President Obama has squared up to congressional Republicans over proposals for stricter controls on federal research funding. But the president has also stressed that grants ought to give value for money, reports Rebecca Trager.
Those on his own side have often criticised President Barack Obama for not taking a more combative approach to his Republican opponents. But the president has come out fighting following recent moves by congressional Republicans to shape science agencies’ grant decisions.
Speaking to the National Academy of Sciences on 29 April, Obama pledged to “keep working to make sure that our scientific research does not fall victim to political manoeuvres or agendas that in some ways would impact on the integrity of the scientific process”. In particular, he emphasised that fields such as psychology, anthropology, economics and political science are hypothesis-testing disciplines regulated by peer review, deserving of the same independence accorded to the natural sciences.
Obama’s remarks counter moves by Republicans to highlight social science projects funded by the National Institutes of Health that they consider to be unworthy and wasteful.
Lamar Smith, the Texas congressman who chairs the House of Representatives’ committee with jurisdiction over federal research agencies, has drafted legislation requiring the National Science Foundation to only fund research that advances national health, prosperity or security. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers have inserted language into the budget for fiscal year 2013 that prohibits the agency from funding work in political science that is not related to growth or security.
The administration argues that these moves threaten to subvert research agencies’ decision-making; in his NAS speech, Obama highlighted the importance of protecting a “rigorous peer-review system”. The Republicans say they are trying to prevent science agencies from wasting taxpayers’ dollars in a tight fiscal environment. The bill will probably undergo changes before it is introduced in Congress, according to a staff member for Smith.
A few days after Obama’s sortie, White House science adviser John Holdren reiterated the status of the social and behavioural sciences in a keynote address at an American Association for the Advancement of Science forum.
“Whether we are talking about research in the social and behavioural sciences or in the natural sciences, it makes no sense at all to confine taxpayer support to those projects for which a likely direct contribution to the national interest can be identified in advance,” said Holdren. He would support such a premise only if national interest included “expanding the boundaries of knowledge”, he said, but suggested that is probably not the Republicans’ intent.
At a follow-up speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Holdren said that it is impossible to predict the societal outcomes of basic research. The Republican proposal “will turn our research enterprise into the pedestrian pursuit of minor advances”, he said. “Transformative research will be out the window.”
In response, Smith and his allies have said that it’s the job of Congress to ensure that public funds are spent responsibly. Smith has also accused the Democrats of rejecting an invitation to cooperate on prioritising public spending, instead deciding to “play politics and misrepresent the nature of the draft bill”.
The presidents of seven high-profile philanthropic organisations, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Kavli and Alfred P Sloan foundations, have weighed in on the administration’s side. In a call to action issued this month, they warned that an emphasis on accountability, job creation and translational research is “shifting funding toward shorter-term, more applied and more mission-driven research”.
This, they said, leads to reduced support for early-stage basic research, which can require a decade or more to show a return to society. They also noted that federal agencies’ peer-review committees expect proposals to come with extensive data and thorough proof of concept, which also leads to more risk-averse funding decisions.
Nevertheless, it seems that the administration might be open to changes in how research agencies review grants—a move that would be in keeping with Obama’s instinct to seek policies that accommodate his opponents. At the NAS, Obama stressed the importance of funding proposals that “promise the biggest bang for taxpayers’ dollars”. Holdren also told the AAAS that the way the peer-review process is implemented in different agencies might benefit from review.
At present, it seems both Republicans and Democrats are being deliberately vague about how exactly they would change review processes. The risk to researchers is that the debate will foster the view that only research guaranteed a positive outcome deserves public money.
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