Читать книгу Culture Clash - Steven Goldberg H. - Страница 26

Under the circumstances, executive and legislative control of the agencies is limited. At the White House level, the small Office of Science and Technology policy can advise the president on major science policy issues, but it can hardly manage in detail the funding decisions made by the large mission agencies such as Defense, Health and Human Services, or Energy. The president’s science advisor (as the head of this office is known) can, for example, provide input when the effectiveness of a major weapons system becomes a matter of public controversy, but that is a different matter than the ordinary grant and contract decisions made daily in the bureaucracy. The Office of Management and Budget can more vigorously enforce overall spending limits in science as in other fields, but even it cannot scrutinize in every case the key questions concerning precisely who gets the research dollars.

The president’s most important effect on the day-to-day conduct of science policy stems from the power to appoint the heads of agencies and their key subordinates. These policymakers work closely with the full-time research establishment and can acquire considerable knowledge about at least some program areas.²⁵ At the subcabinet level, below most public scrutiny, appointees share authority with civil service scientists who have come up through the ranks.²⁶

When Congress considers science spending it faces similar limits. Because there is no single Department of Science, there is no single science budget. The various agency requests go to numerous committees and subcommittees, hampering the development of an overall policy. The problem is not, as is sometimes supposed, a lack of access to technical information. Congress can and does obtain studies on specific issues from such groups as the National Academy of Science, the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, the Comptroller General, and the Office of Technology Assessment, among others. But these studies tend to be limited to relatively high profile public issues, such as the utility of sending astronauts into space, rather than to the disposition of grant requests.

The president and Congress, of course, cherish science for different reasons than do scientists. The political forces care more about a payoff in practical devices and less about the growth of knowledge per se. Thus, science is rarely immune from budget cutting in hard times, and it is never immune from persistent requests to justify itself in practical terms. A large program concentrated in a single agency, such as the superconducting supercollider, can be ended unceremoniously. But generally money is provided in the broad areas where practical results are most likely, and basic scientists are then allowed to work.

There is even an important sense in which the goals of our elected political officials reinforce the norms of the research community. Politicians have an understandable desire for a scientific “breakthrough.” It seems to promise imminent real-world benefits and thus justify the taxpayers’ money that has been spent on research. Thus politicians will favor a line of scientific research that will lead to a dramatic scientific result, and leave for later the possibility that the technological payoff is less than ideal. A line of research that will not lead to rapid scientific progress will be of less interest, at least initially, even if its longer term social prospects are admirable. Scientists may, as Snow wrote, “have the future in their bones,”²⁷ but for legislators the future is now.²⁸

The media further reinforce this tendency. News stories tend to focus on dramatic breakthroughs rather than day-to-day research.²⁹ As Walter Lippman wrote, “[T]he news does not tell you how the seed is germinating in the ground, but it may tell you when the first sprout breaks through the surface.”³⁰

Thus in the basic research area, the scientists’ goal of scientific progress is supported, albeit for other reasons, by political and media forces. Indeed, scientists themselves are sometimes more cautious about whether a result is a “breakthrough” than are politicians or reporters. But our society’s major built-in source of deep caution—the process norms of the lawyer—is not well represented at this stage.

The main risk in this system from the scientists’ point of view, at least so long as reasonable funding levels are maintained, is undue pressure for immediate results intruding on sound scientific judgment. Thus political efforts to wage a “war on cancer” in the 1970s led to wasteful spending on projects with political but relatively little scientific appeal. Fortunately, they also led to a backlash in which more meaningful basic research on cancer came into fashion and more practical progress came to be made.³¹

A similar flare-up once marked congressional attitudes toward military research and development. In 1970, spurred in part by the belief that the Department of Defense had been spending too much money on research not directed toward military applications, Congress passed the Mansfield Amendment to the Military Procurement Act.³² The amendment provided that no research could be undertaken by the Department of Defense unless it had “a direct and apparent relationship to a specific military function or operation.”³³ The amendment was not a success. First, it had little impact, as Defense Department officials were adept at pointing to previously nonobvious implications of research funded by the department. Secondly, the amendment was soundly attacked on the ground that, if taken seriously, it would hinder valuable research because good basic science often cannot be shown to have a “direct relationship” to a particular end. In the 1971 procurement bill the amendment was diluted to provide that research must have “a potential relationship to a military function or operation.”³⁴ Through it all, basic research continued in the Defense Department.³⁵

Thus, basic science operates free of the day-to-day political constraints common elsewhere in American society. Of course it hardly seems that way to the harried science administrator, confronted with budget pressure from the Office of Management and Budget, facing potential ridicule in the form of a “Golden Fleece” award for research that seems silly, and trying to satisfy or appease the desire for results from everyone in elected office. But these judgments are relative. A single change in Social Security requirements, a single desegregation plan in a local school district, indeed, a single proposed change in postal rates can provoke political and legal frenzies that can make an entire science program seem like a backwater.

All of this could change in either of two ways: if the United States had a single Department of Science, or if the president were given a line item veto. Either change would probably work against the interests of the basic research community.

In theory, a single Department of Science could develop a coherent science policy. Thus there have been many proposals for such a department throughout American history.³⁶ They have never been enacted, in part because of opposition from those agencies already engaged in science spending. But even if we could write on a clean slate there are two major drawbacks to a Department of Science.

First, putting all science spending in one basket would subject that spending to wide fluctuations. In good times, science might receive quite a boost, but basic research would be in trouble when budget-cutting is rampant. Under the present system basic science is insulated to some extent from budgetary battles because areas like health, energy, and defense are rarely cut all at once, and all of those areas contain substantial basic research programs. Science is spread out across the federal bureaucracy, which makes it a difficult target. Of course, a rational public policy analyst could argue that basic science does not need or deserve any exemption from the type of scrutiny that would accompany creation of a single science budget, particularly given the popularity of science across the political spectrum. But the uncertain and long-term nature of basic research makes it preferable to protect science somewhat from sharp changes in budgetary policy.

The second danger with a Department of Science is more fundamental. As we have seen, under our Constitution, government has the power to fund science in a way that would be very troublesome in areas such as religion or politics. If it chose, for example, the federal government could fund only those cancer researchers who believe cancer is caused by a virus. Those with different theories would be free to publish their views and seek private funding, but in practice they would be at an enormous disadvantage. This approach is unconstitutional in other areas: the federal government could not fund the Catholic Church, and it could not fund the Democratic Party to the exclusion of all other parties. The nature of the scientific endeavor inevitably involves a type of picking and choosing that would cause problems elsewhere. We simply are not willing to fund all individuals who call themselves scientists—judgments on the merits must be made.

But such judgments ought to be made cautiously and with a sense of humility. A single Department of Science might tend to support a single line of basic research, and that would be disastrous if that line proved mistaken. Progress in science is so difficult to predict that a variety of approaches is usually needed in the early days of working on a scientific problem, long before any technology is in sight. A Department of Science could even come under the spell of a political theory that dictates a research path, thus leading to a disaster like Lysenkoism in the former Soviet Union, which hampered the development of biology for years. More likely, but equally dangerous, would be a Department of Science that took a monolithic approach to a problem because it rejected the alternatives on scientific grounds that turned out to be mistaken. As a result, it is a blessing that so many agencies fund scientific research under so many overlapping and inconsistent guidelines that an “American science policy” is hard to discern. Just as the Italians say that the inefficiency of their bureaucracy is the safeguard of their liberty, so too the absence of a Department of Science is a safeguard of free scientific inquiry.

Similarly, the line item veto is a possible reform of the budget process that might bode ill for science. Apart from its overall merits, this tactic could have a negative impact on science spending.

Under present law, the president of the United States can only veto a bill in its entirety; the president lacks authority to veto part of a bill while signing the rest into law. By contrast, the constitutions of forty-three states give governors the item veto, that is, the power to veto parts of certain bills. This power is usually limited to appropriations bills and thus the item veto is seen as a budget-balancing device.³⁷

Although doubts about its constitutionality at the federal level have been raised, a variety of liberal and conservative lawmakers have called for giving the president statutory item veto authority so that he could slice “porkbarrel” projects out of massive appropriations bills.³⁸ From the point of view of science spending, there is a problem because, although the American public supports science as a general proposition, individual research projects are easy for politicians to ridicule. Former Sen. William Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece” awards for wasteful government spending often went to relatively inexpensive science projects. For example, in “honoring” a study of aggression in primates, Proxmire focused on the scientist’s interest in when the animals clench their jaws:

The funding of this nonsense makes me almost angry enough to scream and kick or even clench my jaw. It seems to me it is outrageous.

Dr. Hutchinson’s studies should make the taxpayers as well as his monkeys grind their teeth. In fact, the good doctor has made a fortune from his monkeys and in the process made a monkey out of the American taxpayer.

It is time for the Federal Government to get out of this “monkey business.” In view of the transparent worthlessness of Hutchinson’s study of jaw-grinding and biting by angry or hard-drinking monkeys, it is time we put a stop to the bite Hutchinson and the bureaucrats who fund him have been taking of the taxpayer.³⁹

In fact, studies of primate aggression could have beneficial medical implications for humans. But it is sometimes easier to make fun of the studies than to understand them. In the hands of a politically minded president, any number of science projects could be subject to similar ridicule. Fortunately for the science community, the item veto does not presently seem likely to become a reality.