Pushing U.S. Into Future With 1970s Vocabulary

Charred, smoldering and in ruins: The budget bills pending in Congress leave the Clinton Administration’s ambitious science and technology agenda looking as if it were zapped by one of those space-based X-ray lasers from the Strategic Defense Initiative that never quite got built. The destruction is near-total. Never has a sitting President’s programs promising new public-private partnerships for innovation been so thoroughly extirpated so soon after launch.

The Commerce Department’s Advanced Technology Program--a $430-million-plus effort to turn the National Institutes of Standards and Technology into a high-tech venture capitalist--is toast. The Technology Reinvestment Program, designed to encourage commercial participation in defense technology development, is targeted for extinction.

Even a half-billion-dollar “national security” initiative to build flat-panel displays for the Pentagon now shrivels into silicon scraps. Techno-”welfare” for rich corporations with billion-dollar research and development budgets of their own is being slashed as rigorously and assiduously as welfare for the poor.

Of course, in the context of the biggest proposed budget cuts in American history, there’s nothing special about the dismantling of the Clinton science and technology apparat. And why should there be? Everything else is getting cut.

What’s disturbingly different, however, is that while the Republican majority cheerfully fuses ideas and ideology when they take on the nation’s health care and welfare budgets, their take on federal science and technology budgets seems oddly disjointed. It looks decoupled not only from the marketplace, but from the marketplace of ideas. The same politicians championing the virtues of America’s “Third Wave” future prescribe federal science and technology policies that would have been deemed simplistic during America’s agrarian heyday.

The reflexive anti-Washington, pro-market, neo-federalist sentiment that so energizes the Right obscures the essential issues that need to be openly debated: What role should the federal government play in supporting non-defense-related research in science and technology? Further, how far should the federal government go in defining regulations and standards that promote innovation in the marketplace? The Republicans insist that market forces are always the best arbiter--but that obviously is not true.

Let’s make these conceptually flavored questions more specific and provocative: Would an Internet--with its unique, non-proprietary, open, flexible, expandable, multimedia architecture--have been an inevitable byproduct of market forces alone? Or did the federal government’s active participation play a valuable role in shaping a new kind of medium?

Did federal safety standards and fuel performance standards foisted on the automobile and aerospace industries over the past 25 years promote both technical innovation and customer satisfaction? Or did their costs to consumers and the manufacturers clearly outweigh the benefits?

Was the agricultural extension service, created to promote the decentralized sharing and diffusion of agricultural innovation among farmers and researchers, an appropriate medium for a central government to support? What about the Morrill Act, which funded the rise of land-grant colleges and universities?

Does a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to monitor the emergence of potentially dangerous viruses and microorganisms make more sense as a federal or state institution?

The answers to any one of these questions speaks volumes about why the proffered policy choice between “centralized government” and “market forces” is a false one. In a democracy, of course, the government is the marketplace and vice versa.

Instead of having the courage to deal with these kinds of issues honestly and directly, we have legislators who prefer to cast them into anachronistic vocabularies where it’s OK for government to fund “basic” and “pure” science but ever so bad for taxpayers to sponsor anything that might be “commercial” research and development.

But traditional definitions of science and technology have become dangerously obsolete. In key research fields, from computer software to new materials to molecular biology, the distinction between basic science and applied technology has blurred into meaninglessness. The applied technology drives the basic science every bit as much as the basic science drives the applied technology.

For example, finding the umpteenth gene marker in the human genome is “basic science.” But building a machine that lets biologists find gene markers 10 times faster is called “technology.” Guess which gets funded? Is a data-compression algorithm that squeezes five video streams onto a single copper wire by using a novel topological equation an example of pure science or commercial technology? What if the student who discovered that algorithm is doing his thesis funded by the National Science Foundation but while working at a Japanese electronics company?

Just as it would be crazy to write banking legislation for tomorrow that focused on passbook savings accounts, legislators are kidding themselves if they believe they are doing taxpayers a service by pretending that federally funded science in the 1990s can be managed with the same vocabulary it was in 1975. It can’t.

One of the biggest lies inside the Beltway is that “you can’t beat something with nothing.” Of course you can, as long as you’re writing the checks. Say this for the Clintonistas: At least this Administration presented a model of how the federal government should ally and align itself with industry to facilitate innovation in science and technology. The new Republican majority has yet to present a coherent proposal that explains what kinds of investments and returns taxpayers have a right to expect from their federal R&D; dollars. It is a most glaring policy weakness from a group that wants to push America into the future.