New Directions in Science Funding
One of the few spending priorities that the Clinton administration and congressional Republicans have been able to agree on in recent years is the need to increase federally funded scientific research. In a speech Friday at Caltech, President Clinton outlined increases of $2.8 billion in next year’s science and technology budget. But the lion’s share of the additional money goes not to the politically popular National Institutes of Health but to lesser known programs, some of them supervised by agencies in the middle of political scandals.
Some Republican leaders are already questioning the president’s $227-million increase for research into nanotechnology, which deals with manipulating tiny bits of matter. The programs would be supervised by the Department of Energy, widely accused of failing to adequately safeguard the nation’s nuclear secrets, and by NASA, which had a host of space mission flops last year.
What’s needed are solutions, not confrontation. Possible security breaches in the Energy Department and technical carelessness at NASA are as much the fault of both political parties’ inadequate legislative oversight as they are of the agencies’ policies and administrators.
As Congress begins to evaluate Clinton’s science and technology budget this week, it should focus on how to maintain the nation’s scientific leadership, not on tactical battles with the White House.
The most defensible element of that budget is a $675-million increase in funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF), by far the largest increase in the agency’s 50-year history. The foundation has won only paltry increases in previous years, largely because its important role in fostering scientific progress and economic prosperity is poorly understood.
While Washington lavishes money on institutes set up to cure specific diseases, it has long slighted the NSF, which funds half of all nonmedical federally funded research. But the foundation has generated many scientific and medical discoveries, including magnetic resonance imaging. Most important, the NSF helps researchers develop the kinds of fundamental understanding that lead to breakthroughs. Take acclaimed AIDS researcher David Ho, a Caltech graduate and Time magazine’s 1996 man of the year. His pioneering work in protease inhibitors, the most effective AIDS control yet developed, grew not out of biology but from his studies in math and physics. You cannot put a price tag on pure science.
Clinton’s science and technology budget only begins to address growing national problems like the lack of workers with training in nanotechnology and other emerging areas of scientific industry. But legislators should welcome its sensible call for public investment in the basic sciences--those fertile fields where researchers like David Ho work.
