The GOP’s war on science has been front and center in the presidential campaign so far, but Congressional Republicans have been putting rhetoric into action.
Today, the House passed the so-called Scientific Research in the National Interest Act.
The bill is a solution in search of a problem that would only end up being a bureaucratic burden to the National Science Foundation. The GOP rails against government bureaucracy, but many of their bills seek to increase it in order to create obstacles for government functions they don’t like. Moreover, as I’ll show later, the bill could actively harm scientific research and the life-saving innovations that can come from it.
Here’s more on the bill:
This bill would require the National Science Foundation (NSF) to award grants or enter into cooperative agreements only if NSF determines that the grant or cooperative agreement: “promotes the progress of science in the United States;” is consistent with the mission of the National Science Foundation; “is worthy of federal funding;” and “is in the national interest” by increasing economic competitiveness in the U.S., advancing the health and welfare of the public, helping to develop the STEM workforce, increasing public scientific literacy, increasing partnerships between academia and industry in the U.S., or supporting national defense.
The NSF uses peer review to make sure the agency is awarding only the most deserving recipients with grants and cooperative agreements since federal research dollars are scarce. H.R. 3293 adds additional bureaucratic requirements to this process and opens it up to political influence. Currently, the NSF uses the highest standards for its merit reviews of grants and conducts an extensive review process before allocating grant money or cooperative agreements, so H.R. 3293 is just another example of a Republican solution in search of a problem.
And here’s John Holdren, Director of the Office of Science & Technology Policy, with more on the dangers of the bill:
Illogically, moreover, most of the criteria offered by the bill for determining whether an award for basic research is in the national interest are not applicable to basic research at all—they relate to whether the research will increase economic competitiveness, increase health and welfare, strengthen the national defense, and so on, and, thus, they are applicable only to applied research. Is it possible that the drafters do not understand that basic research entails the pursuit of scientific understanding without anticipating any particular benefit?
History has shown, of course, that basic research often leads to results with immensely beneficial consequences for specific aspects of societal well-being, but it is precisely the character of such research that these cannot be predicted and offered as an a priori justification for doing the research. Who would have initially predicted, for example, that genomic studies of nematode worms would lead to the discovery of genes that control cell death and, in turn, to new treatment possibilities for cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease? Or that the quest to understand atomic physics would lead to the development of the atomic clocks that now enable the highly precise Global Positioning System (GPS) on which so many Americans rely?
By muddling the distinction between research aimed solely at promoting the advance of science, on the one hand, and applied research carried out with immediate practical benefits for societal well-being as the aim, on the other, H.R. 3293 would create doubt at NSF and in the research community about Congress’s real intent in calling into question the adequacy of NSF’s gold-standard merit-review process, for applied as well as for basic research. This could not only have a chilling effect on the total amount of basic research that scientists propose and that NSF chooses to fund, but it would also be likely to reduce the amount of high-risk/high-return research proposed and funded in both the basic and applied domains.
The bill passed 236 to 178.
229 Republicans and 7 Democrats voted for it. 174 Democrats and 4 Republicans voted against it.
The four Republicans were Carlos Curblelo (FL-26), Bob Dold (IL-10), Richard Hanna (NY-22), and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-27).
And here are the seven Democrats:
Brad Ashford (NE-02)
Jim Costa (CA-16)
Henry Cuellar (TX-28)
Alan Grayson (FL-09)
Dan Lipinski (IL-03)
Collin Peterson (MN-07)
Kyrsten Sinema (AZ-09)