Not satisfied with enforced ignorance among themselves, republicans continue to direct the nation towards a scientific ignorance that has the potential to stifle a free scientific inquiry that has served us so well that we are still coasting on its technological import even as other nations pass us in their devotion to basic research.
Welcome to HR 4186, FIRST Act of 2014. Not only will it cut funding for science in real terms, it interposes politics rather than peer review into funding decisions.
Rather than extending the COMPETES Act of 2010, which already has had funding reduced by austerity and sequestration, One of the things the FIRST Act does is to make de-facto cuts to spending by eliminating any increase due to inflation and carves out the Department of Energy agencies for separate funding legislation. Then it dramatically reduces funding for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (Funding in the National Science Foundation is split among several directorates).
NSF Directorate Budgets in the FIRST Act.
One cannot think of a better way to avoid research into the social and economic manipulation of our society by our government. From the
Climate Progress article I am using as the source:
“For a committee that is supposed to be advancing science, we seem to be doing an awfully good job of advancing selective science,” said Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III (D-MA), who’s also on the committee. He called the GOP bill an “opportunistic approach to defunding or attacking certain areas of science that you either don’t agree with or that you don’t want to see what the results might actually be.”
Essentially, the FIRST Act replaces peer-reviewed funding with politically sanctioned funding, especially when it demands the NSF to publicly justify how each grant it awards would serve the national interest. Statements by republican committee members indicate that the purpose of this Act would be to weed out projects whose cost can't be justified or whose sociological purpose is not apparent. And, who determines that? Not scientists, according to republicans.
I am angry, dismayed, and ashamed by this. I had once worked in basic research, research on bacteriophage-lambda where there was no apparent sociological purpose and whose cost as a ROI would never have been justified. I was and am proud of my little contribution to human knowledge and little did I know at the time, but I was working among some people who I consider giants in early molecular genetics (a paper I contributed to is cited). Alas, I left in order to make money elsewhere. But, this had left me with a knowledge that advances in science cannot be politically directed.
HR 4186, The FIRST Act of 2014, is not only an overreach by anti-science republicans, but is meant to create an enforced ignorance by stifling new and unusual inquiries that may be deemed appropriate by scientific peers but be politically inconvenient.
This is how societies die. I hope you will communicate your opposition to your representatives.