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About the Author
Dan Greenberg is a longtime observer of science policy and politics. He is the author of "Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism" (University of Chicago Press), as well as other books, and has published widely in newspapers and popular and professional magazines.
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Part Two: Q&A With John H. Marburger
John H. Marburger III, President Bush’s science adviser, invited me to come by his office for a conversation, which we held on April 23. Marburger, who heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is one of the administration’s longest-serving officials, having arrived in October 2001. A physicist, and nominally a Democrat, he formerly was president of SUNY Stony Brook and came to Washington from the directorship of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Following is Part Two of edited excerpts of the conversation. Part I is here.
Q. Do you feel the media distorted the significance of the various controversies between scientists and the administration?
A. Of course. All that most people know about science is what’s reported in the papers and what’s talked about in the marketplace of ideas. And that environment, that media environment, is dominated by a very small number of issues, often of the sort floating on top of a very much larger body of things that are happening in science and technology, and much of which is invisible to the public.
Q. What are the accomplishments of this administration in the science and technology area?
A. Science marches on. I think one of the important things that happened under this administration is that the vast amount of research that was taking place when the administration took office continued to take place in very high-quality agencies. The science agencies in this administration have been led by outstanding scientists. The quality has been good.
I think the quality of planning for just the general conduct of operations of the science enterprise of the United States has been good. That’s the first obligation — let’s keep it working properly. We began with the dot.com bubble burst and a difficult economic period at the beginning of the administration, and for whatever reasons, associated with war and the economy and other decisions that were made, the domestic discretionary budget has been constrained. The president has made a commitment to keep the growth of the domestic discretionary budget to less than the inflation rate. And even in those conditions, the science budget has grown at a rate greater than the discretionary budget. Even when you take out the development part in the research and development budget, it’s grown. Even when you take out the NIH budget, which doubled in the first three years of the administration, this administration continued three of the five-year doubling period for the NIH budget.
In other areas, there’s been pretty good support for the parts of the science-and-technology enterprise that you would expect important for future energy. The NASA budget — people may complain about it, but it’s still grown. It’s still a very substantial fraction of everything else. The administration’s been trying to repair the imbalance between life science and physical science, which is a problem. I think one of the unfortunate things about this second term of the administration is that we did not succeed in getting Congress to appropriate funds for the American Competitiveness Initiative, but I think the president’s attitude on this has been very much on the right side. And not only on funding for the physical sciences, but also immigration policies, tax incentives for research and experimentation, and trying to keep bright people in the U.S. and open our doors to highly trained people. All of those issues have been supported by this president and, I hope, possibly will bear fruit in the next administration.
Q. About the NIH budget, you once said that the python should digest the pig before it’s fed anything more. The NIH people are complaining that since the doubling [1998-2003], their purchasing power is down, by their estimate, 12 percent.
A. No question. It’s not good to have this kind of fluctuation, lack of predictability, in any science budget. And it is unfortunate. But the NIH budget is 50 percent of the civilian science budget, and if you think there are imbalances, it’s awfully hard to repair them without constraining that big piece. That’s an unfortunate situation. It’s also true that the purchasing power in the physical sciences has been going down for an even longer period of time.
Almost as soon as I came to Washington, I began hearing a lot of complaints, not only from the university scientists and the people in the national labs, but practically from every industry related to telecommunications and electronics and semi-conductors, materials, and software and computing. They all were concerned about the decline in basic research, the difficulty of finding people; there were many references to the decline of Bell Labs and how we need them. Certainly in the early years, I didn’t hear complaints from the pharmaceutical industry. Even now I don’t hear complaints from the pharmaceutical industry about the lack of basic research, although I do think there is a need for more basic research in biological sciences than we’re doing now.
So, there are balance issues everywhere. When I look back at the entire budget for science in the U.S. and I compare it with what other countries are doing, we seem to have enough money on the table. So the real problems are how we manage where it isn’t well distributed. It’s not ideally distributed, and the way we spend it is not ideal. The fact that we have so many different science agencies, with different policies and different ways of dealing with their investigators, both in-house and out-of-house — that’s part of the business of this office.
Q. Have you been able to introduce any correctives?
A. Yes. We haven’t been able to make huge differences but I think we’ve begun, and in a spirit that’s very much one of the leading principles of this administration, which is better management. We’ve established what we call a “business models interagency group” that has worked to identify where these different ways of doing business among the agencies have had a negative impact.
There are things that you can do that don’t cost money that can make life better for people. How you spend the money, whether you require investigators to fill out the same set of forms every time — those kinds of things.
Q. But a 12-percent reduction in purchasing power is not easily going to be made up through managerial improvements.
A. That’s true. But that is a different issue, and I’m not suggesting that it can or should be. In my view, the biomedical research community is funded much closer — even with the 12-percent reduction in purchasing power — to what it needs to satisfy its missions than some of these other areas are. You’ve got 50 percent of the budget in biomedical research. And you have 10 to 12 percent in NSF, maybe 10 percent in the Department of Energy, 15 percent for NASA. That doesn’t leave much for everything else, all the social and behavioral sciences, geology, oceanography, environmental science, particle physics, nuclear physics, material science. They’re not all falling behind. Some are better funded than others. But the point is there needs to be a balance among these things, otherwise they lose capabilities even in their own fields. If you’ve got all the money in one pot, and other supporting fields are underfunded, then even the wealthy will have trouble getting their work done. Under a constraint budget — the overall budget has been constrained — what you have to do is establish priorities and fund them until you fix it, and then you can bring up everybody at the same rate, even if that rate is causing us to fall behind in some things.
By the way, the 12-percent purchasing power is subject to some interpretation. For example, we have enormously increased the productivity of science through information technology. The capabilities of laboratories today are immensely greater. The ability of science to communicate, to find things out, to disseminate their work, to write proposals — all of this is much, much better than it was. So, our productivity has increased.
Secondly, the lifestyles of different areas of science are very different. It’s difficult to gauge the relative impact of any given amount of money. The CPI [Consumer Price Index] itself is not a very good measure. Certainly the market basket for any kind of research today is going to be more expensive than a market basket used to be, and it’s very different in different fields. But there’s a quality aspect to the market basket as well. What are we paying for and what are we getting in the different areas of science support? A typical way that a National Science Foundation grant is spent is very different from the typical way an NIH grant is spent. A lot of NIH money is spent in medical schools. A lot of NSF money is spent in chemistry departments. There’s a great difference in the fields of science and how much can be done. Mathematics and computer science research are relatively modest. So small amounts of money on an absolute scale make a huge difference in some of those areas which turn out to be very important.
Q. There have been some efforts in the past to rein in indirect costs. These set off a storm in the academic community, and they come to naught.
A. When I was president of a university, I actually came up and testified during the 80s to express my concern about limitations on indirect costs. I think indirect costs are real costs. On the other hand, I also think there’s a tendency — and since I was a university president I’m aware of it — for bureaucracies to grow. Although I don’t much like it, I can understand why the Office of Management and Budget has a cap on administrative costs. Indirect costs are real, and I think they should be paid by the federal government, and where there are continual complaints or frictions, we need to look into them and fix them. Because it isn’t good to have universities lose money when they do work for the federal government.
Q. The administration has been accused of a slow response to energy problems.
A. There are important things that were done in the energy areas that we shouldn’t ignore. One of them is a whole set of energy-related initiatives, many of them having to do with an impact on the climate-change issues — the President’s Advanced Energy Initiative. And a lot of other things that happened in the Department of Energy that wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t been pretty strongly endorsed from the top. We rejoined the ITER [International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor] collaboration. There’s work on the hydrogen economy. There are other important initiatives. There was a revision of the space-exploration policies, and initiatives that came out of agencies but resonated with the administration and received a lot of support. Great progress in nanotechnology — well-managed interagency programs there. I think we supported the IPCC process this time very well, and most people internationally felt this was an important milestone in getting consensus on climate change.
Q. Your office has pushed for more attention for the social and behavioral sciences.
A. The same kinds of productivity enhancements that all of us are getting from information technology have particular importance for the social and behavioral sciences — the ability to handle large databases; the ability to identify huge populations that have something in common; the ability to get data, to analyze data in huge databases with many, many variables. The geographers pretty quickly figured out that they have new technology to make maps and observations, global positioning systems. And the field of geography has pretty clearly been transformed by technology. Library science, sort of an orphan in the social sciences, has been completely transformed. And some small areas, many of which are in medical schools, possibly because the largest funder of social science is NIH. There are important parts of psychology and neuroscience, which is sort of on the fringes of social science. These have been transformed.
At the same time, my impression has been that the social sciences, like sociology, anthropology, psychology, and political science, have not yet fully exploited the opportunities that are now available in information technology and applications. So, almost ever since I came to Washington, I’ve been urging those communities to pay attention. And since I came to Washington, within days after 9/11, in 2001, one of the first things that I asked was what could social science do for anti-terrorism, homeland security writ large? Not necessarily finding but also in dealing with heightened concerns about security. There’s a lot that was coming together to give the social and behavioral sciences opportunities that they rarely had in the past for getting new government funding. I think it’s very important for the Department of Defense to be asking the same questions. What can we do? Take interrogation. We really ought to perhaps have an idea of what we’re doing and what we’re likely to be able to get out of a rational approach to getting information from people.
Q. Has that been neglected?
A. Certainly, absolutely.
Q. It’s been pointed out that unlike your predecessors you do not have title of assistant to the president.
A. All this other stuff about titles and where I’m located. To my mind, that’s totally trivial. When you’re the president’s science adviser, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, people return your phone calls. I’m able to talk with anybody in the White House or outside. And I do, and our staff is well treated, and we get our work done. As far as I can tell, we do as well or better than any previous Office of Science and Technology Policy. I find that
whole thing more of a sign of lack of understanding.
Q. The end of this administration is months off.
A. It’s a little premature for me to talk about things at the end of the administration. We aren’t at the end yet. I do think that science and technology have progressed remarkably during this administration. And the administration should get some credit for that. It’s not a foregone conclusion that in another administration, the science budget overall would have fared as well as it has in this administration. I think the management of our science enterprise in general has been very good. The quality of the people that I’ve been working with in all of these agencies is really quite good. The quality of the advisory committees has been good. I think science itself in its business has been functioning very well. I think we will continue to do well because the American people are generally pretty darn supportive. It’s just a shame that more people aren’t aware of exactly what it takes to get these results.
Posted at 10:12:39 AM on April 29, 2008 | All postings by Dan GreenbergComments
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“Q. What are the accomplishments of this administration in the science and technology area?
“A. Science marches on. I think one of the important things that happened under this administration is that the vast amount of research that was taking place when the administration took office continued to take place in very high-quality agencies.”
Where’s The New Yorker’s “Words of One Syllable Dept.” when we really need it?
— LuckyJim · Apr 30, 10:06 AM · #