The OSTP Act

On May 11, 1976, President Gerald Ford signed into law the National Science and Technology Policy, Organization, and Priorities Act of 1976 (PL 94-282, often referred to as the OSTP or Science Policy Act).² An attempt at major reform, the act articulated guidelines for a national science policy; established the Oce of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) within the Executive Oce of the President; designated the OSTP director as science advisor to the President; provided for a President's Council on Science and Technology (PCST) and a federal science and technology survey; and vested, in OSTP, several specic functions intended to ensure a more coherent presidential approach to national science policy.

The act represents the most comprehensive attempt ever undertaken by the federal government to for-mulate a national science policy. Congress envisioned using science both for the public good and as a tool for governance. Notably, the new law eliminated responsibility for defense-related science policy from the OSTP's portfolio, although that had been included in an earlier Senate version of the act.

The new law was the culmination of almost three years of congressional and executive attempts to restore the direct access of science to the president that Nixon had terminated in 1973. Congress hoped once and for all to end the ad hoc approach to science policy that had been a consistent feature of federal behavior for nearly all the nation's history.

Passage of the act came after three years of strenuous eort to undo the damage Nixon had done. In July 1973, thirteen months prior to Nixon's resignation, the House Committee on Science and Technology, at the initiative of chairman Olin Teague (D-TX) and the strong support of Republican Charles Mosher (R-OH), the ranking minority member, began holding hearings on federal planning, policy, and organization for science.³ Nixon's elimination of the science advisory system gave the committee license to range more freely over the matter of federal organization, policy, and planning for science.

Witnesses during the rst phase of hearings were primarily government or former government ocials.

They included H. Guyford Stever (NSF director and science advisor to Nixon); his senior sta members;

1This content is available online at <http://cnx.org/content/m34589/1.1/>.

2Public Law 94-282, 90 Stat. 459.

3U.S. Senate, Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and the Committee on Human Resources, A Legislative History of the National Science and Technology Policy, Organization, and Priorities Act of 1976, 95^th Congress, 1^st session, April 1977, 883-84.

Available for free at Connexions <http://cnx.org/content/col11210/1.2>

seven members of the National Science Board; Edward David, Jr., the last White House science advisor;

and William D. Carey, formerly a presidential-level appointment in the Bureau of the Budget during the Johnson administration and future Executive Ocer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The more extensive second phase of the hearings, held in June and July 1974, was limited almost ex-clusively to testimony from non-government witnesses.⁴ They included such well-known industrial scientists as Chauncey Starr, president of the Electrical Power Research Institute; such prominent representatives of university-based science policy study groups as Brewster Denny of the Graduate School of Public Aairs of the University of Washington; all six former presidential science advisers; and the presidents of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the National Academy of Engineering.

The NAS had asserted its interest in federal science policy during the fall of 1973 when it established an ad-hoc committee on Science and Technology in Presidential Policy Making. Chaired by James Killian, Dwight Eisenhower's rst science adviser, and staed by David Beckler, Executive Secretary of SAC/ODM from early in the Eisenhower administration and of PSAC throughout its lifetime, the NAS panel was virtually a shadow presidential advisory system. Its report recommending that the former presidential advisory system be revived was released in June 1974, just before the second phase of congressional hearings.

4Ibid.

Figure 11.1: NSF Director and Science Advisor H. Guyford Stever testifying before the House Com-mittee on Science, July 1973.

In March 1975, congressmen Teague and Mosher introduced a bill proposing passage of the National

Science Policy Act of 1975. Its principal features: establishment of a national science policy; appointment of a ve-member Advisory Council on Science and Technology, rather than a single science advisor, in the Executive Oce of the President; creation of a cabinet-level Department of Research and Technology Oper-ations to include NASA, ERDA (the Energy Research and Development Authority, which in 1977 became the principal component of the Department of Energy), the NBS, NSF, and NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration); and creation of a Science and Technology Information and Utilities Cor-poration. Hearings on the bill were scheduled for June.

Five days after his swearing in, new president Gerald Ford asked Guyford Stever to stay on as NSF Director and presidential science advisor, and to schedule a meeting to discuss reestablishment of a more eective presidential science advisory system.⁵ Ford wanted the presidential advisory system reestablished by congressional action rather than by executive order. Stever noted that some of the oces in the Executive Oce of the President, including OMB, were opposed to reinstitution of the system, but their opposition proved ineective.

In December 1974, Ford directed Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to examine relations between science and the presidency. The following June, Rockefeller, meeting in conference with the House Committee on Science and Technology, indicated that the president preferred a less complex science policy organization than that in the Teague-Mosher bill. He urged that the committee consider a White House bill that would do little more than establish an Oce of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Oce of the President, designate its director as the president's science advisor, and outline the functions of the oce in general and exible terms. Such a bill was quickly introduced, so as to allow hearings simultaneous with those on the Teague-Mosher bill.

Hearings on the two bills led to a compromise bill passed by the House in October. It established a national science policy and an OSTP with a larger sta and greater number of functions than envisioned by the White House. The proposed cabinet-level department was eliminated on the grounds that over-centralization of the federal R&D system would be cumbersome and counterproductive, and a proposed Science and Technology Information and Utilities Corporation was eliminated on the grounds that it needed further study. The bill replaced both with a Science and Technology Survey Committee that would assess the eectiveness of the government's science and technology eorts in the context of broad-based national needs.

In June, the magazine Science predicted that cordial relations between the House committee and the White House would help get a new presidential science advisory system in place by year's end. The Senate, however, had other ideas. Edward Kennedy, chairman of the Science Subcommittee of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, developed a strong interest in federal biomedical research policy, to the growing consternation of that community.⁶ Kennedy suggested that the public, because of its sizeable investment in biomedical research, was entitled to a more substantial voice in research priorities and directions. He declared that public input was required not only for nancial reasons but because of potential ethical and safety issues as well.

In October 1975, Kennedy convened committee hearings on what he called the OSTP Act. The Sen-ate hearings featured testimony from a wider range of witnesses than had testied before the House; they included, in addition to the usual suspects, representatives of public interest groups, state and local govern-ments, and non-universityoriented education groups. The Kennedy subcommittee bill, considerably more complex than the House measure, was passed by the Senate on February 4, 1976. The bill established a pol-icy oce in the Executive Oce of the President, which it designated as the Oce of Science, Engineering, and Technology Policy. The director of that oce, who was to serve as the president's science advisor, was designated as a member of the Domestic Council and a statutory adviser to the National Security Council, despite pleas from the White House to leave such arrangements exible.

The administration also objected to provisions requiring the policy oce to transmit to the Congress periodic, ve-year investment forecasts and to prepare annual priority options for the OMB. It also opposed

5H. Guyford Stever, Science Advice: Out of and Back into the White House, in William T. Golden, ed., Science Advice to the President (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), 61-63.

6News and Comment, Science (June 20, 1975), 1187-89.

creation of a new federal-state science advisory committee and an accompanying provision to provide up to $200,000 to each state. Further, the White House opposed the bill's establishment of an interagency Federal Coordinating Committee on Science, Engineering, and Technology (FCCSET) to replace the Federal Committee on Science and Technology (FCST), which had been established in 1959 and had survived the demise of PSAC. FCST consisted of the secretaries of all cabinet departments with science and technology responsibilities, and the heads of NASA and NSF. The ostensible objectives of FCST and FCCSET, as envisioned by the Congress, was to exchange information and coordinate programs, but neither functioned eectively, in part because the heads of the departments and independent agencies rarely attended meetings themselves.

Finally, the administration objected to a proposed new PSAC-like committee called the President's Committee on Science, Engineering, and Technology.

When nally signed into law, the OSTP Act was closer to the Senate than the House version. Provisions regarding the relationship between the director and the Domestic Council and National Security Council were eliminated, as was the provision of grants to the states. A federal-state advisory committee was established, as were FCCSET and a President's Committee on Science and Technology (PCST). PCST was temporary, extendable after two years at the president's pleasure, and assigned the specic task of carrying out the federal science and technology survey originally in the House bill.

Finally, the bill mandated that a ve-year science and technology outlook and annual science and tech-nology report be sent to Congress.

Figure 11.2: Left to right: former Congressman (D-CT) and at that time Director of the Oce of Technology Assessment Emilio Daddario, Congressman Charles Mosher (R-OH) and Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA).

The bill was an attempt at accommodating a plethora of conicting and overlapping interests, including those of the scientic establishment (exemplied by the National Academy of Sciences), with its insistence on special access to the president; federal line agencies (and their constituents) intent on preserving their turf; science-related interest groups and populist scientic organizations such as the AAAS; state and local governments; educational organizations; and groups concerned with equity for women and minorities. While the act accommodated most of these interests, at least on paper, it failed to resolve the perennial problem of unifying defense and non-defense science policy. It granted no explicit authority of the OSTP director over defense R&D, and included no statutory relationship between OSTP and the National Security Council.