the rules in 1981, is intended to lower the barrier to study government officials. At the time, political scientists relied at least partially on interviews with members of Congress and other public figures to gain a clearer picture of how government institutions functioned. Interviews with members of Congress, for example, illuminated how the lawmakers interacted with lobbyists and the role that rank-and-file members played in the lawmaking process.

"When researchers study political officials' behavior, they are studying them in their official capacity as democratic representatives (or other official), not as private citizens," wrote Jessica Robinson Preece, a political scientist at Brigham Young University, in a public comment on the proposed changes. "That public officials forfeit some of their privacy and individual protections is a well-established principle to ensure democratic accountability."

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