Soapbox Post

A famous psychology experiment presented five-year-old children with a choice: take one marshmallow now, or wait twenty minutes and get two marshmallows. Apparently, those children who could muster self-control for what must have seemed like an eternity turned into more socially and intellectually successful adults than the kids who chose to immediately gratify their marshmallow ardor.

Has science just opted for one marshmallow? The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—the economic stimulus bill—lavished spectacular riches on science. The National Science Foundation got a boost of $3 billion; NASA got an extra $1 billion; the National Institutes of Health $10 billion; the Department of Energy almost $8 billion. From one perspective this is a welcome down-payment on President Obama’s promise to “restore science to its rightful place.” But from another point of view it marks the giant step in the continuing politicization of science—and the long term consequences for science may not be entirely happy.

Economists will tell you that, when it comes to economic stimulus, it doesn’t matter how new money gets into the economy, as long as it gets there fast. It’s probably true that doing research is not nearly as effective at quickly moving money into the economy as, say, building bridges or boosting unemployment insurance. So money for science (unless it goes to renovation or construction projects—which, indeed, some of the science stimulus money does) may not be a particularly good way to recharge the economy.

On the other hand, it is the Recovery AND REINVESTMENT Act, right? And few would argue that increasing public expenditures for science and technology is not a good long-term investment. But in that case, why the one marshmallow approach? Why ram more than $20 billion R&D dollars—a third of the total annual budget for non-defense R&D—into the system so quickly? Why not ramp up more gradually, so that agencies can actually do a good job of assuring that the best and most promising projects get funded, in the most accountable, least wasteful ways possible, thus assuring additional marshmallows down the line?

Here’s where the politics come in. During the Bush Administration, Democrats got political mileage by painting the former President as “anti-science,” largely because of his positions on climate change and stem-cell research. At the same time, and for reasons that had little or nothing to do with science—and a lot to do with the response to 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, tax policies, and the slowing of the economy—pressure on the federal budget increased, and funding for research (as well as funding for almost all other non-defense areas of the annual budget) leveled off and even began to decline.

So declining support for science became another part of the Bush legacy, and the importance of the federal investment in science and technology—for 60 years a matter of overall bipartisan agreement—became a subject for political theater. Restoring science to its “rightful place” didn’t just mean getting serious about climate change and allowing research on embryonic stem cells, it also meant increasing the R&D budget after eight years of an anti-science White House. It was political pay-back time, to the tune of $20 billion.

What’s next for science? Perhaps a new era of partisanship. Pressure on the federal budget is likely only to increase in the coming years, as the consequences of the global economic debacle continue to radiate through the economy. This means that every program funded by Congress on an annual basis—from support for overseas embassies to monitoring of food safety—will be squeezed, and subject to increasingly fierce political horse-trading. Having gotten a huge boost this year, legislators (and the interest groups that strive to influence them) may well wonder why science should continue to receive preferential treatment when other important areas of public expenditure continue to languish.

The hope of the science community (and perhaps the intention of the Obama administration) is that the huge boosts for R&D in the stimulus package will actually become part of the R&D base—in other words, that future science budgets will continue to increase from the levels created by the stimulus funding. But, especially given the budget pressures that will almost certainly persist for the next several years, there’s another possibility—that science has been knocked for good from a pedestal that has kept it, for the most part, above the political fray. Having now become an explicitly partisan issue, Democrats and Republicans alike who long supported or (the more common case) benignly neglected science may now come to see it as essentially equivalent to dairy price supports and highway funds—less an issue of long-term national interest than another variable in the calculus of short-term political gain. This year, that calculus came down on the side of more funding for R&D. It may not always be thus.

About the Author: Dan Sarewitz is co-director of CSPO.