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Republican Proposal Puts 'National Interest' Requirement On US Science Agency
ananyo writes "Key members of the U.S. House of Representatives are seeking to require the National Science Foundation (NSF) to justify every grant it awards as being in the 'national interest.' The proposal, included in a draft bill from the Republican-led House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and obtained by Nature, would force the NSF to document how its basic science grants benefit the country. The requirement is similar to one in a discussion draft circulated in April by committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas). At the time, scientists raised concerns that 'national interest' was defined far too narrowly. The current draft bill provides a more expansive definition that includes six goals: economic competitiveness, health and welfare, scientific literacy, partnerships between academia and industry, promotion of scientific progress, and national defense. But many believe that predicting the broader impacts of basic research is tantamount to gazing into a crystal ball. 'All scientists know it's nonsense,' says John Bruer, president of James S. McDonnell Foundation and former co-chair of an NSF task force that examined requiring scientists to state the 'broader impacts' of their work in grant applications."
Maybe they should start by requiring the military to demonstrate how everything it spends is in the 'National Interest'.
I think you'd lose a lot of pork.
...be applied to politicians? (of all colours)
The problem is that you don't, and usually can't, know what the results of basic research are going to be. For example, it'd be really hard to show how research into the electrical characteristics of silicon would be in the national interest, because on it's own (without knowing what'll come from it) you can't show how it'll satisfy any of those criteria. Yet without that research we wouldn't have semiconductors, which means no integrated circuit chips, which means none of the smart bombs and drone aircraft and the massive computer banks that drive the surveillance and data-collection efforts that the Republicans are so fond of supporting as being so crucial to national security.
If something that's so obviously in the national interest couldn't at the time it was proposed meet any of the criteria listed, why in the world should we consider those criteria valid? Yeah, preaching to the choir here...
I'm for this proposal, if the same bill will include a requirement for all military financing to declare ahead of time which military conflict the weapon will be used with specifics and financial analysis of the impact for dollar compared to current weapons.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Key members of the U.S. House of Representatives are seeking to require the National Science Foundation (NSF) to justify every grant it awards as being in the 'national interest.'
It is in our national interest to be on the leading edge of science and technology, therefore basic research is in the national interest.
Taxpayers paid millions of dollars to study them.
Not to go all Wikipedia on you, but [citation needed].
You're probably one of those people who think that NASA and food stamps are 20% of the federal budget each.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
... should be required to justify their national interest.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
From their own web site, the "...NSF's FY 2014 budget request is $7.626 billion"
$0,007.6 billon NSF budget. The Federal budget for 2014 is about $3.77 trillion (wikipedia) To put that on the same scale:
$3,770.0 billion total US budget. So the NSF budget is (I think I did the math correctly) 0.2% of the total budget. Less than 1/4 of one percent!
$3 billion is what the Navy is spending on a singe new Zumwalt destroyer (the next 4 in that fleet will cost $2.5B each) to fight nonexistent maritime enemies. That's two NSF budgets for ships that will do nothing but cost money to operate for the next 20 years.
I think this is the religious right pushing to get the US Government to stop funding science that disproves their church teachings and bible scripture.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
The whole of large-scale funding of science and engineering came out of WW-II -- the Manhatten Project and microwave radar.
No, it's been around for a lot longer than that. The french even in the 18th century had a national science policy that was essentially what we're talking about here - things that directly benefit the country. The British had a more laissez faire approach to the whole thing with the Royal Society, and never really congealed a cohesive plan. Since the two regularly stole from each other for a couple of centuries it worked out OK. The british did a lot of fundamental science, the french did a lot of practical stuff, and they just copied each other where it was relevant.
Since the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 there have been various efforts at funding science in the way we think of it through universities, I suppose arguably you could even go back to the 11th or 12th century in Italy for something similar, though that was much more limited in scope.
Government funding is a sort of odd concept. If you expect rich lords to subsidize the children of other rich lords (who sit in the house of lords) being educated at a government school is that government funding? Not exactly, but it's not really different either. The world has had had government support for industry and research for centuries, but different funding models are well, different. Tax breaks, making members of the government pay for it, making 'The Church' pay for etc. have all been going on for ages.
so at best it's a waste of time, and at worst it's a(nother) way for someone to arbitrarily reject research proposals.
"One day sir, you may tax it."
Faraday's reply to William Gladstone, then British Chancellor of the Exchequer (minister of finance), when asked of the practical value of electricity (1850), as quoted in The Harvest of a Quiet Eye : A Selection of Scientific Quotations (1977), p. 56 (wikiquote)
Basic research is where the revolutionary new discoveries in science are. Applied research can only take what we have and improve on it. Certainly also relevant and necessary, but it does not move us ahead in any way that's even close to the leaps and bounds fundamental research can grant us.
The main problem with basic research is simply that it takes quite a while to produce marketable results. That's a given. It's a long, long way from "hey, that's interesting" to "and here's our new thingamajig". Take lasers. The first, theoretical, research for lasers was done as early as 1917, and it took way into the 50s for the first halfway decent models to come into existence, far from commercially interesting or marketable. Mostly a "toy" for scientists, too expensive to build and operate and way to unstable and unreliable. But things evolved, and today we have BluRay and laser cutters, whole industries that live and die by the very existence of that product.
Now, I can hear someone butt in and say that of course if we need some technology, someone will develop it. We need a way to store sound and (moving) pictures, we need a way to store data, so it will come into existence. That's right. It will. But nobody, at least nobody who bothers to invest money, will look at alternative, better, ways to do it. What will happen is that the old and tried ways get improved. So today we'd probably have perfectly error correcting Victrolas, playing shellac records and removing even the tiniest bit of crackling and noise in post processing before sending it to the speaker instead of CDs that simply eliminated that problem by moving from analogue to digital data storage. We'd also probably still have core memory, of course a lot smaller and faster than back in the 50s, but without the advent of the microchip and research in semiconductors, we'd still be at radio tubes heating up our rooms. Of course, the tubes would get smaller and their power consumption lower with time, but the technology itself would stay the same.
Well, much like we actually have now, we just do the very same crap one step up. Essentially, concerning the underlying technology, the latest intel chip is not different in any way from an old 80x86. Yes, it's smaller, it uses lower voltage, thus it can work faster and whatnot, but in the end, it is the same technology.
Without basic research that opens up a new way, we can only get so far. Of course once the way is shown applied research has to improve and polish, but you can only improve so far. At some point, you have reached what's possible. And then you have to look for other ways.
And with a lot of our tech we ARE at the point where further polishing won't do us much good.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's a big deal to get upset about because it gives the flat-earthers and short-sighted "save money by shorting infrastructure" types an oppurtunity to grandstand about how [thing I don't get/agree with] is a "waste of taxpayer money". I've seen these types fighting against things like tide buoys and seismic and weather sensors (i.e. data collection for things they might not support - like not fouling the global commons) because they're a "waste of money". We need LESS politicizing of science funding, not MORE.
for you. First, the U.S. military does indeed have defense as its primary function
We have several hundred ships in the Navy, for example, and at any moment there are US Navy ships all over the world making sure the seaways remain open so that commerce, people, etc may freely pass (which provides a great deal of economic stability and thus reduces economic and geopolitical "stresses" that have historically led to wars). Those ships also perform humanitarian services, frequently pulling civilians from the seas and returning them to their families, while always as a result being ready and able to swing into a strong military posture should the nation need it. None of the land wars we've been involved in lately and of which you probably were thinking affected any of this.
The Air Force has missiles in silos and bombers which are strategic deterrence; some of those bombers have been used in recent ground wars, but that was only a temporary use.
The Army and Marines have indeed been involved in many recent activities (I personally do not care if you call them "wars" "police actions" etc, the kinetics are the same) that were not the simple-minded obvious form of defense (as-in "man the ramparts!") but which were positioned as defense via dealing with problems over where they were festering before they blew-up into full-scale wars
The REAL point of all this is that the military in the U.S. exists for defense and is capable of defense BUT it answers to civilian leadership and follows civilian orders (which I presume you would prefer over the alternative) therefore these people and systems which exist for defense follow the orders and judgement of the civilians in determining what exactly IS "defense" and and how that end is best achieved. In the 1930's the civilians erred on the side of not acting early (the military followed its orders then and was inadequately armed and trained) and the military then had to fight a world war. In the decades since, the civilian leadership has repeatedly decided to have the military act early, far from home, in places like Korea, Vietnam, and the middle-east (and the military has followed those orders). Don't like it? Look in the mirror and take your elections more seriously.
The strain on our Federal budget and perpetual deficit due to things like duck penii studies?
As someone else pointed out above, even if you are in a high tax bracket, you probably paid something like 0.002 cents out of your taxes toward this study. The vast majority of U.S. taxpayers probably paid something on the order of a ten-thousandth or hundred-thousandth of a cent.
Even if this study is bogus, are you really sure this is where you should be directing your focus? I'm all in favor of trimming the federal budget, but you may want to spend a little time figuring out the huge categories of expenses in the federal budget before complaining about something that constitutes something like 0.00001% of it for one year (literally). Many people here have mentioned defense (which takes up roughly 19% of the annual budget, which is about 1,600,000 TIMES the size of this duck study every year, but we could just as easily talk about other expense categories that cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
I read about the shape of their penii from the Daily Beast and I care about how much was spent on researching them because I get the impression from this anecdote and many others how bad we are at controlling waste, pork, and fraud.
We're absolutely TERRIBLE at controlling waste, pork, and fraud. Do have any clue how much money is handed out to random defense contractors every year through inappropriate channels? With just a little Googling, you could come up with dozens of categories of spending that EACH cost tens of thousands of times your duck study every year. Recalling one soldier from Afganistan for one year would save roughly 2.5 times as much as your duck study.
I think you're absolutely right that there's a huge amount of waste and corruption. However, directing your anger at legitimate scientific inquiry, which is already severely at risk within the federal budget, is a bit odd -- if your goal really is to save taxpayers a significant sum of money.
Also, by the way, your Daily Beast article actually argues that the duck research is legitimately interesting. From the little I know, I agree. I'm not a biologist, but I heard about the strange properties of duck phalluses years ago -- long before this study -- and it wouldn't surprise me if studying them would produce some unique insights into reproduction, perhaps far beyond just ducks or birds. Just because you're too ignorant to imagine that such research might be useful, it doesn't mean that it isn't. There are all sorts of reproductive issues in the world these days, from endangered species who aren't reproducing property to falling human birth rates in developed countries, and I'll trust the experts to know whether this research could be helpful.
Lastly, if you want to go on some ignorant screed about something, take a few minutes and at least learn to spell the topic you're discussing. The plural of "penis" is "penises," as you can see in your Daily Beast article. If you insist on using the Latin plural, it is "penes" (since it's a 3rd declension noun), but you won't find that except in very old medical textbooks. "Penii" is just something ignorant people say when they're trying to look smarter than they are.
Now that my post title earns me a +1 "slashdot loves it", perhaps people will consider this:
*Perhaps* when your country is $trillions$ in debt, one should strongly consider carefully justifying every single program - NSF included - for its expected value and relevance to the national interest.
Lest someone believe I'm being tendentious here, I fully agree that this same metric SHOULD be applied to the bullshit military programs (cancel the LCS - both versions are equally stupid - instantly, for example) as well.
Perhaps EVERY dollar the government spends (you know, since it was taken from some taxpayer at the barrel of a proverbial gun) should be vetted carefully, including congressional haircuts and other benefits. Here's an idea: for every year since congress last passed a budget (you know, their fundamental job) we simply refuse to pay their pensions?
-Styopa
"Up hill both ways!" act aside, it's possible to work your way through college, sure. It's gotten harder with tuition increases and (arguably) coursework increases, but people still manage it. Personally, I was in a Physics program that expected ~60 hours a week in coursework and no one worked more than ~10 hours a week on top of that; it just wasn't realistic.
That being said, do you really think you learned as much (natural intelligence accounted for) in three years working four part time jobs and sleeping 4 hours a night as the guy who was well rested everyday and had more time than the bare minimum to devote to every assignment?
While your individual devotion is commendable, nowhere in the world is the average (or even above average) person going to have that in them. It's not even a good method of weeding people out; the ability to work menial jobs and complete passable academics with massive sleep deprivation doesn't really reflect your ability to perform mentally taxing tasks for 40-60hrs a week later in life.