Research Funds Shouldn’t Have a Pork-Barrel Fate

The supplemental appropriations bill that will come before the Senate this week contains an $80.6-million item for research activities and research construction projects at 10 universities. We will ask the Senate to strike it from the bill.

Seen against the total 1986 defense budget of $286 billion, or even the defense research-and-development budget of $33 billion, this item normally would attract little attention. Yet there are few matters in this bill that are of greater long-run importance than those projects, how they got there and what they mean.

The quality of this nation’s basic science and the technology that rests on it are essential elements of our national defense, public health, economic vitality and competitiveness. In the 40 years since the end of World War II, we have built and sustained a capacity for basic research--mostly in our universities--that, for its size and quality, is the envy of the world. We appear now to be turning away from the policies and practices that have led to success in our research enterprise, and instead are adopting practices that can lead only to mediocrity.

Clearly, no sensible nation would do such a thing intentionally. We are in the process of doing it unintentionally as Congress moves, step by selfish step, to turn the federal funding of research into yet one more barrel of pork.

The latest and most significant piece of evidence of that trend showed up in the Defense Department’s appropriation for the current year. In the conference report on that appropriation, Congress instructed the department to support nine projects at nine universities totaling $55.6 million, using funds for basic research that Defense ordinarily gives out only after rigorous scrutiny for scientific quality and importance to the department’s long-term needs. In addition, a new project for a $25-million science-and-engineering center at Arizona State University appears for the first time in this supplemental appropriations bill.

None of the 10 projects had been scientifically reviewed or put forward by the department as part of its research program. All were pet projects of senators aiming, in the way that characterizes many other government programs, to do something good for their states.

That is not an unworthy motive, but in this setting it is badly misplaced. It is a genuine triumph of public policy that the logrolling that dominates the allocation of funds for public facilities and other economic goods has been largely absent from decisions about science.

To a remarkable degree, Congress has exercised self-restraint and allowed those decisions to be driven by quality, as judged by qualified professionals rather than by constituency interest. The proof of the policy is in its success, and it is a success in which Congress can take real pride.

We stand in serious danger of giving all that away. If decisions about who shall do research and where it shall be done are made by Congress with, as in this case, almost complete indifference to the relative quality of the work, we will be well on the road to mediocrity, at best, in our research enterprise.

The time to stop this trend is right now, and fortunately there is one more chance. For technical reasons, the nine projects in the 1986 defense appropriation need to be voted on again in the supplemental bill.

The Defense Department does not want these projects, nor does it want its hands to be tied on the newly proposed project at Arizona State. Funding them will mean that other research projects that would have been supported on their merits will not be carried out, and Congress will have taken another, perhaps irrevocable, step toward substituting politics for science.

It is a bad deal all the way around, and the Senate should reject it.