In a throwdown between scientific truth and political interests, scientists are supposed to emerge victorious.

So said President Obama in March 2009, when he issued a memo vowing to preserve scientific integrity by requiring that federal agencies create procedures to protect government scientists—including whistleblower protections. However, that sentiment seems to have fallen prey to bureaucratic lethargy. Now a group dedicated to protecting scientists from political influence has issued a wake up call.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility filed a compliant Wednesday with the Department of the Interior alleging that Bureau of Land Management officials excluded important information from environmental impact analyses, according to NPR. More than just a request to examine the situation, the complaint is a test of the how the president’s integrity order will be carried out.

“To us, this is exactly the sort of abuse that the White House directive was designed to prevent,” PEER lawyer Jeff Ruch told NPR. “And so we will file a formal complaint, under one of the few policies that exist.”

When first announced, the memo was seen as a much-needed assertion of the importance of sound science in political decision making.

“The president restated the centrality of science to the issues,” Alan Leshner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science told USA Today at the time. “I've never seen the scientific community so pleased by a presidential action. It really is a historical attempt to establish the clear role of science in underlying policy.”

Nearly three years later, with only a handful of policies in place—out of the 20 or so agencies the White House expected to respond, according to NPR—the situation could be seen as less affirming. It’s unclear who has yet to comply because there’s no guidelines regarding how an agency post its policy, or even what policy it makes.

“If an agency delivers a ham sandwich and says, ‘This is our policy,’ the White House wouldn’t reject it,” Ruch told Bloomberg News in August, calling the process “inordinately late and lax.”

As of the writing of that story, the list of agencies with draft or final policies included the departments of the Interior and Commerce, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, and NASA. The departments of Defense, Energy, Transportation, and Homeland Security had yet to make their policies known, according to Bloomberg. There is a December 17 deadline for agencies to submit their final drafts to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, according to NPR.

The PEER test complaint is one of several at the Department of the Interior being handled by Scientific Integrity Officer Ralph Morgenweck, who indicated the process for handling the complaint is just as unclear.

“I think it puts everyone on notice that you can make a decision and ignore the science—you do that at your risk—but what this policy is really getting at is not to mischaracterize that science,” he told NPR. “We don't really know how the policy is going to work until we actually get into the practice of it. And we're into it now, and so we're learning as we go along.”