Creation Of Sound Science Policy Hindered By Budget Debates

For too long, national debates on science and technology (S&T) policy have been conducted as a footnote to budget debates. Nagging and important issues, fundamental to the conduct and future of our national research and development (R&D) enterprise, have been left to languish while Congress debates artful accounting exercises that do not pencil out, budgets that are really Trojan horses for someone's ideological social blueprints, or "feel-good" proposals to increase spending on R&D that have no basis in budgetary reality. Left neglected by this myopic fixation on the need to balance the federal budget-a need generally recognized as a political and not an economic imperative-is a complicated set of issues affecting national S&T policy that requires immediate attention. The problem confronting the public- policy apparatus is akin to a transcendental equation. We are being asked to set a policy on S&T to lead the United States-and by inference much of the world-into the next century, while growth in human knowledge and understanding continues to expand exponentially. Meanwhile, we are still finding our way through the post-Cold War era and redefining the role of the federal government. At the same time, the reality of the workplace and global markets is undergoing revolutionary change, and the fundamental nature of relationships between individuals and sectors of society is in flux. And all of this is going on as we struggle to balance our national budget. If only one of the variables in this political equation were changing at the current rate, it would be difficult enough to map an outcome. But with all of these variables changing and with many of them interacting concurrently, the task becomes daunting. For most of the last 40 years, the federal government made major investments in science and engineering. Investing in universities for human resources and knowledge and contracting with industry for applied R&D and goods and services, lawmakers largely created the government- university-industry-research partnership that exists today. The science, engineering, and academic community flourished under its relationship with government that was born in World War II and continued throughout the Cold War. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the easy justifications for our national R&D investments have fallen as well. At the same time, a number of larger, domestic political changes are occurring that complicate the work to reconnect our R&D investments to a new set of national needs. The central force in these changes stems from failed economic policies, which have resulted in massive annual deficits and a huge national debt. Combined with an economy driven by consumption, these fiscal shortcomings have contributed to declining public savings rates and underinvestment in business capital improvements, public capital improvements, and human and intellectual improvements, specifically education and R&D. Contributing to all these factors are other changes, which by their magnitude have disrupted domestic tranquility and destabilized our society. The end of the Cold War has brought entirely new concepts of national security and military strategies. An influx of immigrants, both legal and illegal, has brought new costs and benefits to be accommodated in our thinking. An intractable increase in crime and welfare costs to our society, partly due to an inability to fully incorporate a large number of people into significant economic activity, has left people feeling powerless. A significant public attitude that the government at all levels is not solving their problems-and may in fact be exacerbating them-has caused people to doubt government's ability to accomplish anything. And a decline in political civility and public morality-fueled in part by a perception that a cultural, economic, and political revolution is necessary-is providing the critical energy for the current social instability. This leads to diminished faith in public institutions, like governments and universities, at a time when these institutions are struggling to redefine themselves and their relationships in our national R&D enterprise. Concurrent with these new stresses on public institutions, the private sector is undergoing revolutionary change. Over the last two decades, our domestic economy has become part of the global economy. This is demonstrated best by the North American Free Trade Agreement, which redefined the United States as an international trade region stretching from the North Pole to the Yucatan Peninsula. This global economy, together with compressed product cycle times, has placed more emphasis on product development, which has caused a decline in long-term industrial R&D. Increasingly, this R&D is "purchased" by industry as needed through partnerships with universities or through investments made in smaller, science-based startup companies. These changes are redefining the government-university- industry relationships and are creating a new R&D paradigm. Gone is the simple linear model of advanced technology development that was seen to run smoothly from basic research, through applied and developmental work, and culminating in product development. The new model is a more complex. It envisions a range of concurrent and interrelated developments with numerous feedback loops wherein technology breakthroughs allow advances in basic research, gains in one discipline become building blocks in another, and new partnership arrangements allow new perspectives on R&D needs. These changes need detailed examination as part of an S&T policy review; but with government's attention focused on the need to balance the budget, that review has not occurred. In the straitjacket of the budget debate, we cannot discuss needed physical, human, and intellectual investments. We are forced into a zero-sum game that requires funding for R&D to come out of the shrinking pot of discretionary spending that is now only one-sixth of the federal budget. Seeking to move beyond this stalemate, I have developed a plan that balances the budget by 2002 and increases R&D investment. This budget allows federal R&D funding to grow at a steady rate, parallel to the growth in the Gross Domestic Product, which is about 5 percent per year. It provides additional funds for education and training programs as well as permitting increased outlays for capital projects, such as highways and mass transit. This budget balances by the year 2002 by offsetting these investments with simple cost savings: delaying a tax cut until the budget is balanced; adjusting the Consumer Price Index downward one-half of 1 percent; holding defense spending constant; and making modest adjustments in entitlement programs along the lines proposed by members of both parties. This investment budget also protects these designated investment programs by walling them off in the way we protected defense programs during the Cold War. Our new definition of national security involves different concepts, such as encouraging sustainable economic growth, nurturing knowledge-based industries, developing and maintaining job skills needed to produce quality employment opportunities, and ensuring social and political stability needed to allow global markets to function smoothly. Programs to meet these new national security goals should be afforded as much budgetary protection as we gave defense programs in the past. The adoption of this budget will allow us to get beyond budget policy and return to a long-overdue discussion of S&T policy. However, for the investment budget to pass and for the ensuing S&T policy debate to have a grounding in reality, the science, engineering, and academic community will have to participate more actively in the political process. This participation involves linking R&D program outcomes to the aforementioned list of new national goals that have replaced the containment of communism as our central focus. We must become more adept at discussing the kind of world we want to create with our advances in science and technology. That last statement may sound utopian, but it reflects the broadened dimensions of what our new S&T policy deliberations must recognize now that we are freed from the rigid thinking of the Cold War. It is no longer sufficient to simply push for more funding for R&D programs or even to argue for an investment budget. We must all apply ourselves to the task of social change, to issues of equity and social stability, and to a fundamental reordering of relationships among individuals, institutions, and sectors of society. We must also set about developing a more humane rationale for our activities, seeking to avoid the activities identified by Mohandas Gandhi as the seven social sins: politics without principle, wealth without work, commerce without morality, pleasure without conscience, education without character, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice. Our nation is marked by disparities in income, life expectancy, rates of infant mortality, and a host of other factors that display the deep divisions in our society between the haves and the have-nots. Unless we as a nation dedicate ourselves to eliminating these inequities, we will see-and in fact are starting to see-the inevitable consequences in the form of violence, disruption, and conflict. Members of the science, engineering, and academic community may ask, what is our stake in this struggle? Rep. George E. Brown, Jr. (D-Calif.) is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Science. The article is adapted from a March 16, 1997, address given at PittCon in Atlanta. On a level that relates directly to the conduct of R&D work, without equity across society in knowledge skills, we will not see an equitable distribution of the benefits that social progress brings. This inequity will cause social disruption, threatening the peace and stability that scientific inquiry requires. For proof of this statement, one need look no further than the current state budget in California where, for the first time, the cost of the state corrections system exceeds the combined budget for the University of California and California State College systems. Yearly graduate tuition at Stanford University is less than the average yearly cost of incarceration in California. These facts urge broader social involvement by the science community for reasons of enlightened self- interest, if not human compassion. We must also be mindful that as we make advances in human understanding and move the boundaries of knowledge further out, we leave behind those who are merely standing still, thus increasing social instability. Every advance in science and technology has consequences, both good and bad, and we owe it to ourselves to minimize the adverse consequences. This does not mean that everyone involved with R&D has to solve every problem in society. However, we should be aware of the dislocations that progress causes, identify the new knowledge that is required to keep pace with the progress created, and keep the political system informed about these possible problems so that it can respond appropriately. All of this may seem daunting to those in the science, engineering, and academic community who are used to a simpler existence. But increasingly complex and interrelated systems seem to be the reality, both in the conduct of R&D and in the setting of public policy. This complexity compels us to find ways to move beyond short-term budget debates and engage in a comprehensive discussion of long-term S&T policy, one that will serve us well into the 21st century.

Creation Of Sound Science Policy Hindered By Budget Debates

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Rep. George Brown

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April 1997

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