One Bureaucrat Who Made a Difference

Were he born and raised in Japan, Erich Bloch might well have become there what he became here: a tough-minded maverick government bureaucrat championing a unique brand of industrial policy.

That’s because Bloch, not unlike the folks at Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry, takes an unapologetically realpolitik view of how wealth and knowledge are created.

“I consider that, in order to be a world power, that you have to be in command of your own economy and you have to have an economy that can support your own aspirations,” says Bloch, who recently retired as director of the National Science Foundation, the federal government’s primary funding arm for the physical sciences. “I don’t think you can have that kind of economy without an appropriate base in science and technology.”

It’s not clear that Bloch’s successor at the NSF, physicist Walter Massey, will be able to champion the integration of science, technology and economic growth as firmly as Bloch has.

In the vast scheme of America’s science and technology infrastructures, the NSF is an insignificant little agency with a pipsqueak budget that had less political influence than your typical junior senator. Despite its bureaucratic puniness, Bloch adroitly maneuvered the NSF into the turbulent center of national debates about global competitiveness, industrial policy, big science versus little science, university-industry relationships, equipment and education.

While other agency budgets shriveled, Bloch oversaw a near doubling of the NSF’s total funding to more than $2 billion annually. Where most Administration officials performed the Adam Smith hallelujah chorus, Bloch publicly argued that not only did government have a crucial role to play in science and technology, it should have a bigger role.

By most measures, Bloch ultimately proved to be a ruthlessly successful bureaucratic infighter who managed to garner both attention and resources for his agency. In fact, Bloch’s tenure at NSF is a case study of bureaucratic entrepreneurship in the creation of a subtle industrial policy by a man who is very blunt.

The original knock on Bloch--now in semi-retirement in Washington--was that the 32-year International Business Machines engineering veteran couldn’t care less about fundamental science research. Critics said he would turn the National Science Foundation into the National Technology Foundation. He would throw over funding for basic scientific research for the filthy lucre of commercialization. What’s more, he would play politics to get what he wanted.

The reality was that Bloch went into NSF with an extremely clever agenda. He would preserve the agency’s traditional core scientific constituency but use it to create new alliances with state governments, industry and venture capital. He would use NSF money not just to fund science but to fund coalitions that would fund science.

The NSF engineering “centers of excellence,” such as CalTech’s in biotechnology, launched at universities around the country, created structures that would be a magnet for academic, state, local and corporate funding. Bloch skillfully offered NSF matching grants to get other organizations to pony up.

“It’s not just what NSF spends,” says Bloch, “but how it influences the whole behavior of its communities and the relationships it builds with states and universities; it’s a catalyst for things. You’ve also got to involve industry in science.”

The whole idea was to seed structures that could become semi-autonomous and attract NSF-independent political support. In this, Bloch’s critics were right on the mark: Bloch was more than willing to play politics to get what he wanted because, in Washington, that’s how you get what you want. Bloch explicitly understood that NSF could leverage its funding to broaden its constituencies. More constituencies give you more clout. Bloch wanted clout. His bet is that successful innovation can come from clever infrastructures as well as clever individuals.

What’s more, the NSF broadened its vocabulary. Bloch argued--rightly--that there was a false dichotomy between science and technology.

“There’s no dividing line between the two,” says Bloch. “The knowledge flows back and forth. The separation between science and technology is a bad separation--there’s no reality behind it.”

That, of course, became the rationale for funding more engineering and technology research. For the most part, the NSF directorates were sharp enough to create explicit links between basic science research and the technology missions.

Indeed, Bloch once threatened to bar Japanese nationals from access to U.S. national labs unless Japanese labs made themselves more accessible to American researchers. The NSF played a big role in opening up Japan’s much-vaunted Fifth Generation computer project to foreign researchers.

Perhaps the most important shift at the NSF under Bloch was the emphasis on infrastructure development--whether that infrastructure be science equipment in university labs, the education of undergraduates, supercomputing networks for universities or new industry-academy research ties.

Erich Bloch’s NSF confirms the belief that a bureaucrat with an agenda who knows how to grow new constituencies can have an impact far beyond the original mission of his agency. Bloch has been criticized for building constituencies and new institutions at the expense of funding science. He would argue that these constituencies and institutions will be the future of science funding.

The most revealing thing about Bloch’s NSF tenure is that it was less about research budgets than the culture of science. Bloch sees science as a complex system of commerce, academe, federal and state participation and multidisciplinary teams. He sees arbitrary distinctions between basic research and applied technology as just that--arbitrary. Most important, he doesn’t see science as something separate from the society that’s sponsoring it.

There’s a simple way to measure success in Washington. Did you leave the department in better shape than you found it? Bloch did. His successor, Walter Massey, has his work cut out for him.