The Obama administration expressed skepticism on Thursday about a Republican effort to require that federal spending on science promote economic development or national security, calling it a dangerous act of political interference.
Speaking at a policy conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said lawmakers were not qualified to act as peer reviewers.
“Most members of Congress are not experts in the relevant fields,” Mr. Holdren said.
Congress, as part of budget legislation approved in March, voted to bar the National Science Foundation from approving any grants involving political science unless the NSF could certify them “as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.”
Since then, the new chairman of the House science committee, Rep. Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, has proposed extending that requirement to all research financed through the NSF.
“It is the job of Congress and the NSF to make sure that taxpayer dollars are spent responsibly,” Mr. Smith said in a written statement on Tuesday.
President Obama, speaking on Monday at the National Academy of Sciences, briefly alluded to the overall issue, saying he was determined to protect the peer-review process. “I will keep working to make sure that our scientific research does not fall victim to political maneuvers or agendas that in some ways would impact on the integrity of the scientific process,” Mr. Obama said.
Questionable Intellectual Merit
Mr. Holdren, in his remarks on Thursday at the AAAS conference, was more direct. He said that unless the NSF was allowed to broadly define virtually all its work as aimed at expanding national knowledge—not likely, given past criticisms of specific NSF projects by Mr. Smith and other leading Republicans—the idea was a clear attempt at political interference in science.
Lawmakers are mistaken, Mr. Holdren said, if they believe there can be “discernible, confidently predictable benefits for the national interest” from any particular research project. He listed oft-cited examples of the difficulty of such prediction, such as the NSF grant to the future founders of Google that helped them devise the Internet-search engine that led to their development of a $270-billion corporation.
Republicans, in turn, have repeatedly cited NSF-financed projects they regard as having questionable intellectual merit, including studies with such titles as “Picturing Animals in National Geographic, 1888-2008,” “The International Criminal Court and the Pursuit of Justice,” and “Regulating Accountability and Transparency in China’s Dairy Industry.”
Mr. Smith, in his statement, said he had suggested the idea only to spark a discussion of ways to improve the peer-review process. “It is disappointing that instead of accepting the invitation to work together to prioritize the spending of taxpayer dollars, some have chosen to play politics and misrepresent the nature of the draft bill,” he said.
An aide to Mr. Smith’s committee said that the draft legislation had been circulated privately among lawmakers in both parties and with members of the administration, and that Mr. Smith’s staff was disappointed that it had been leaked to the news media. “We did this in good faith,” the aide said.
‘Congress as Peer Reviewers’
At the AAAS conference, Mr. Holdren repeated his willingness to discuss how to improve peer review. But “if the additional layer of review is adding Congress as peer reviewers,” he said, “I think that’s a mistake.”
The NSF, an independent agency that receives about $7-billion a year in taxpayer dollars, has declined to respond publicly to Congressional criticisms of its choices of research projects to support. The NSF’s conversations with lawmakers constitute “privileged information between us and the legislative branch,” an agency spokeswoman said. The NSF is also still evaluating the effects of the requirement concerning political-science research, said the spokeswoman, Maria C. Zacharias.
The White House’s concern was reiterated by a group of seven leading philanthropic organizations that finance scientific research. They used the AAAS gathering to propose doubling the amount of money for basic research that comes from private sources.
The groups are the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Kavli Foundation, the W.M. Keck Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement, the Simons Foundations, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In a written summary of their proposal, their leaders said that they recognized that Congress was trying hard to cut the federal budget, an effort they knew would mean pressure to avoid riskier avenues of investigation.
“There will be a tendency to emphasize projects whose outcomes are more certain, even though such projects are less likely to yield transformative discoveries,” the leaders of the seven groups said.
In their summary, the groups said that American philanthropic organizations distributed about $47-billion a year but devoted only $2-billion of that to basic scientific research. Of that amount, 75 percent goes to medical research, leaving only about $500-million for fields that include physics, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering.
The president of the Kavli Foundation, Robert W. Conn, said the group’s idea had not been motivated by the specific controversy involving Mr. Smith. Mr. Conn said, however, that it would be natural for some in Congress to expect more certainty for taxpayer investments.
Kavli already devotes its entire portfolio to scientific research, and the proposal is therefore a call for other philanthropic groups to consider shifting more of their portfolios toward science, he said.
That could mean the establishment of new charitable organizations devoted primarily to science, or priority shifts by existing groups. As an example, he said that a philanthropy concerned with the environment might recognize how the fruits of basic scientific discoveries help environmentalists carry out their work.