Everybody Needs Standards

When science Nobelists make public-policy pronouncements, they are likely to be scientifically sophisticated and politically naive. But 25 American winners of the prize in physics have bravely entered the political fray in Washington over Republican efforts to abolish the Department of Commerce.

They fear that a casualty of this firefight between the Republican majority in Congress and President Clinton will be a little known but scientifically crucial Commerce agency--the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It was founded 94 years ago as the National Bureau of Standards and has its roots in the constitutional authority of Congress to “fix the standard of weights and measures.”

Scientists are worried mainly about NIST’s eight in-house laboratories that serve as impartial stewards of measures and standards for all science and industry. The labs maintain an atomic clock that is the world’s most accurate timepiece and set uniform standards for telecommunications, electric power grids, defense components, radiation therapy and countless other areas. Their 1,304 researchers also do the most advanced research in metrology, the science of measurement.

Unfortunately, the Clinton Administration turned this obscure agency into a political football by using it as the branch onto which to graft an American industrial policy. Thus NIST became host to the Advanced Technology Program, ATP, which gives large grants to industry to pursue early research into promising industrial technology.

Now consuming nearly two-thirds of NIST’s budget, ATP is the tail that wags the dog. Conservatives call ATP “corporate welfare.”

ATP has little to do with the basic-research labs. In fact, House budget plans, while axing ATP, give the labs a healthy 9.3% increase next year. But now several bills threaten them. The most drastic, authored by a freshman Republican, Rep. Dick Chrysler of Michigan, would sell the labs to private industry. Others would reorganize them out of Commerce.

It is astounding that anyone thinks that private industry can or will do this kind of maintenance of common standards and basic research at a time when major companies like AT&T; and IBM are drastically cutting back on such work.

Speaker Newt Gingrich has often affirmed that the federal government has a key role in supporting basic scientific research that has no immediate commercial payoff. Given budget constraints, Republicans have largely adhered to that notion. House appropriations, still to be reconciled with the Senate’s, increase basic research support generally by 1.6%.

Scientists have historically cried wolf even when Congress was generous, and their cries now might be discounted. But when it comes to NIST labs, the Nobelists are right.