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

Meanwhile, as the size of the federal deficit increased, the budget became a source of almost continuous controversy between the White House and Congress. Congress repeatedly failed to enact several of the thirteen appropriations bills required to keep the government operating, relying instead on eleventh-hour continuing resolutions, followed by hastily patched-together appropriations measures to do so. The situation became more politically charged after 1984, when the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act mandated automatic across-the-board reductions in agency appropriations if the total contained in the thirteen appropriations bills exceeded prescribed limits.

The patchwork character of the thirteen appropriations committees militated against a coherent federal R&D budget even under relatively favorable circumstances, and these circumstances were far from favorable. At the end of 1987, the stock market collapsed, leading Reagan and leaders of Congress to send a positive message to the financial markets in the form of a drastically slashed federal budget. Significant items in the administration’s proposed budgets for R&D agencies, including NSF funding that would have provided enhanced support both for traditional, disciplinary-based research projects and innovative interdisciplinary science and technology centers, were reduced or eliminated entirely. Irwin Goodwin, Physics Today (March 1988), op. cit .

Restoration of psac?

During the waning days of the Reagan administration, several scientific elders grew more openly critical of the absence of a coherent federal science policy. Most of their criticism focused on the presidential science advisory system. On May 17, 1986, The New York Times published a guest editorial by physics Nobel laureates Hans Bethe and John Bardeen, who lamented the “remarkably haphazard” character of the science advice reaching the president. On April 27, 1987, Jerome Wiesner, former science advisor to President Kennedy, delivered a blistering address at Washington, DC’s Cosmos Club, attributing a number of national maladies, including the “disintegration” of the U.S. space program and the decline of U.S. economic competitiveness, to the absence of an effective science advisory system.

In January 1988, William T. Golden produced a second anthology, entitled Science and Technology Advice to the President, the Congress, and the Judiciary . Golden, op. cit. It consisted of eighty-five short articles from a wide spectrum of contributors, including a handful of former science advisers—most notably Jerome Wiesner and George Keyworth. Of those essays, fewer than twenty dealt with the congress or the judiciary, reflecting a continuing preoccupation with the presidential advisory system. Most essays (including Keyworth’s) were openly critical of the science advisory system, with a few (including Wiesner’s update of his Cosmos Club address) bordering on hostility. Jerome Wiesner, “The Rise and Fall of the President’s Science Advisory Committee,” in Golden, ibid., 372-384. A sizable majority advocated reinstitution of a PSAC-like system, and a few suggested that the science advisor be elevated to the rank of cabinet member without portfolio. Keyworth’s essay resurrected the option of a cabinet-level official presiding over a full-fledged Department of Science.

A few contributors were skeptical about any single institutional innovation resulting in a more consistent, coherent science policy. They believed that PSAC had been effective in its heyday largely because it devoted most of its attention to defense issues, which required a relatively narrow range of disciplinary expertise. Since the range and complexity of issues had proliferated, so had the breadth of expertise a resurrected PSAC would have to include. Could such a large, heterogeneous science advisory committee be functional?

Furthermore, two successive presidents with different agendas and distinct operating styles had ignored the requirements of the Science Policy Act of 1976, which had been designed to give science advisors and the EoP office they headed extensive planning, coordination, and oversight authority, with or without a standing presidential science advisory committee. Either president could have established such a committee without a congressional mandate.

These contributors also pointed out that as the 1988 presidential election approached, neither presidential candidate was making science policy a part of his campaign. It seemed clear, in the words of Don K. Price, Director of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a former protégé of Louis Brownlow, that: “Scientists have not yet conquered the basic difficulties in the American political system which have turned on the problem of integrating and adding a greater degree of responsibility to the uses made of public money... [We lack] a system of tying together the influence of science as attached to the presidency with the influence of the president in strengthening a conviction of the importance of politics and public service and the need to pull things together in the public interest. This is something that science ought to do a lot more about and hasn’t yet really learned how to do.” Don K. Price, “Money and Influence: The Links of Science to Public Policy,” in Gerald Holton and William A. Blanpied, eds., Science and its Publics: The Changing Relationship (Boston: Reidel Publishing Company, 1976), 97-113.