U.S. SCIENCE POLICY:
Congress Passes Massive Measure to Support Research, Education
Jeffrey Mervis

In 2005, a U.S. National Academies' panel drew up a blueprint for sustaining economic growth by strengthening the country's research and educational systems (Science, 21 October 2005, p. 423). Last week, Congress adopted nearly all of its recommendations in a bill that prescribes new policies and programs at six federal agencies.
The academies' report, titled Rising Above the Gathering Storm, named 20 priorities, putting more and better science and math teachers at the top of the list. It also called for a sustained boost in federal spending on research, especially for the physical sciences and engineering, and increased support for those planning to become scientists. Congress folded most of those proposals into the America COMPETES (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science) Act, a 407-page leviathan that authorizes $43 billion over 3 years for dozens of research and training programs. It passed the House by a vote of 367-57 on 2 August and, a few hours later, the Senate by unanimous consent.

Part of the reason for the overwhelming support was that America COMPETES is not a spending bill that appropriates money for the next, or any, fiscal year. Instead, it's an authorization bill that describes broad policies an agency should follow, specifies programs to achieve those goals, and endorses a desired spending level. It is the job of the appropriations committees to decide how much money will be spent in any particular year.

Appropriators are still working on the 12 spending bills for the 2008 fiscal year that begins 1 October. The preliminary signs are good for the three agencies--the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy's Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)--that are included in the president's American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI), itself a response to the academies' report. Still, the new legislation gives appropriators lots of suggestions.

It puts NSF on a 7-year doubling track, for example, compared with 10 years under ACI, and increases many of its education programs, including a huge jump in a $10-million-a-year program to give scholarships to science, math, and engineering undergraduates who promise to teach. It declares that an NSF program partnering universities and local school districts is complementary to one at the Department of Education, rather than redundant, as the Bush Administration has argued. It greatly expands DOE's role in elementary and secondary school education, giving it the authority to create new science and math academies affiliated with its network of national labs. It authorizes a new version of an industrial research program at NIST that Republicans have long sought to eliminate, converting the Advanced Technology Program to the Technology Innovation Program and starting it off with $100 million. It also creates grants for young scientists who have failed in their first NSF submission, in hopes of bolstering their chances of success the next time around. The most controversial element is a new agency within DOE (see sidebar, p. 737).

In addition to beefing up current efforts and creating a cornucopia of new programs, the legislation ties up some loose policy ends. It enshrines the social and behavioral sciences as an essential element in NSF's research portfolio, a rebuff to attempts last year by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and others to downplay their importance. And it orders the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to come up with a standard policy for all agencies on the dissemination of research results, a reaction to a spate of reports that federal scientists have been hindered in publicizing studies that appear to contradict Administration policies on global warming and other hot-button issues. That will happen, promises OSTP director and presidential science adviser John Marburger. "We're a science policy shop, and we'll do what Congress tells us to do," he says.

Legislators portray the bipartisan support for science as a matter of enlightened self-interest. "This bill will help us keep our brainpower advantage," trumpeted Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), who shepherded the bill through three Senate panels. "Securing a brighter future for our children is simply not a partisan issue," noted Alexander's Tennessee colleague, Representative Bart Gordon (D-TN), who as chair of the science committee played a similar role in the House. Even so, only three Republicans voted in favor of moving the measure to the House floor, expressing their ire over how the Democratic majority handled the procedural steps leading to the final vote.

Why was the academies' report so influential when similar proposals to bolster science have fallen short in the past? The trick this time around, says Norman Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed-Martin and chair of the panel that produced the report, was to argue in terms that the public would understand. "We quit talking about the virtues of science in the abstract and started talking about its impact on jobs," he explained about the 2-year lobbying effort by university and industry leaders. "Everybody understands jobs."

Even one-time critics say that the final legislation provides a useful road map for managing the country's scientific enterprise. "It's good for Congress to say that STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] education and research are important," says Marburger. "But we have to pay for this stuff, and this bill is way over the top in terms of authorized spending and the number of new programs. My concern is that when the time comes for Congress to appropriate the money for each of these agencies, what will they choose to support?"

Gordon praised university and business leaders for being effective "cheerleaders" for the new legislation. But Augustine cautioned that their work is far from over. "Our biggest challenge is to sustain this coalition for the next 10 to 15 years, because it will take that long for the new jobs to appear," he predicts. "Still, you can't finish if you don't start, and that's what this bill does."