Science groups such as the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) have expressed concern about draft legislation that, they say, has been circulating among staff on the House Science, Space and Technology (SST) Committee.
The legislation would require the National Science Foundation to guarantee that each grant that it funds advances national health and prosperity or secures the national defence, and does not duplicate other research that the agency supports.
The bill, dubbed the High Quality Research Act, has yet to be introduced, but is expected to be sponsored by the chairman of the SST Committee, Republican Lamar Smith from Texas.
“The ASBMB strongly opposes any attempt by political entities to micromanage the funding portfolios of individual agencies or the peer-review process for two reasons,” the organisation wrote in a blog post on 29 April. Although the ASBMB acknowledged that no system was perfect, it argued that peer review was widely regarded as the most effective at determining the merit of grant applications.
“Legislation that dictates what scientists can and cannot be curious about would erode and eventually destroy this enterprise,” the group continued. “The idea that legislation that narrows the scope of the scientific endeavour can improve the peer-review system and speed the discovery process shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the peer-review process and the nature of scientific inquiry.”
But it is unlikely that the High Quality Research Act will ever become law, according to the ASBMB. The group noted that members of both parties in both chambers of Congress understand the value of an unfettered peer-review process. Nevertheless, the ASBMB and the Coalition for National Science Funding are working together to engage members of the SST committee, which has oversight of NSF activities, and the Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over NSF appropriations.
The outreach appears all the more important considering recent correspondence between Smith and the NSF. In a letter to NSF acting director Cora Marrett, dated 25 April, the lawmaker expressed concerns about five specific social and behavioral science grants that the agency had approved. He asked whether these projects adhered to NSF’s “intellectual merit” guideline, and requested detailed information on these approved projects by mid-May.
The very next day, the ranking Democrat on the SST Committee, Eddie Bernice Johnson, wrote to Smith and criticised his approach.
“In the more than two decades of committee leadership that I have worked with—chairmen Brown, Walker, Sensenbrenner, Boehlert, Gordon, and Hall—I have never seen a chairman decide to go after specific grants simply because the chairman does not believe them to be of high value,” she wrote. “Interventions in grant awards by political figures with agendas, biases, and no expertise is the antithesis of the peer-review process.”
For his part, Smith noted that NSF only has enough money to fund one in seven research proposals, so the agency needs to ensure that each one is of the highest quality. He stated that the proposals about which he has requested further information do not seem to meet such high standards.
“Congress has a responsibility to review questionable research paid for by hard-working American taxpayers,” Smith stated. “If academic or other institutions want to conduct such research on these kinds of subjects they can pay for them with their own private funds.”