More than 200 scientific leaders from industry, government and academia gathered in Washington recently at the request of the White House for a “Forum on Science in the Public Interest.” For nearly half a century, science in the United States was supported as a means to better weapons; the challenge to the assembled scientists was to begin building a new framework for sustaining America’s scientific pre-eminence in the post-Cold War world.
It’s a worthy task; our hopes for a more secure, healthy, humane and prosperous society are linked to the wise use of science. But who will decide what science is in the public interest?
Ultimately it is Congress that must make such decisions. Within Congress, however, there is a fractious dispute over the power of the appropriations committees to dictate science policy.
The abuse of that power was denounced by Vice President Al Gore in a speech to the gathering. Gore attributed much of the remarkable success of American science since World War II to a policy of awarding research funds on the basis of scientific merit. That policy, he warned, is being dangerously undermined by “academic pork.”
“Academic pork” refers to the earmarking of appropriations for specific research programs and facilities at a few favored colleges and universities in the home districts of key appropriators. It is the space-age way for well-placed members of Congress to flex their muscles in front of the voters back home.
Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.), the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, is a staunch defender of the practice. “It’s not pork,” he explains indignantly, “it’s infrastructure.” Maybe so, but this “infrastructure” is not part of any federal program.
The earmarked projects are not reviewed by impartial experts to see if they make sense, or measured against the thousands of other needs of colleges and universities; they have not been the subject of congressional hearings, or debated in any committee of Congress; they are not even included in the appropriations legislation.
The earmarks are inserted in the “report” that accompanies the appropriations bill. The report is meant to provide guidelines for spending; it does not have the force of law and is not subject to debate or amendment.
Spared any sort of scrutiny, most earmarked projects turn out to be wasteful, and many are just plain goofy. But the agencies that are called on to spend the money take even the nuttiest earmarks seriously; if they fail to carry out the appropriators’ wishes, they fear, their budgets will be slashed the next year. Joe Wyatt, the president of Vanderbilt University, calls it “appropriation by intimidation.”
So it was in 1992, for example, that the Defense Department had to find a way to award a $10 million defense contract to the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who run tiny Marywood College in Scranton, Penn. Scranton is the home of Rep. Joseph McDade, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Forces Appropriations Subcommittee. The Defense Department was not about to jeopardize its $300 billion budget by offending McDade.
And in Sen. Byrd’s home state of West Virginia, NASA awarded $29 million to little Wheeling Jesuit College for a “Technology Transfer Center,” even though Wheeling does not offer advanced degrees in technology. There are literally hundreds of such abuses.
In 1983, academic earmarks totaled about $10 million; by last year that had grown to nearly $1 billion. If earmarking continued to grow at that rate, it would consume the entire science budget by the end of the century.
But earmarks this year are actually down by nearly 50 percent. The decline seems to be the result of increased media exposure, due largely to the efforts of Rep. George Brown (D-Calif.). “Earmarks are like mushrooms,” Brown says. “They grow best in the dark.”
Alas, the problem isn’t just pork. It doesn’t take a nuclear physicist to figure out that if an appropriations committee can intimidate the space agency into building a marine research center, or the Energy Department into building an ambulatory care facility, it can dictate to federal agencies on just about anything.
Indeed, much of the attention of the scientists at the White House forum was devoted to trying to interpret language in a Senate appropriations subcommittee report that directed the National Science Foundation to make changes in the interaction between academic scientists and industry. To the extent that the changes could be understood, they were opposed by both industry and academia.
The efforts of the White House to engage scientists in a national debate over the role of science in a peaceful world are to be applauded. But unless the appropriations process in Congress is reformed, the collective judgment of the nation’s science and technology experts may count for less than the opinions of the clerk of an appropriations subcommittee.
