In May, the White House Office of Management and Budget proposed a significant overhaul to federal oversight of US research grants.
The proposal has engendered widespread opposition, and the Senate voted on Saturday to pause implementation, at least through Dec. 11. Let us hope this pause extends to a rethink of the proposal, which ignores the lessons of history and some of science’s more pressing problems.
By the turn of the 20th century, chemistry had reached an interesting crossroads. Industrialization had spurred what is now broadly regarded as the professionalization of the field. A new technocratic class had emerged and modeled the dynamics of peer support we see reflected in scientific societies today.
The members of this new class, overwhelmingly men, concerned themselves with the technical advances of their field. The decisions about what to fund and, indeed, how these breakthroughs would be rolled out were left to the politicians.
But as the 20th century reached its midpoint, a deliberate and growing movement emerged in the US to wrest control of scientific research away from politicians.
The Great Depression and the two world wars had mobilized the political conscience of large swaths of chemists and other scientists. If the US stock market crash of 1929 led some to contemplate capitalism, the mustard gas of World War I and the atomic bomb of World War II led others to consider pacifism. The point is that chemists were concerned with the applications of their work and felt they should have a stake in how their research is governed.
Historians such as Ernst Homburg from Maastricht University have noted the ways chemists responded—self-organizing and setting standards for self-governance, as seen with the creation of efforts such as the World Federation of Scientific Workers, the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.
In the US, the postwar movement was embodied in Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report “Science: The Endless Frontier” (PDF), which helped establish the current federal system for managing US research and development and led to the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950. The NSF emerged as the foundation of US dominance in R&D. From the outset, the agency allowed leaders in different scientific disciplines to determine which research was likely to advance their fields, and its committees established a process that balances informed skepticism with collective ambition.
And now, chemists in the US are once again at a crossroads.
The OMB’s proposed rule would require political appointees to approve all discretionary grants, among other significant changes.
While the stated ambition is to introduce efficiency and accountability to US research and ensure fiscal alignment with the administration’s priorities, the proposals in practice go far beyond cost containment.
Of particular concern is how the rule proposes to wrest decisions about what is researched, how, and by whom from scientists themselves.
No system is perfect. And a system as large and sprawling as the US scientific research establishment could certainly benefit from new thinking and new approaches.
For instance, the struggle for fields like chemistry to become genuinely interdisciplinary and systems oriented or to embed the practices of sustainability need radical thinking and multilateral coordination. These are issues where thoughtful budgetary and policy incentives would be welcome.
But the system of the past 80 years has worked exceptionally well for the US and has not harmed the country’s economic growth or military dominance.
Changes may be needed to the US research ecosystem, but injecting more politics into it ignores more than 80 years of history and the overwhelming evidence of the value of self-governance.
This editorial is the result of collective deliberation in C&EN. For this editorial, the lead contributor is Nick Ishmael-Perkins.
Views expressed are not necessarily those of ACS.
