0.11 The carter and reagan years: 1977-89  (Page 9/10)

Finally, in 1984, Congressman Don Fuqua (D-FL), Chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology, announced formation of an eighteen-member bipartisan task force to conduct a two-year review of critical national science policy issues. At first, the task force review was billed as the first comprehensive study of national science policy since the 1945 Bush report (evidently forgetting the extensive congressional hearings that had preceded the Science Policy Act). But its agenda was limited primarily to policy-for-science issues and focused heavily on problems of concern primarily to universities. By the time Fuqua retired in 1986, his task force had produced twenty-four volumes of hearing transcripts and thirteen commissioned background volumes. While these provide valuable source material for historians and students of the congressional process, they had little discernible impact on executive or congressional science policy.

Part of the problem in Congress was due to fractured jurisdiction. The House Science and Technology Committee lacked oversight authority over several agencies whose activities and expenditures comprised a major share of the federal R&D enterprise. Oversight authority for the Departments of Defense and Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health were the jurisdiction of other, more powerful committees that seldom viewed the R&D programs of the respective agencies as part of a potentially comprehensive national package. Other agencies, such as the Departments of Commerce and State, which indirectly affected federal science policy, were under the jurisdiction of still other committees. Fragmentation of R&D oversight authority in the Senate was even worse; in 1981 and for several years following, he Senate failed even to consider an authorization bill for the National Science Foundation because of a jurisdictional dispute between the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and the Committee on Labor and Human Resources.

These jurisdictional problems worsened in the early 1980s, when organizational reforms intended to limit the power of House committee chairs led to a proliferation of subcommittees. By one count, there were five hundred such subcommittees in both houses by 1988—nearly one for each member of Congress. This absurd state of affairs considerably worsened the legislative tendency to view science policy in terms of traditional special-interest politics, giving rise to a practice that came to be known as “academic pork barreling.” Irwin Goodwin, “Universities Reach Into Pork Barrel With Help From Friends in Congress,” Physics Today (April 1989), 43-45. Some universities, frustrated in their attempts to obtain research funding through conventional agency channels, hired professional lobbyists to take their case directly to the floor of the House or Senate. The lobbyists would persuade a home-district legislator to move an amendment for the university’s desired facility to the appropriations bill for an R&D agency, thus bypassing both agency and congressional committee review. Condemnation of the practice by the National Science Board, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Association of Research Universities was derided as an attempt by the “haves” to deny the “have-nots” their fair share of federal funding.