Page 15 - Acoustics Today Spring 2011

PETES, the nonfederal stakeholders include colleges and uni- versities big and small, individual faculty, science and engi- neering societies, companies big and small, industry associa- tions, various advocacy groups for issues such as women and minorities in science, and many more individuals and organ- izations focused on improving K-12 STEM education. We had to weigh and balance these views against our own Members’ priorities, agency priorities, and budget and other political realities. There are maybe 10 pages in either COM- PETES bill that have anything to do with how budgets are allocated. The rest represents our best efforts to incorporate all of the aforementioned input into coherent guidance for agency policies and programs that still allows agencies flexi- bility to shape the details and let programs evolve with time. There is some amount of compromise every step of the way— but we learn quickly not to let (what we believe to be) the perfect to be the enemy of the good. I suspect that nobody will say that either COMPETES Act is perfect. But I person- ally believe that both of those laws are very good, and as important in the message they send as the policies they estab- lish.
I’ve just briefly described two examples of “science poli- cy” that were enacted by Congress in the last several years. But the truth is, my first instinct in answering the question of how federal science policy is made is to answer, “it isn’t.” There is no single authorizing committee in either chamber of Congress responsible for all federal R&D, even all civilian R&D. It’s fractured and stove-piped, driven in part by per- sonalities, political winds, and the two-year election cycle. The same is the case for appropriations, where each of the 12
subcommittees is its own fiefdom and R&D accounts are scattered across the majority of the subcommittees—nine at my count.
And so it goes for the executive branch as well. In Fiscal Year 2011, the proposed federal R&D budget is $148 billion, of which $66 billion is nondefense. (I did not update these numbers to reflect the final appropriations bill enacted by Congress in April.) A total of 14 federal agencies, including the Smithsonian, are considered to have significant enough R&D expenditures to report as part of the White House’s annual R&D summary. The largest, of course, is the Department of Defense, followed by Health and Human Services (HHS). But many of those 14 agencies listed are at the cabinet level, such as DOE, which has both the Office of Science and several applied energy R&D offices; Commerce, which houses both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); and HHS, which is the parent agency to National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). So in practice, we have many more than 14 at least somewhat autonomous federal R&D performers. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was established to coordinate R&D initiatives and budgets across the federal government. But with a small operating budget and no programmatic authority of its own, OSTP can only do so much in terms of developing and implementing coherent national policies.
In the end, even when the White House does announce (with every good intention) a new national initiative, every
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Role of Science in the Policy-Making Process 11