0.11 The carter and reagan years: 1977-89  (Page 2/10)

Because committees in both the Senate and House had been intimately involved in reinstating a presidential science advisory system, OSTP’s operations were subject to close congressional scrutiny during Press’s tenure. By July 1978, he and/or senior staff members appeared sixteen times before congressional committees. Congressional Research Service, op. cit . Press’s performance was also subject to frequent comment in the science press, by academic science policy specialists, and by members of the scientific establishment. The establishment sources were usually supportive, if only because they were relieved OSTP had survived Carter’s surgery, and in part because Press himself was a science establishment member in good standing.

Although Press had a good relationship with Carter, he once noted that he was merely a member of a group serving the president’s inner circle rather than a member of the circle itself. Ibid. He and his staff maintained close liaisons with other EoP units, including the National Security Council and the Office of Management and Budget. Press participated in the White House senior staff meetings and cabinet meetings, and was assigned a leading role in several domestic policy reviews on science-related topics. Congressional critics were unimpressed with these arrangements, lamenting the loss of interest by the OSTP in strategic vision or the building of a coherent, long-term national science policy.

Carter’s attitude towards science

During his single term, Carter presided over increasing federal R&D budgets (particularly basic research budgets), and occasionally declared his intention to reverse the damage done to the science-government relationship by Nixon. During the swearing-in of NSF director Richard C. Atkinson, for example, he remarked, “So this is a morning when we are taking a great step forward in recementing the relationship between science and knowledge, the probing of new areas of human comprehension on the one hand, and the political application of that knowledge on the other, for the benefit of all mankind and womankind.” News and Comment, Science (June 17, 1977), 1300.

Yet Carter also abolished many if not most Science Policy Act provisions—particularly those having to do with accountability to Congress—regarded as critically important by various congressional committees and Ford administration figures. In the words of one seasoned Congressional Research Service analyst, “Dr. Press has made it clear that attention to the President’s needs and desires is his primary objective and that of his office. In concentrating on this, he has sometimes neglected other aspects of his job which involve accountability to the Congress and the people of the Nation. These are also important.” Congressional Research Service, op. cit.

Carter made more impressive scientific advances in the international arena. In 1979, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geological Survey negotiated a cooperative agreement for earthquake studies with their counterpart agencies in China, permitting the exchange of scientists in those specialties between the two countries. This agreement was the first between agencies of the two governments. However, the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the Peoples Republic of China, a consortium consisting of the National Academy of Sciences, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies, had existed since 1965 and, despite the ensuing Cultural Revolution, succeeded in sending an occasional delegation of U.S. scientists for short visits to China during the Mao Zedong era. A year later, on the occasion of the historical visit of Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping and a delegation including several senior Chinese science officials, the U.S. State Department and Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs forged an umbrella agreement permitting all U.S. R&D agencies and their Chinese counterpart agencies to negotiate Memoranda of Understanding to initiate and support collaborative projects; a second agreement opened enrollment in American university graduate programs to Chinese students.