Page 14 - Acoustics Today Spring 2011

I wasn’t there, I could name at least a couple of former col- leagues who could have served the same role as I did within my own Committee. At the same time, I don’t want you to underestimate the role that a single, well-placed, scientifical- ly literate staffer in Congress can play in ensuring that science is incorporated into decision making.
Over the course of several months, as I became more and more educated about the challenges and opportunities in nuclear R&D, I communicated what I knew and under- stood to my subcommittee chair in a way that she could understand. And I continued to advise her as she became one of the most vocal Republican critics of GNEP on the Hill at the same time she remained one of the most passionate advocates for an expanded role for nuclear energy. I empha- size Republican because the Republicans were in control then, of both Congress and the White House, so Democratic opponents to GNEP could throw stink bombs, but they lacked the power to block the Administration (at least in the House). And then I sat down with the House appropriations clerk responsible for advising his Members on funding deci- sions for DOE’s energy programs, and walked him through what I knew and understood. As I mentioned previously, his boss was generally sympathetic to the idea of GNEP, but also very skeptical about the details. The clerk used my scientific arguments on top of the project cost arguments to support his boss’s advocacy for reducing funding for GNEP and pro- hibiting premature large-scale demonstrations. In negotia- tions with the Senate, the House position prevailed. Remember, that happened during a Republican Congress in response to a Republican administration’s proposal.
Other people were focused on the economic and securi- ty implications of GNEP. My job was to help introduce the scientific arguments, translated from the scientists them- selves. We had a physicist among our Republican committee members, and he caught on very quickly that the GNEP pro- posal was highly flawed, but as highly respected as he was by his colleagues, his voice alone would not have been enough. Members needed to hear from the scientific community directly. So we held hearings and invited a diverse group of experts to testify before the Subcommittee. Notably, all of the witnesses invited by my subcommittee chair were supportive of nuclear power and of a nuclear research program at DOE. Most of them, however, offered stinging critiques of the Administration’s plans under GNEP.
One of my most memorable moments from that entire period was when a mid-level DOE official testifying before my subcommittee made the following statement in response to a question from my chair: “Like you, I will admit, a facili- ty on the order of, you know, 200 metric tons to 500 metric tons ‘scares me to death.’ One is we don’t know enough to go to that size facility. Secondly, I doubt we could afford it.”1 At the time, DOE was proposing an engineering-scale facility of about 100-200 metric tons. That official’s very off-message, spontaneous remark was telling for how much the Administration had excluded its own experts in developing the GNEP vision. The DOE political leadership believed that they needed to move beyond funding the basic research and start actually “doing something” about nuclear energy. Even
those who supported this premise eventually concluded that DOE’s plans completely ignored the current state of the sci- ence and technology. To be sure, I am not making any sweep- ing generalizations about the Bush Administration’s treat- ment of science, nor about the role of science at DOE during that Administration. I am simply describing one narrow but potentially consequential example of an arguably well-mean- ing policy proposal that dismissed the science from the out- set, and how those of us working on that issue at that time forced the science back to the table.
My own role on the committee took a pretty sharp turn in 2007 when I joined the Democratic staff (where I contin- ue to serve) and swapped DOE and nuclear energy for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and academic research policy. It turns out to be a pretty different job in many ways. Now my specific scientific background is less important than just the fact that I have a decent sense of how a university research lab operates and I can personally relate to the expe- riences of undergraduate and graduate science and engineer- ing students. If anything, my “jack of all trades” training is advantageous in that it enables me to communicate with sci- entists and engineers across many disciplines.
In 2007, and again in 2010, I played a lead staff role in the development and passage of the America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology Education (COMPETES) Act and the subse- quent COMPETES Reauthorization Act. The COMPETES Act includes authorizations for the National Science Foundation, DOE’s Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The 2007 Act also cre- ated the Advaced Research Projects Administration-Energy (ARPA-E) at the Department of Energy, a significant achieve- ment for my former chairman. The 2010 Reauthorization Act authorizes a number of new and ongoing innovation pro- grams and activities consistent with the current administra- tion’s innovation agenda. Both laws seek to strengthen the federal role in improving science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.
The Science and Technology (S&T) community tends to focus on the authorization levels in COMPETES, but I con- sider those numbers only a small part of what makes the bills important. The policy details are where authorizing commit- tees such as my own exercise real authority in helping to shape the directions of the agencies and their various R&D and STEM programs. The Appropriators, on the other hand, set actual funding levels, from the top level funding for DOE’s Office of Science, for example, down to individual project funding if they want to. The Appropriators are guid- ed, but not bound by authorized funding levels.
The many policy provisions in COMPETES reflect extensive input from the dozens of hearings and countless meetings we held with both agency officials and nonfederal stakeholders. We are one of the checks in a system that was designed for checks and balances, and because Members of Congress answer directly to stakeholders to a degree that agency officials rarely do, it is in particular a check to ensure that the federal government is responsive to the needs and priorities of all of the communities it serves. For COM-
10 Acoustics Today, April 2011