The President Needs [Scientic] Help!

Early in 1980, the quarterly journal Technology in Society published a special issue on Science Advice to the President.¹³ Edited by William T. Golden, the volume featured essays by all but two presidential science advisors from the Truman through the Carter administrations, and included reections on the presidential advisory system from fteen other veteran observers, including former President Ford. According to Golden, the objective of the volume was to explore how to be most eective in encouraging the President, every President, to seek, consider, evaluate, and utilize such wise and spirited advice. That Golden, his editors,

9Frank Press, Advising Presidents on Science and Technology, in William T. Golden, ed., Science Advice to the President (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), 8.

10Press in Golden, 1988, op. cit.

11National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators 2006. Volume 2. (Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, 2006 (NSB 06-01A)), Chapter 4

12Council on Governmental Relations, The Bayh-Dole Act: A Guide to the Law and Implementing Regulations (Washington, DC: Council on Governmental Relations, 1999).

13Later in 1980, this edition of the journal was published as a free-standing book. See Golden, op. cit.

and his contributors chose to address these essays to the President, every President during an election year highlights their dissatisfaction with the presidential advisory system under Carter.

Golden explicitly called for the restoration of PSAC: The `argument of the work [the collection of articles],' in Winston Churchill's phrase, is that the oce of Science Adviser to the President should be retained and that, before or promptly after the 1980 Presidential election, a President's Science Advisory Committee should be reestablished, with privacy if exemption can be won but without it if it cannot.¹⁴

Many contributors praised Frank Press, the incumbent science advisor, for his eectiveness in dealing with the president and his inner circle. That Press himself contributed a Foreword suggests that he did not regard the volume as an attack on himself or Carter.

As already noted, Press did concede, however, that President Carter's decision in reorganizing the science advisory apparatus. . .not to make use of a formal outside group such as the President's Committee on Science and Technology (PCST) had come under some criticism. The thrust of the implied criticism by Golden's contributors was that the administration had not adequately involved the scientic community in policy formulation. Edward David, Jr., Richard Nixon's last science advisor, made that point explicitly.

While conceding that the science advisor's principal constituent had to be the president rather than the Congress, the scientic community, or the amorphous general public, former Nixon science advisor Edward David, Jr., emphasized, If, indeed, there are elements missing from the current White House science advice performance, it is the function of providing paths to the future based upon new technological possibilities and basic relationships in the research and development process. It is indeed unrealistic to expect this kind of performance from the White House or OSTP stas themselves. . .Indeed, the missing element appears to be the broad and deep contributions by dedicated members of the scientic communities... In past times, this eort was supplied by the President's Science Advisory Committee and its panels."¹⁵

If Golden and his contributors hoped to reverse Carter's course, they were destined for disappointment.

Ronald Reagan, who regarded the science advisory system as an even lower priority than had Carter, viewed it as nothing more than a special interest lobby.

In June 1981, Reagan nominated George A. (Jay) Keyworth II as his science advisor and OSTP director.

Keyworth had been a weapons physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory throughout his career and was virtually unknown outside of the defense science community, and his nomination did little to allay academic anxiety regarding the Reagan administration's interest in science. Nor did the fact that he had been suggested to the president by the hawkish Edward Teller, whom many establishment scientists had still not forgiven for his role in the Oppenheimer aair. However, by December 1985, when he resigned both positions, Keyworth had won over a good many skeptics.

14William T. Golden, Contours of Wisdom: Presidential Science Advice in an Age of Flux, in Golden, op. cit., 5.

15Edward E. David, Jr., Current State of White House Science Advising, in Golden, op. cit., 57.

Figure 12.2: President Ronald Reagan and George (Jay) Keyworth in the Oval Oce. Courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

Recognizing the problem, Keyworth made special eorts to establish good working relations with both the university-based scientic community and the federal R&D line agencies. In consultation with the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP) of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, Keyworth arranged a series of annual research briengs in areas COSEPUP identied; and on the advice of the National Academy of Engineering, he strongly endorsed the Presidential Young Investigator awards, prestigious post-doctoral appointments intended to encourage outstanding PhDs in science, and particularly engineering, to pursue academic research careers.

However, in his rst appearance before a large scientic audience (the April 1981 annual American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science and Technology Policy Colloquium in Washington, DC), he made it clear that he intended to be a White House team player rather than an emissary from the scientic community, and that he had no intention of recommending the restoration of PSAC.¹⁶

Much of the initial anxiety about Reagan's support for the broad-based national research system abated with the submission of his proposed budget to Congress in January 1982. As anticipated, substantial increases in defense-related R&D were proposed, along with sharp cuts in non-defense applied research and development, on the grounds that the latter should be left to the private sector. But the budget did propose substantial increases for basic research support, much to the relief of university-based scientists, and these increases continued over the next three years.

In April 1984, Keyworth emphasized the administration's commitment to basic research, noting with

16Barbara J. Culliton, Keyworth Gives First Speech, Science (July 7, 1981), 183-84.

approval the elimination of costly energy demonstration projects that were better left to the private sector.¹⁷ Although such programs had been cut back signicantly during the Carter administration, they disappeared almost completely under Reagan. Keyworth noted that total federal R&D obligations had increased from

$35 billion in scal year 1981 to $53.1 billion in scal year 1985, with most of the increase in defense R&D, which grew from $16.5 billion in scal year 1981 to $34.2 billion in scal year 1985. Total federal obligations for basic research increased from $5.1 billion in scal year 1981 to $7.9 billion in scal year 1985.

Keyworth's claim that the Reagan administration and Congress were generous to science was echoed by the external community, as evidenced by a July 3, 1987, Science article entitled, Science Budgets Fare Well in House Action.¹⁸ This trend for basic research persisted until politically unacceptable federal decits forced the administration and Congress to reexamine their priorities, beginning with the president's proposed scal year 1988 budget.¹⁹

Support for the social sciences in Reagan's rst budge request, however, was drastically reduced, and NSF's science education budget almost entirely eliminated. In response, the National Science Board, as NSF's policy-making and governing body, invoked a rarely used provision of the National Science Foundation Act of 1950 by convening a special commission to examine the broad science education issue. This commission lent support to subsequent congressional restoration of science education through creation of NSF's Directorate for Education and Human Resources. All 435 members of the House of Representatives, after all, had schoolteachers in their districts, many of whom had proted from programs the Reagan administration was proposing to cut. Congress voted to restore funding for science education to NSF, and the administration had no choice but to comply. From then on, science education would be an integral component of U.S.

science policy.