Science (de)funding

Note: I had intended this post to be a quick discussion of how science funding supports jobs, and why we need more science funding at the federal level.  As you can see below, I never quite got there, but I hope this entry has a couple of points of interest.

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I don’t write about politics very often on this blog.  I follow the news best I can but I’m not what you’d call an astute political observer.  Given the large number of people who are, or who at least pretend to be, I usually feel there isn’t that much that I can add to the conversation.  I think that this is a sentiment that is shared by a lot of my peers.  Like most scientists I prefer to keep politics at arm’s length (maybe at an arm + leg’s length) and spend my time and energy doing science.

This is, of course, totally unrealistic.  Although there is a growing philanthropic contribution to science funding – a much welcome contribution that, nonetheless, raises its own set of issues – the bulk of funding for basic research in the United States comes from the federal government, and that’s become a real problem.  Looking for data on this I found some interesting numbers on R&D spending as a fraction of GDP compiled by the World Bank.  The US is not the largest spender, falling behind S. Korea, Israel, and much of northern Europe, but it re-invests a substantial proportion (2.7 %) of its GDP in R&D, an amount consistent with most of the developing world.

The problem, however, is that the vast majority of this funding is being committed by and spent in the private sector.  Nothing wrong with private sector spending on R&D, of course, but the private sector has a very different mission and motivation than the public sector.  Their goal is to maximize profit in the near term by 1) developing new products 2) lowering the cost to produce existing products and 3) expanding the market for new and existing products.  Research that supports these objectives is considered applied research.  By contrast federal funding is largely responsible for sustaining basic research.  Basic research is rarely undirected – the peer review process in place at federal agencies is, if anything, overly conservative on this – but it is often undertaken without a specific commercial application in mind (though there are plenty of exceptions, the search for novel antibiotic compounds being one that comes immediately to mind).

I think that most industry leaders recognize that basic research is a critical feedstock of industry (I suspect that all devices, algorithms, and processes have some ancestry in basic research).  There may however, be a growing sense that even applied research does not belong entirely in the private sector, or at least that the companies best known for a high level of R&D spending have not always been the top performers** (whatever happened to the Bell telephone company anyway?).  I tend to agree with this idea.  I like to think of public sector science as a common well, where all companies, innovators, and entrepreneurs can come for new ideas and solutions.  The well is sustained by the federal government with the money that everyone pays into the system.

So how does the depth of the public well stack up against private sector R&D spending?  The 2014 US GDP was 16.77 trillion dollars; 2.7 % of that amount is 452 billion dollars.  The chart below shows federal research spending by government agency, tally it all up and you get 68.1 billion dollars, or roughly 15 % of total US R&D spending.  Note that not all of this funding can be described as basic research, in fact the only agencies with a real mandate for basic research are NASA and NSF.  More on that momentarily.  Before we get to the point I want to quickly address the little blip in funding for 2009.  That was my second year in grad school and I remember all the hubbub about stimulus spending to “jump start” the economy (sort of like wiring a D-cell battery to your dead car and hoping for the best) – lots of people got grants funded that year.  This increase in funding produced some good science, but in the long run I fear that its done as much damage as it did good.  The temporary increase in funding provided for many graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and staff members.  Because funding levels were not sustained, however, these positions could not be maintained.  What happened to all these people is a great question that nobody seems particularly keen to explore.  It seems unlikely that they were absorbed into permanent jobs in academia; hiring was low during the recession and has been tepid during the recovery.  Many of these workers probably moved on to the private sector, but it also seems like there are a lot more “soft money”* scientists these days.

To finally get to the point.  Recent weeks have seen a disturbing escalation in the rhetoric against basic science in the House of Representatives.  At the core is the re-authorization of the America COMPETES Act, elements of which will pretty much insure that America does anything but.  There are a few troubling things about this bill, which have been widely discussed in other blogs and the mainstream media, including an under-the-table redistribution of funds between NSF directorates and sly spending level freezes.  The goal was apparently to enact a deep cut to the Geosciences Directorate (one of the seven major organizational units within NSF) without making it obvious.  The bill was accompanied by some rather silly statements by John Culberson (R-Tx), chair of the House Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee, regarding the role of the Geosciences Directorate within NSF, and Senator Ted Cruz (also R-Tx, imagine that!) on whether the geosciences are a “hard” science.  It isn’t hard to imagine why Republican’s want to take aim at the Geosciences Directorate, which funds a lot of climate science work (they are also taking aim at Earth observing programs within NASA).  It’s enough to make one wish for the Bush years, when science funding saw steady, albeit slow, growth, and funding for climate-critical projects like the Orbiting Carbon Observatory.  The comments by Ted Cruz however, are baffling, as the Geosciences are among the most quantitatively rigorous disciplines of modern science.  I can only hope that enough petroleum geologists and engineers back in Texas were offended by the remark to earn Ted a jeer or two in his home state.

On a practical level I suspect that most Republican members of Congress, like their Democratic counterparts, have no idea what they are talking about when they speak about science, the scientific community, and science funding.  I’ve had the pleasure of having some conversations with Democrat science staffers in both houses and I was shocked at how little they new about what science funding is actually used for.  This point was brought home in a recent editorial in Science, where NSF director France Córdova described the surprise expressed by a Congressional delegation upon learning that the entire Antarctic Program is funded through the Geosciences Directorate.  It is, sadly, the prerogative of the Congressional leadership to execute a personal vendetta against the climate science community, but we can expect a lot of collateral damage, including to the industry partners of these same Republicans.

In addition to the Antarctic and Arctic Programs, a quick look at the Directorate of Geosciences website reveals programs for:

Tectonics!  Probably best not to defund earthquake research…

Hydrology!  I keep hearing stuff about a drought or something, but it’s probably nothing…

Biology!  Back in the day biology was considered evil.  But now it has John Culberson’s full support.  Hey geosciences, thanks for getting us off the s–t list!

Fellowships!  When the Republicans talk about jobs, they don’t mean jobs for those people.  If industry wants highly skilled geologists and informaticians they can find them in some other country…

This wandered pretty far from where I started, so the take home points are:

1.  In the US, industry spends a lot of money on R&D.  It would be better for everyone, and more economical, if the federal government took on more of this responsibility.

2.  The federal government allocates a very small portion of the federal budget to NSF and NASA, the two agencies that conduct the most basic research.

3.  These same two agencies are being raked over the coals for producing high quality science that the congressional leadership objects to.

4.  You can do something about this.  Please let your Senator know you object to the House cuts for science, and that the Senate should not follow suit.  No one will read your email, but the volume of email traffic matters for something.  The American Geophysical Union, the largest geosciences professional organization in the US, has an easy web interface for emailing your senators.  They’ll even provide some boilerplate text, I added the following to my message:

As a working research biologist I’m deeply troubled by the attacks against my colleagues working in Earth and space sciences, of which this budget issue is only the most recent iteration.  From previous conversations with staffers in both houses I feel there is an under appreciation of how federal science spending supports higher education and jobs across the United States.  University faculty, and faculty at non-profit research centers, are typically dependent on federal grants for 25 to 50 % of their salary.  Lab managers, technicians, administrative assistants, graduate students, and researchers not on a tenure track are typically entirely dependent on federal grants (i.e. they receive no institutional support).  The proposed funding cuts are an academic job killing program that the country can ill afford – many of these positions are essential training for future academics and future industry researchers.  I encourage you to not only oppose this measure, but to adopt language that accurately reflects the possible ramifications.

* There are two types of science positions in academia.  Hard money positions, such as a typical university professorship, come with at least partial institutional support, usually for 6 or 9 months of salary each year.  The researcher is expected to raise the rest of their salary, and all their research expenses, from grants.  A researcher in a soft money position has a lab and position at an institution, but has no (or little) salary support.  This is great for universities, which pay almost nothing for soft money positions (facilities costs are offset by grant overhead) but benefit equally from the products of soft money and hard money research.

** I’m not supporting the assertion this article makes, which even at a quick glance is based on shoddy methods, but the idea might have merit.