Page 16 - Acoustics Today Spring 2011

agency defends its own priorities and own way of doing busi- ness. In fact, every office within every agency has its own pri- orities and culture. Returning to Congress, the House and Senate, their respective leadership, the relevant committees, and even senior rank and file Members have their own prior- ities. So there’s a complicated dance that goes on across the government every year, and nobody, anywhere, is truly look- ing across the entire R&D portfolio and trying to manage and prioritize across agencies, science and engineering disci- plines, and national needs.
But let us explore the alternative here for a moment. What if we were to consolidate authority for all civilian R&D, in both Congress and the Administration? For the purpose of this exercise, we’ll leave the weapons development to the Pentagon. Many countries do indeed have a Ministry of Science and Technology, or something comparable. One of the complaints we often hear from science attachés in embassies here in Washington is that there is no single point of contact within the federal government on almost any S&T issue. But what if we had a single point of contact? A single agency or at least a much smaller number of agencies.
There are advantages to such a model, for sure. Coordination across missions, such as energy and agricul- ture, and across science and engineering disciplines, such as computer science and biomedical science, would be much easier. There would be no need for an OSTP without budget authority, because we would have a Department of S&T with budget authority. We would be able to establish cross-cutting priorities and actually implement them as intended, or at least face fewer obstacles to implementing them. Likewise, Congress would have the opportunity to look holistically at the federal R&D enterprise when developing its own policy and budget priorities, even if it all still goes through the sausage-making process in the end. How rational is it, after all, that my committee has authority over most of the feder- al civilian R&D enterprise, but not NIH? Instead, NIH is overseen by the Energy & Commerce Committee, where, even at $30 billion, it is a relatively low priority compared to the rest of the committee’s vast jurisdiction. In my 4 1⁄2 years serving on the subcommittee that oversees NSF, not once have staff from Energy & Commerce reached out to me or my colleagues to discuss how NIH can better coordinate with NSF and the other science agencies to improve the health and well-being of our society. On the other hand, I have actively collaborated with Armed Services Committee staff on a few issues of mutual interest. We even put togeth- er a successful joint hearing a few years back, which was no small feat. But in general, we’re all so stove-piped, in the executive branch and in Congress. Wouldn’t it be better to consolidate the R&D authority? I believe the answer is no, for the following reasons:
1. Across the leadership of our government, at all levels of leadership, in all parts of our government, there are visionaries who can’t manage, excellent managers with no vision, egos enough to drown you, Washington savvy without substantive expertise, substantive expertise without Washington savvy, and
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so on. Nobody has it all. So what if, instead of a dozen Cabinet Secretaries, several Congressional Committees, and hundreds of senior agency officials with significant budgetary authority, we have just a handful of people with any real influence on setting R&D priorities. The naïve part of me suggests that we might lose a lot of the wisdom, vision, and expe- rience (and likely some less flattering attributes) of the hundreds no longer part of the process, but maybe we can make much of that up through advi- sory boards and other forms of input. But the cyni- cal part of me says that putting all decisions for the direction of science in this country in the hands of a few is a bad idea—bad because of the constantly shifting political winds and because the conse- quences of mistakes, poor decisions, and incompe- tence would be amplified, perhaps catastrophically. We may have removed some redundancy and ineffi- ciency, but we have also removed a lot of the checks from the system that keep it vibrant, diverse, and sustainable.
2. Lawmakers don’t often connect support for research budgets to the issues they care about most. And even when they do make that connection, the electoral sys- tem forces them to think in terms of short-term ben- efits, while the benefits of scientific research are usu- ally long-term and often unknown. Therefore, they may say all the right things about science, but they won’t put science ahead of other priorities during tough budget times. So if you put all $66 billion of civilian research into a single budget line, rather than scattered across several smaller budget lines, such a large number may be even harder to defend and eas- ier to raid.
3. Finally, I worry about the consequences of separating R&D from the missions. With the exception of NSF
and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), every other R&D agency or office is part of a larger agency with a domestic mis- sion—agriculture, energy, environment, oceans, health. Does it really make sense to disconnect the R&D underpinning those critical missions from the regulatory and policy making for those missions? By placing all R&D in its own agency and giving it its own budget as we are imagining, we have created a new, potentially more consequential stovepipe in our government.
So our system might be chaotic and irrational to those of us with scientific (read: rational) training, but in the end it seems to work pretty well. I would love to tinker around the edges, but I would not propose a wholesale overhaul of our federal S&T enterprise. We remain, after all, the overall leader in generating new ideas, pushing the frontiers, and educating the world’s best scientists and engineers. There are troubling signs that our lead is slipping and I do believe that