0.10 Resurrection? 1974-76  (Page 2/6)

The more extensive second phase of the hearings, held in June and July 1974, was limited almost exclusively to testimony from non-government witnesses. Ibid. They included such well-known industrial scientists as Chauncey Starr, president of the Electrical Power Research Institute; such prominent representatives of university-based science policy study groups as Brewster Denny of the Graduate School of Public Affairs of the University of Washington; all six former presidential science advisers; and the presidents of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the National Academy of Engineering.

The NAS had asserted its interest in federal science policy during the fall of 1973 when it established an ad-hoc committee on Science and Technology in Presidential Policy Making. Chaired by James Killian, Dwight Eisenhower’s first science adviser, and staffed by David Beckler, Executive Secretary of SAC/ODM from early in the Eisenhower administration and of PSAC throughout its lifetime, the NAS panel was virtually a shadow presidential advisory system. Its report recommending that the former presidential advisory system be revived was released in June 1974, just before the second phase of congressional hearings.

In March 1975, congressmen Teague and Mosher introduced a bill proposing passage of the National Science Policy Act of 1975. Its principal features: establishment of a national science policy; appointment of a five-member Advisory Council on Science and Technology, rather than a single science advisor, in the Executive Office of the President; creation of a cabinet-level Department of Research and Technology Operations to include NASA, ERDA (the Energy Research and Development Authority, which in 1977 became the principal component of the Department of Energy), the NBS, NSF, and NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration); and creation of a Science and Technology Information and Utilities Corporation. Hearings on the bill were scheduled for June.

Five days after his swearing in, new president Gerald Ford asked Guyford Stever to stay on as NSF Director and presidential science advisor, and to schedule a meeting to discuss reestablishment of a more effective presidential science advisory system. H. Guyford Stever, “Science Advice: Out of and Back into the White House,” in William T. Golden, ed., Science Advice to the President (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), 61-63. Ford wanted the presidential advisory system reestablished by congressional action rather than by executive order. Stever noted that some of the offices in the Executive Office of the President, including OMB, were opposed to reinstitution of the system, but their opposition proved ineffective.

In December 1974, Ford directed Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to examine relations between science and the presidency. The following June, Rockefeller, meeting in conference with the House Committee on Science and Technology, indicated that the president preferred a less complex science policy organization than that in the Teague-Mosher bill. He urged that the committee consider a White House bill that would do little more than establish an Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President, designate its director as the president’s science advisor, and outline the functions of the office in general and flexible terms. Such a bill was quickly introduced, so as to allow hearings simultaneous with those on the Teague-Mosher bill.