Worrisome Trend : Research Funds: Not So Scientific

On a farm in western Massachusetts, Ray Coppinger raises sheep dogs with money he received from the federal government. He worries about winning a Golden Fleece Award--one of Sen. William Proxmire’s booby prizes for novel examples of government waste.

It’s not that Coppinger’s work has no purpose. The Hampshire College biologist has placed 1,000 of his specially trained dogs with ranchers and farmers throughout the country who are trying to protect their livestock from coyotes and wolves without resorting to guns or poison.

What makes Coppinger nervous, however, is knowing that many people do not approve of the way he got his animal research money. His grant was part of a new trend in congressional funding of science that has leading members of the nation’s academic community in an uproar.

More and more, politicians rather than scientists are deciding who gets the federal research money available to universities each year. Lobbyists have entered the scene. Political contributions are greasing the skids.

Key Questions

Presidents of major universities, accustomed to a lion’s share of research dollars, are worried about future funding and about the broader implications. They ask how the nation’s best interests can be served if science funding becomes a spoils system.

Most research money is still governed by merit review. But the critics of the new trend worry that politicization of science is becoming the norm. Even now, they say, marginal projects are gaining the same access to science dollars as work on superconductors or research on the Strategic Defense Initiative.

“It is easy to see how congressional earmarking of research funds could undermine the quality of work we sponsor. Research that does not receive some kind of review could be of very low quality,” said James F. Decker, acting director of the Office of Energy Research in the Department of Energy.

Help From Congress

Work like Coppinger’s at Hampshire College may not cost much--only about $180,000 in federal money to date--and it is welcomed by environmentalists. But Coppinger admits he would not have received his money from the Department of Agriculture without the intercession of Rep. Sylvio O. Conte (R-Mass.) and other members of Congress.

It’s that sort of political intervention that rankles critics. They argue that the nation’s basic research budget is turning into a pork barrel where Coppinger’s dogs and a host of more political animals are allowed to feed while worthier candidates for federal science dollars are going hungry.

Until fairly recently, federal scientific research money was available to colleges and universities mostly on the basis of merit or “peer” review by panels of scientists drawn from government, industry and academia. These reviews are meant to reward proposals that put the best minds to work on solving the nation’s most critical scientific needs. The reviews are conducted by scientists on behalf of federal agencies, such as the departments of Defense and Energy, who put up the money for the research.

But the peers have made enemies.

Members of Congress feel they should have a greater role in deciding who should receive the billions of dollars available for scientific research.

“When did we agree that the peers would cut the melon or decide who gets the money?” asked Louisiana Sen. Russell Long in a 1986 debate over $56 million in Defense Department research funds.

Competing With Giants

Many schools have chafed under the peer-review system. They felt they had little chance of developing their own research potential as long as they had to compete for federal dollars against MIT, Harvard, the University of California and other academic giants. In the eyes of many smaller schools, peer review was simply a way for the rich to get richer.

Recently, The Times set out to identify the winners and losers under peer review and to size up the revolt against the system. The Times relied on a computer analysis directed by Caltech political science professor Bruce Cain.

The Caltech analysis indicates that a handful of big-name, well-fixed schools have fared best under the peer-review system. It shows that, before 1982 and the growth of the pork-barreling trend, 20 schools received 41% of all federal research money allocated to universities. That left 570 academic research institutions to fight for the rest.

(Caltech ranked 29th in receipt of peer-reviewed funds.)

Another study, this one by the General Accounting Office, showed how the peer-review process can be self-serving. It found that in 1984, the top 20 institutional recipients of National Science Foundation grants received 46% of the foundation’s funds. These same schools provided 25% of the people--the peers--who sat on the review panels that decided who would get the money. The General Accounting Office found a similar pattern the same year at the National Institutes of Health. There, 20 schools provided 30% of the people who reviewed institute grant applications. The same schools received 44% of the institute’s peer-reviewed funds.

Appeal to Congress

Beginning in 1982, a number of schools began to bypass peer review and appeal directly to Congress for money. Many got what they asked for--grants to build and equip new laboratories, research hospitals and engineering centers.

However, the Caltech analysis reveals that the amount of money appropriated without merit review is still quite small compared to the total federal outlay for university research projects. Appropriations approved without merit review in 1986 represented only about 3% of the total federal outlay for scientific research.

Small as they are, the controversial appropriations have been growing at a rapid rate, from $1.1 million in 1982 to $336 million last year, and that pattern is what troubles the critics.

“If this becomes the established mode of operation, it will be a bloody free-for-all, and the devil take the hindmost,” said Paul Gray, president of MIT.

Risk Seen

“We are risking the prospect that our scientists and engineers will become increasingly cynical and disillusioned with the process which does not consider academic excellence and merit as its principal criteria in the allocation of funds,” said Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) during a Senate debate last year over the fate of Defense Department funds for scientific research.

Last year, the presidents of the University of California, Stanford, Caltech and the University of Southern California sent a joint letter to Sen. Alan Cranston and other members of the California congressional delegation calling on them to “support the existing merit-review system and resist attempts to earmark funds for research proposals that have not received competitive, merit-based review.”

Earlier this year, 40 of the country’s most prominent research universities voted not to accept direct congressional grants for projects whose merits have not been assessed through competitive review. The schools are part of the 54-member Assn. of American Universities, which has spearheaded the drive against pork-barreled research funding.

Not Impressed

The opponents of peer review are not impressed by the moral indignation expressed by the AAU members and their friends in Congress. They contend that the big schools are mostly worried about losing their stranglehold on federal research dollars.

“When someone says it’s not the money, it’s the principle that’s at stake, you can be damned sure it’s the money they’re worried about. That’s what the peer-review purists are most upset about,” said Roy Meyers, a Washington lobbyist.

Meyers’ firm, Cassidy & Associates, has become a major player on Capitol Hill in the movement to free up research dollars from the constraints of peer review. The firm’s clients have received close to 40% of non-peer-reviewed science funds since 1980, according to Meyers. At the same time, the firm’s tactics, in particular more than $50,000 in contributions to key members of Congress like House Speaker Jim Wright of Texas, have inflamed the debate over research funding.

Meyers says his firm has used time-honored techniques to obtain research money for what he calls “have-not” schools that would have no chance competing against schools like MIT and Stanford that tend to dominate the peer-review process.

Cassidy’s clients clearly appreciate what the firm has done for them.

‘Nothing Unfair’

“We finally learned how to get near the wagon with the grain, and they dropped it into our hands, and we’re glad to take it,” John Silber, president of Boston University, said in an interview with Common Cause magazine. “There’s nothing unfair about that.”

With Cassidy’s help, Boston University obtained $19 million in congressional appropriations to help build a new science and engineering complex.

It may strain credulity to think of Boston University as a “have-not” school. The Caltech analysis found that it ranked 42nd in receipt of peer-reviewed funds.

But Silber insists that, standing in the shadow of Harvard and MIT, Boston University is a poor relation when it comes to federal science funding.

Meyers argues that without the money his firm has been so successful in prying loose from Congress, many schools would never be able to build the research facilities and assemble the faculties that, one day, will make them competitive with the most prestigious institutions.

Venerable Tradition

Peer review is a venerable tradition by which scholars, dating back to the 17th Century, have attempted to evaluate one another’s work. Since the time of Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. government has used peer review to assess the work of scientists seeking government financial assistance. For example, Jefferson called on the American Philosophical Society to evaluate the findings of the Louis and Clark Expedition of 1804, one of the nation’s first federally subsidized scientific undertakings.

But there has always been tension surrounding the peer-review process. For example, scientists preoccupied with basic research have clashed with politicians more interested in funding projects that promise social and economic benefits.

That tension is alive today. Critics of peer review say the peers ignore their obligation to assist schools in depressed areas of the country where research funding could help spur economic revitalization, much as it did in Silicon Valley near Stanford and in the Northeast around Harvard and MIT.

Vital Research

Today, universities perform more than half of the basic research that is converted into commercial technology. So it is easy to see why many members of Congress are eager to develop the research capacity of schools in their own districts.

It is also clear from the Caltech study that the peer-review process has not been a very democratic way of seeding research capacity. Peer review has been a boon only for those regions, including California, the Midwest and the East Coast, where the nation’s top schools are concentrated. It has not done nearly as much for the rest of the country.

In 1982, for example, the Caltech analysis shows that California received more money under peer review than all of the Southern states combined.

The so-called pork-barrel approach to science funding, on the other hand, has begun to reverse that trend. The Caltech analysis indicates that non-peer-reviewed funding by Congress has favored schools and states that had not fared well under peer review.

The study found that the 20 schools receiving the most money under peer review got only 1.3% of the non-peer-reviewed money. By contrast, schools that ranked low in peer-reviewed funds wound up with 71% of the pork-barreled money handed out in 1986.

Quality at Issue

As Congress continues to assert itself in the allocation of science research money, the issue of quality control looms larger. What kind of science will the country get from projects that are no longer reviewed by the nation’s scientific establishment?

Last year, Common Cause claimed that many pork-barreled projects are funded “. . . at the last minute, sometimes literally in the middle of the night. That means there’s no real debate. No careful review. No tiresome hearings on the pros and cons. In a matter of moments, a school can become millions of dollars richer.”

Some lawmakers, like Sen. Bingaman, are convinced that Congress should not be making the decisions. “We should not be the ones trying to decide how each project in the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation or the Defense Department is funded. We simply do not have the expertise to trade off one project for another. Nor do we have the facts to base such decisions.”

Most of the pork-barreled projects are too new to evaluate, but federal science agency spokesmen recently commented on a few of the works in progress.

Early this month, Northwestern University opened a basic research laboratory built with $26 million appropriated by Congress from Department of Energy research funds. The purpose of the laboratory is to anchor a research park in Evanston, Ill., which will focus on ways to make Rust Belt industries, such as heavy machinery manufacturers, more competitive in world markets.

Officials Angered

Officials at the Department of Energy, however, are skeptical of the lab’s prospects, which they say duplicates work being done elsewhere, and the officials are angry about the appropriation.

“They took the money right out of our hide for a project that distinctly parallels other kinds of work we’ve been doing,” said one official who is close to the project.

“If you are talking about the very best way to spend research and development money, that project and a number of others wouldn’t have a prayer,” said another Energy Department official. Both officials asked to remain anonymous.

On the other hand, the department’s Decker likes what he has seen so far of an $11-million high-energy physics project at Florida State University. He said Congress appropriated money for the project from the Energy Department’s budget before the department had a chance to evaluate the project’s potential.

“They’ve done a reasonably good job so far,” Decker said. But he pointed out that Florida State started with a strong faculty in place, an advantage that many schools benefiting from congressional science appropriations lack.

Plum for UNLV

Indeed, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, with only three computer scientists on its faculty, sought and received $3.5 million to build a computer science center, according to a university official.

David Emerson, who heads the engineering department, credited former Nevada Sen. Paul Laxalt with securing the money, which he said the university would not have qualified for under peer review.

Most of the money allotted by Congress without peer review goes to construction projects aimed at filling a critical, nationwide shortage of research facilities. That shortage was estimated recently at $10 billion by a special White House commission formed to study the problem.

There are bills pending in Congress that would pour more money into the building gap and require much of it to go to the “have-not” schools. Many of the bigger schools are also enthusiastic about the bills because they would relieve the pressure that construction puts on money normally reserved for pure research--in other words, the peer-review pot.

But the pending bills call for several hundred million dollars in new appropriations at a time when Congress and the White House are under the gun to reduce federal spending. Many observers are not optimistic about the fate of the proposed legislation.

No Sign of Abating

In the meantime, the trend toward congressional appropriation of existing science money is showing no signs of abating.

The Energy Department budget alone could be tapped for $100 million for projects that members of Congress have introduced.

Moreover, it appears that several of the nation’s more prestigious schools, including a few that have complained loudly about pork barreling, are lining up at the trough.

Columbia went outside the peer-review system in a successful bid for $5 million in federal funds to build a new center for chemical research. (Columbia, however, did not join fellow members of the Assn. of American Universities in condemning the pork-barreling trend.)

In a letter to alumni, MIT President Paul Gray, while deploring pork-barreled funding, made it clear that school officials were working closely with key members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation to protect MIT’s interests.

At Caltech, where former President Marvin L. Goldberger two years ago joined in a written condemnation of the pork-barrel process, officials glumly admit that there may come a day when they, too, will be lobbying for federal funds.

Worrisome Provision

Right now, Caltech officials are particularly worried about a provision of one bill pending in Congress that would limit to 14% the amount of Defense Department block grants that any one state could receive. One of the states that would be hit hardest is California, where schools have received up to 22% of Defense Department block grants. The grants represent the largest chunks of the Defense Department’s university research budget and pay for the most complex kinds of research.

Theodore P. Hurwitz, Caltech’s vice president for institute relations, says the school is lobbying against the bill, but he says there may come a day when Caltech and other universities that have done well under peer review will have to hire full-time lobbyists to go after research money, much the way cities and states go after federal highway money.

“If this pork-barreling, log-rolling business becomes the thing of the future, we will have to be able to get in on it,” Hurwitz said.

Research fellows Kin Ha and David Lipin assisted in preparation of the Caltech analysis done for this story.

RESEARCH WINNERS AND LOSERS

A Caltech computer analysis directed for The Times by Prof. Bruce Cain identified “winners” and “losers” of scientific research money available on the basis of merit or “peer” review. Some politicians now argue that they should have a hand in distributing research money.

BEFORE 1982

* 20 schools got 41% of federal research money to universities.

* 570 schools fought for the rest.

The 20 schools, by rank:

Johns Hopkins University

MIT.

Stanford

University of Washington

Columbia

UCLA

Cornell

University of California at San Diego

University of Wisconsin

Harvard

Yale

University of Michigan

University of Pennsylvania

University of California at Berkeley

University of California, S. Francisco

USC

University of Minnesota

University of Illinois, Urbana

University of Chicago

Penn State University

(Caltech ranked 29th)

The decision-makers:

A study by the General Accounting Office found that in 1984, 20 schools got 46% of National Science Foundation grants; these schools provided 25% of the people who sat on review panels that determined who would get the money. The study found a similar pattern at the National Institutes of Health, where 20 schools provided 30% of the people who reviewed institute grant applications and received 44% of the research money for schools.

SINCE 1982

* Many schools began to bypass peer review, appeal to Congress for money and receive grants for laboratories, hospitals and engineering centers.

* Although these grants represent only about 3% of available research money, the amount awarded in this fashion is climbing fast, going from $1.1 million in 1982 to $336 million in 1986.

* Only 1.3% of these grants have gone to the 20 listed above.

* Forty universities have voted not to accept congressional grants.

HOW STATES COMPARE

The Caltech analysis compared the percentage of grants by state from Congress in 1985-86 (black bars) with those under peer review in 1982 (hatched). California universities, for example, got much less in congressional grants than under peer review.

Illinois

New York

Mass.

Alabama

Florida

Mississippi

California

0% 3% 6% 9% 12% 15%