Daschle rips Bush on science

WASHINGTON, DC—US Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) yesterday (April 22) attacked the Bush administration for a flawed, unethical, and fiscally unsound science policy. Speaking at an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Science and Technology Policy Forum, Daschle said that “time and time again, the administration is choosing politics over real science.” Also at the conference, Kei Koizumi, director of the AAAS Research and Defense Budget and Policy Program, said that the prospects for science funding in the next 5 years appear dismal.Daschle referred to the administration's policies as “vending machine science.” “They think they can pull the lever and get the result it wants at no cost,” he said. The US reputation as the home of cutting-edge science is being diminished, said Daschle, adding that federal investment in research is decreasing as a share of the US economy. He claimed that, based on a declining publication rate, the rate of scientific discovery in the United States is lagging behind that of many European countries. “The administration is abdicating responsibility for cutting-edge research,” he said. Daschle referred to a February 2004 statement from the Union of Concerned Scientists signed by dozens of eminent scientists, which criticized the Bush administration for manipulating “the process through which science enters into its decisions.” The statement claimed, in part, that the administration had done so by “placing people who are professionally unqualified or who have clear conflicts of interest in official posts and on scientific advisory committees; by disbanding existing advisory committees; [and] by censoring and suppressing reports by the government's own scientists.” In an early April response to the statement, John H. Marburger, III, science adviser to the president and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, issued his own statement, disputing the claims and defending the Bush administration stances one by one—everything from its environmental policy to its stance on reproductive health issues. Speaking at the AAAS forum, Marburger said that “President Bush believes policy is made with the best and most complete information possible” and that the administration has no intention of to “undermine or distort” scientific data.Daschle also criticized the President's Council on Bioethics for recently dismissing two members based on, he said, their views about stem cell research. Daschle called for a new large-scale science endeavor that would “capture the imagination of the country” along the lines of the Lewis and Clark Expedition or the Human Genome Project. He suggested more focused efforts on diseases of the developing world, like HIV and malaria, or a coordinated effort to explore the “science of the mind.”While Daschle criticized the administration for science budget cuts, Marburger touted its strong commitment to science noting that, based on the president's fiscal year (FY) 2005 budget request, total research and development (R&D) will have increased 44%, to $132 billion, since he took office.But according to an analysis by Koizumi, the bulk of those increases were in defense and health spending, leaving many agencies short-changed. Given that the president plans to cut the $521 billion budget deficit in half in the next 5 years, Koizumi's projections suggest that there will be cuts in R&D funding for all agencies except for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and NASA. To meet deficit reduction targets, R&D funding at the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation will likely decline beginning in FY 2006, Koizumi said. The president's FY 2005 budget request may be further trimmed by Congress, leading to additional R&D cuts, he said.Former National Institutes of Health director Harold Varmus, now president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, cautioned that “the darkest cloud” hanging over US science was the nation's growing budget deficit.

Daschle rips Bush on science

AAAS meeting features grim projections for US science funding

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