Congress Stumbles Through Two Science Policy Hearings

WASHINGTON--The National Science Foundation can't see what's on the horizon in science. The federal government doesn't know what the supercollider will ultimately cost. And nobody has a clue how to balance competing demands for scarce science dollars. On February 20, Congress learned those things and more as it took a five-hour stab at setting science policy. The occasion was back-to-back hearings on the president's proposed science budget for 1992, involving first a portion, and then the whole, of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. It's not easy for legislators to dissect how the government proposes to spend the $13 billion that has been requested for basic research, much less the $75 billion on research and development across all agencies. So for the past eight years the House science committee has invited the president's science adviser to present his views on the subject and to field questions from the panel. For the past two years that task has fallen to Allan Bromley, a former Yale physicist. He's a favorite of the committee; in fact, new committee chairman Rep. George Brown (D-Calif.) told members that Bromley's written testimony this year "was the best statement on science that I've ever seen" in nearly 30 years in Congress. Earlier that day, the panel's subcommittee on science made an equally broad pass at the 1992 budget request for NSF, the only science agency solely under its jurisdiction. For many foundation officials, it also was their first close look at the subcommittee's new chairman, Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), a five-term legislator who until now has been very quiet on research issues. That subcommittee has a bevy of new members, some of them only weeks into their first terms in Congress. And their unfamiliarity with the federal science bureaucracy showed up in their queries. "So tell me, when are we going to start generating commercial power from nuclear fusion?" Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-Md.) asked acting NSF director Fred Bernthal. "We don't handle fusion research," Bernthal replied. "That's done by the Department of Energy." At the same time, one of the subcommittee's newest members, Rep. Barbara-Rose Collins (D-Mich.), after hearing that NSF's five-year, $180 million environmental cleanup in Antarctica included plans for an incinerator, moved past a lengthy discussion about balancing environmental needs with research opportunities and got to the heart of the matter. "Is this incinerator going to destroy the ozone layer and contribute to global warming?" she asked Bernthal. "We haven't made any decisions about what type of incinerator to use, but I assure you that we're taking those concerns very seriously," answered Robert Corell, assistant NSF director for the geosciences. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.). Boehlert, an outspoken and long-time member of the committee, at one point implored NSF officials to breach the confidentiality of an evaluation currently underway of the National Center for Earthquake Science at the University of Buffalo, on which NSF has spent $25 million since 1986. Just tell me if we're going to come out okay," Boehlert said to Roy Bowen, NSF's acting assistant director for engineering, about the fate of a research facility that is located in his state. "I can tell you our site visit team was very impressed with the work going on there," replied Bowen, intent on preserving the sanctity of the review process while still concerned about an important constituent. Soon, the hearing was focused on the supercollider, the 54-mile-around proton-proton accelerator that Boehlert has opposed, at times almost single-handedly, as a waste of federal dollars. Under pointed questioning from Boehlert, Bromley acknowledged that foreign countries "are going to wait until we actually begin construction" before they decide whether to begin chipping in with the $1.5 billion or more that the administration has pledged to collect from international collaboration. Boehlert also questioned the rising cost estimates for the project--pegged last month at $8.2 billion--and reminded Bromley of a statement by Energy Secretary James Watkins. "He's the one," Boehlert said, "who promised two years ago not to build the proton-proton collider if it was going to cost a penny more than $5.9 billion." In response, Bromley admitted that "nobody knows how much the SSC will ultimately cost." But he disputed Boehlert's suggestion that the costs could eventually reach or exceed $14 billion. Subcommittee chairman Boucher addressed the issue of a 1988 law that authorized the foundation's programs for five years instead of the usual one-year period. Under the law, Congress had asked NSF to provide it with rolling three-year projections of its spending priorities. But NSF consistently provided figures showing all of its major programs growing at identical rates. "Science doesn't really change that much from one year to the next," Bernthal said, explaining how spending increases for each of seven major areas were projected to be within a half-percentage point of 12 percent in documents submitted last year to the committee. "I beg to differ," Boucher replied, citing actual budget requests for this year that ranged from 12 percent to 23 percent. Bernthal attributed the discrepancy to "our [NSF's] inability to foresee the special initiatives that come up" during the budget process, citing major federal programs on high-performance computing program and global climate change. "We just don't have a good way of knowing ahead of time what our major increases will be," he said. "This isn't what we had in mind when we passed the five-year authorization," Boucher replied. "For us to do our job well," he said, referring to the committee's wish to pass legislation that gives NSF the authority to launch new programs, "you've got to do a better job than you have done in the past." The final word at the afternoon hearing belonged to the chairman. "Although I have high praise for this budget," Brown told Bromley, "we feel that some areas are not in balance." Saying that Congress is powerless to address those imbalances because, in most appropriations subcommittees, research needs in one area are judged not against other research needs but against other, nonscience, civilian programs, Brown asked the science adviser for suggestions. "You are wiser than I am in such matters, Mr. Chairman," Bromley replied politely. "But the fact is that it's extraordinarily difficult to do what you're suggesting. Perhaps, if we were starting from scratch, we could come up with an alternative structure." Brown shook his head in agreement and said:. "This is our problem, of course. We don't have the ability to adjust the federal R&D budget, by itself, to achieve the proper balance."

Congress Stumbles Through Two Science Policy Hearings

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