Читать книгу Culture Clash - Steven Goldberg H. - Страница 24

In practice, Congress allocates billions of dollars a year for basic science with the condition that the recipient agencies use the money for research in broadly defined fields. Obviously, the agency itself answers the tough questions in evaluating individual requests for funding: What specific areas of research are most promising? What kinds of qualifications should matter most in making a grant? Thus the difficult decisions on funding are made by full-time agency employees and the outside consultants they retain to evaluate grant and contract applications. The classic method used is a competitive peer review system in which experts evaluate and compare funding requests, and then choose the winners.

The Supreme Court has provided important support for the central role of the agencies by holding that only actual congressional legislation, as opposed to comments found in the legislative history, bind an agency to a particular spending program.⁴ Thus a single member’s desire to fund a particular science project, expressed, for example at a hearing, is not binding. According to the Court’s 1993 decision in Lincoln v. Vigil, “the very point of a lump-sum appropriation [by Congress] is to give an agency the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances and meet its statutory responsibilities in what it sees as the most effective or desirable way.”⁵

Of course, agency officials will often, as a matter of prudence, heed concerns expressed by members of Congress in hearings, or advice given in a committee report as to how money ought to be spent, even though these inputs are not legally binding. But even these relatively easy forms of guidance are rarely forthcoming in the highly technical field of research funding.

Indeed, agency control over science funding is so well established that deviations from the pattern attract considerable attention. When, in 1984, some universities seeking science funding attempted to follow a different route, the Washington Post trumpeted in a front-page headline, “Colleges Bypass Agencies to Get Federal Funds.”⁶ What shady process had these schools engaged in? According to the article, the schools had sought funds “directly from Congress without going through the usual, laborious route of applying to federal agencies.”⁷ The notion that the democratically elected Congress would pass legislation setting specific research priorities is generally regarded as “pork-barrel politics”⁸ or inappropriate “earmarking”⁹ that should not be allowed to subvert the expert review taking place in the permanent bureaucracy.

The continuing controversy over the “earmarking” of scientific research funds is instructive. Beginning in the early 1980s, Congress occasionally passed laws requiring an agency to fund a particular scientific project, usually one involving building a facility at a specific university.¹⁰ Prominent examples included the Soybean Laboratory at the University of Illinois-Urbana and the Waste Management Center at the University of New Orleans.¹¹ Members of Congress at times justify this practice by saying they want to spread out research money so that it does not all go to the same elite institutions, the notion being that good science takes place in many places. In practice, of course, earmarking has tended to favor the constituencies of powerful members rather than any neutral geographic pattern.¹²

In any event, earmarking has received almost universal condemnation. “Basic and applied research,” the newspapers say, “should be determined by peer and merit review, not congressional favoritism.”¹³ The President’s Council of Science Advisors says that earmarking “must cease and must not be initiated or encouraged by universities.”¹⁴ One scholar sees in “porkbarrel science” the “corruption of our research enterprise.”¹⁵

One might surmise from this that science funding has been taken over by the great unwashed. In reality, earmarking, even taking the highest estimates and assuming that none of it is done in good faith, accounts for under I percent of the federal government’s spending on research and development.¹⁶ Vastly more “porkbarrel” spending takes place in countless nonscience areas throughout the U.S. budget.¹⁷

What is derided as “porkbarrel” is, through another lens, democracy. When representatives spend the taxpayers’ money there are at least elections to take them to task. The system is far from perfect, but, outside the realm of science spending, it is at least understood that voters choose people who vote on spending programs. But science is different—here the presumption is that an elite group, the science community itself, decides how to slice up its own portion of the federal pie.

This presumption reflects our belief that science should not be governed by interest group politics. There really is “good” and “bad” science and, even allowing for hard cases, it is safer to have scientists decide which is which. Of course, bureaucracies develop their own pet projects that would not be part of an ideal research program, but it is in fact true that expert agencies are better able to manage incremental decisions in this field than are elected officials. Neither the president nor members of Congress want earmarking to replace peer review as the norm in American science funding.

At this point, constitutional purists might object that, however substantively attractive peer review is, under this approach nonelected officials are making key government decisions, an approach the Constitution does not appear to envision. But this sort of broad delegation of congressional power to administrative agencies is hardly limited to science funding. In many areas of government regulation, such as communications and environmental protection, agencies actually do the day-today work. Judicial construction of the Constitution requires only that Congress provide “adequate standards” to guide agencies, and broad language such as “regulate in the public interest” has been found adequate—indeed, not since the 1930s has the Supreme Court found any congressional delegation unconstitutional.¹⁸ Although the Court might revive nondelegation doctrine someday, it will almost surely not be in the area of science funding, where virtually no one believes that Congress or the president can provide meaningfully detailed guidance on technical decisions. Even when modern justices have raised questions about delegations to agencies, they have noted that Congress can delegate if it chooses a general policy and leaves implementation to an agency when a “field is sufficiently technical, the ground to be covered sufficiently large, and the Members of Congress themselves not necessarily expert.”¹⁹ Thus delegation in the science funding area has not been seriously questioned.

This is not simply a twentieth-century phenomenon. In the science area, high political officials have never been able to spend their time making detailed judgments. Even Thomas Jefferson fell victim to this reality. As Secretary of State Jefferson personally examined patent applications. But in passing on those applications, Jefferson sought and received advice from professors at the University of Pennsylvania. Moreover, Jefferson himself complained that the job was so difficult that it gave him “from time to time the most poignant mortification” because he was “obliged to give undue and uninformed opinions on rights often valuable, and always deemed so by the authors.” After just two years of Jefferson’s labors, the patent law was revised to require that the Department of State issue patents automatically if fees were properly paid. Thus the burden of determining the validity of patents fell on the courts. By 1836, Congress passed a new law creating a permanent office of commissioner of patents with a professional staff capable of assessing patent applications.²⁰ Given the difficulties even Jefferson faced, it is hardly surprising that today science policy of all types is made initially in the federal bureaucracy.