Congress tries to reset science grants, wants every one to be “groundbreaking”

If lawmakers get their way, research like recent Higgs findings could disappear.

by John Timmer

Due to Congressional rules, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology had to choose new leadership this year. At the time, we opined that almost any choice would be a bad one. The Democrats had been neglecting the committee, leaving three seats unfilled, while the Republicans filled their seats with people who were openly hostile to a number of fields of science such as evolution and climate research. Late last year, the House leadership made its intentions clear, attempting to crowdsource a search for federal research grants that people considered wasteful spending.

Now, Congress is following through on that effort. Earlier this month, the House committee held hearings that featured the National Science Foundation (NSF) director and the chair of the board that oversees the science agency. Again, grants made to social scientists were held up as examples of wasteful spending. The committee's new chair, Lamar Smith (R-TX), used these to suggest that "[w]e might be able to improve the process by which NSF makes its funding decisions."

Rather than targeting only grants in the social sciences, Smith is reportedly preparing a bill that would revise the criteria for all grants funded by the agency. According to ScienceInsider, the bill would require the NSF director to certify that every grant met the following conditions:

• The grant must "advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and... secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science"
• It must also be "the finest quality, groundbreaking, and answer questions or solve problems that are of utmost importance to society at large"
• The grant should not be "duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation or other Federal science agencies"

The last of these is a reasonable requirement, but it already exists. Both the NSF and National Institutes of Health have rules that are intended to block new grants that have previously received funding. Mistakes may sometimes get made—it's hard to keep track of who's being paid to do what across multiple federal agencies—but there's already an effort to limit this.

The other two requirements, however, completely misunderstand both basic research and the role of the National Science Foundation. Basic research is largely about exploring the unknown; by definition, it's almost impossible to tell which areas of research will end up being groundbreaking or have commercial applications. And the NSF is specifically tasked with funding basic research and science education.

It's informative to contrast these rules with a current example of NSF funding. Prior to last year, the NSF had no idea whether the Higgs boson really existed or whether it would behave like the one predicted by the Standard Model. Yet the foundation put millions of dollars into the Large Hadron Collider and the support infrastructure behind it. So far, the Higgs is looking rather mundane, and it may never have commercial applications or implications for society at large. The bill, as structured, would appear to mean the end of funding for that kind of work.

This isn't the only recent example of Congress altering the rules for research, either. Last month, Tom Coburn (R-OK) sent a letter to the director of the National Science Foundation, in which he listed a series of grants funded by the agency were a waste of taxpayer money. Shortly thereafter, Coburn added an amendment to a funding bill that would block the ability of the NSF to fund political science unless the grant can be certified as "promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States." That amendment was passed as part of the budget.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has also come under fire from Congress. The House Energy and Commerce Committee is investigating the large public communication budget given to the National Cancer Institute, and while they had him on the Hill, House members grilled NIH director Francis Collins about a paper by researcher Stanton Glantz. Glantz studies public health and tobacco regulations, often using documents obtained from cigarette makers during lawsuits. In this paper, he concludes that the political infrastructure that helped organize the Tea Party movement was developed originally to oppose tobacco legislation.

Needless to say, that did not go over well with the members of that organization within Congress.

With the possible exception of the budget allocated to PR and public awareness at the National Cancer Institute, most of these issues come back to an uneasiness about the research itself. People either don't like it or don't understand why peer reviewers rated it so highly, so they assume it is either an error or a waste of money. In this case, their response seems to be to try to intervene in the process of grant approval, something that's normally left to expert peer reviewers.