The Science-Government Compact:
7.5 The Steelman Report
During the years of debate over the National Science Foundation, a second federal science-promotion eort was under way. In October 1946, Truman issued an executive order establishing the President's Scientic Research Board and charged it to prepare an overview of current and proposed research and development within and outside of government. The prime mover behind the executive order was probably James R.
Newman, formerly of the Oce of War Mobilization and Reconversion, who had been in the vanguard of the successful battle to assure civilian control of atomic energy.24
22Bush, op. cit., 1.
23The National Science Foundation Act of 1950 authorized the foundation to initiate and support basic scientic research. . .in the mathematical, physical, medical, biological, and other sciences. The social and behavioral sciences were explicitly included in that formulation by means of a 1968 congressional amendment of the original act as a result of hearings before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology.
24England, op. cit., 63.
Figure 7.3: President Truman and John Steelman in Key West, November 1951. Paul Begley, United States Navy, Courtesy Harry S. Truman Presidential Library.
Chaired by John R. Steelman, Director of the Oce of War Mobilization and Reconversion, the Scientic Research Board was comprised of the heads of all cabinet departments and other federal units with substantial research and development responsibilities. Steelman was directed to submit a report:
setting forth (1) his ndings with respect to the Federal research programs and his recommen-dations for providing coordination and improved eciency therein; and (2) his ndings with respect to non-Federal research and development activities and training facilities, a statement of the inter-relationship of Federal and non-Federal research and development, and his recom-mendations for planning, administering and stang Federal research programs to insure that the scientic personnel, training, and research facilities of the Nation are used most eectively in the national interest.25
Bush was a statutory member of the board in his capacity as OSRD Director,26 but took little or no part in its deliberations and dismissed its eorts will ill-concealed contempt on the grounds that Steelman (who had a Ph.D. in economics and had been a university professor prior to joining the government as a labor relations specialist during the late Roosevelt years) had no understanding of science. No doubt Bush, who had enjoyed easy access to Roosevelt, was also piqued by his exclusion from the inner circles of the Truman White House. Steelman, in contrast, was becoming increasingly inuential. With the liquidation of the emergency Oce of War Mobilization and Reconversion in December 1946, he was designated The Assistant to the President, in eect the rst White House chief of sta.
But more than personal pique was involved. The thrust of Bush's Sciencethe Endless Frontier was that support for basic research in universities ought to be the central focus of science policy; the Steelman board regarded university research support as just one aspect of a more complex situation. Sciencethe Endless Frontier was based on the reports from four committees of non-government scientists; the Steelman board was composed entirely of government ocials. Bush and the scientic establishment also suspected that the Steelman board wanted to preempt military domination of post-war science policy, and that it was expected to promote the right kind of science foundation.27
Despite the distaste of scientic elders for the Steelman exercise, the resulting ve-volume report, entitled Science and Public Policy and commonly referred to as the Steelman report, ranks as a seminal achievement.
A Program for the Nation, its rst volume, was transmitted to the president on August 27, 1947, exactly three
25John R. Steelman, A Program for the Nation, Science and Public Policy: A Report to the President 1 (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Oce, August 27, 1947), 69.
26The OSRD was liquidated at the end of 1947, much to the relief of Bush, who had originally proposed that since it was a temporary, emergency agency, it should be phased out after the end of the war in Europe.
27England, op. cit., 63; note 8, 375.
weeks after his pocket veto of the National Science Foundation Act of 1947.28 Its principal recommendation was to nearly double the national (federal, plus industry and other sources) R&D budget to approximately
$2.1 billion annually by 1957 through a planned program of expansion that would require greater increases in public than in private spending. Thenceforth, federal R&D expenditures should be equal to at least one percent of Gross National Product (GNP).29
In contrast to the Bush report, which based its few cost estimates on prewar basic research expenditures, the Steelman report explicitly recognized a link between R&D expenditures and national income.30 It also set explicit 1957 distribution targets by sector: 20 percent for basic research, 14 percent for health and medicine, 44 percent for non-military development, and 22 percent for military development. The report included charts which extrapolated desired federal R&D expenditures through 1957 and the desired numbers of scientists through that same year.
28The succeeding volumes of the report were the following: vol. 2, The Federal Research Program; vol. 3, Administration for Research; vol. 4, Manpower for Research; vol. 5, The Nation's Medical Research.
29This appears to have been the rst use in an ocial public document of the now familiar R&D/GNP (later R&D/GDP) ratio.
30Steelman, op. cit., 26.
The Bush report had recommended strengthening federal non-defense applied research programs, but paid little attention to the entire government system. In contrast, the Steelman report recognized the growing complexity and inuence of the federal scientic enterprise on the entire national eort: The Federal program for scientic research and development exerts its inuence in many major areas, and it is a direct inuence not only upon the scientic activities of the country as a whole, but upon the national economy. Its very scope makes the formulation of policy and administration dicult, and its operation within the structure of the Federal Government raises questions of balance in its programs.31
In order to increase the eectiveness of the federal eort, the report recommended that: A central point of liaison among the major research agencies to assure the maximum interchange of information...must be provided. . .. There must be a single point close to the President at which the most signicant problems created in the research and development program of the Nation as a whole can be brought into policy discussions.32
Sciencethe Endless Frontier and A Program for the Nation were in accord in singling out basic research as the principal area for concerted federal action. Indeed, the latter report recommended that the largest percentage increases in federal expenditures during the next decade should be in that area. (In contrast, it recommended that expenditures for military development ought to increase more slowly than for other sectors.) Much of its rhetorical justication for government research support was reminiscent of Sciencethe Endless Frontier, and no doubt drew upon it for inspiration. More concretely, A Program for the Nation proposed creation of a National Science Foundation that would have been more municently endowed than Bush proposed.33 It was also considerably bolder in recommending a program of Federal assistance to universities and colleges...in the matters of laboratory facilities and scientic equipment,"34and by asserting the need to assist in the reconstruction of European laboratories as a part of our program of aid to peace-loving countries.35
Despite its unequivocal endorsement of government support for basic research and its broader concept of the scope and authority of a National Science Foundation, the report drew the ire of the scientic establish-ment by recommending that the foundation be headed by a presidentially appointed director assisted by a part-time advisory board of distinguished scientists and educators similarly appointed.36 Half the members of the advisory board would have been drawn from within government and half from outside. Moreover, it recommended that the foundation be established within the Executive Oce of the President (EoP) rather than as an independent agency. Indeed, there was some sentiment on the Steelman board that the president should simply establish a National Science Foundation within the executive oce by means of an executive order rather than having to rely on the congress to create the organization.37 Since the report's recommen-dations were also opposed by the military and by conservative congressmen opposed to central planning, it went nowhere. (It is interesting to note, however, that actual R&D expenditures through the 1950s far exceeded the report's targets.)
On September 13, 1948, President Truman addressed the centennial anniversary meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).38 In history's rst public presidential speech calling for a national science policy, Truman suggested that it be based on ve key Steelman recommendations:
First, we should double our total public and private allocations of funds to the sciences. . ..
Second, greater emphasis should be placed on basic research and on medical research.
31Steelman, op. cit., 45.
32Ibid., 61.
33Bush, op. cit., 40
34Ibid., 31.
35Ibid. The Steelman report was released during the months that Congress was debating the proposed Marshall Plan for economic recovery assistance to Europe.
36Ibid., 34
37England, op. cit., 80
38Harry S. Truman, Address to the Centennial Anniversary AAAS Annual Meeting (1948), in Albert Teich, ed., Science and Technology Policy Yearbook 1999 (Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1999).
Third, a National Science Foundation should be established.
Fourth, more aid should be granted to the universities, both for student scholarships and for research.
Fifth, the work of the research agencies of the Federal Government should be better nanced and coordinated.