A particularly bad idea

I haven’t written many posts on this blog that are political in nature, in fact I think the only political topic that’s come across is the need for new investment in the US ice breaker fleet.  A particularly troubling bill is under development in congress however, titled the “Quality in Research Act”, that, if passed, will do anything but guarantee high quality in our nation’s research.  As a working scientist it is difficult to not have some opinions about it.

A number of blogs have given the proposed act a pretty complete treatment, in particular this post on AmericanScience.  Rather than speculate on the motivation of the bill’s author (Lamar Smith (R-TX); naivety?  anti-science philosophy?), and rather than repeat what’s being said in other forums, I’ll just add a couple of points that seem to be missing from the discussion.  According to AmericanScience the bill will include new criteria for National Science Foundation (NSF) funded projects.  To meet the proposed criteria a project:

1.  Is in the interest of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science.

2.  Is the finest quality, is ground breaking, and answers questions or solves problems that are of utmost importance to society at large; and

3.  Is not duplicative of other research projects being funded by the foundation or other Federal science agencies.

All three of these criteria have some deep flaws as written.  I’ll address the second and third criteria, which are the more troubling.  But first, to establish some context, what exactly is the National Science Foundation and how much money does the federal government spend on research?  NSF is one of several government or quasi-government entities that provides Federal funds for research.  It is not the largest such entity, the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the research branches of the Department of Defense (DOD) have much larger budgets.  NASA also has a much larger budget, but the amount spent on actual research is a bit less than what NSF invests.  NOAA, USGS, DOE, EPA and other agencies also conduct research, but this research tends to be mission-oriented and primarily conducted in-house.

The Obama administration’s request for NSF for 2014 amounts to $7.6 billion, a pretty small fraction of the federal budget.  By comparison the NIH request for 2014 is $31.33 billion.  I don’t begrudge NIH and NIH funded investigators a penny of that amount, but the difference highlights a flaw in how the Federal government thinks about science.  The mission of NIH is fundamentally different than that of NSF; the majority of NIH funds goes to applied research – concepts that had a genesis in basic research but that have matured to the point where they can begin to solve people’s problems.  NSF is the primary source of funding for that genesis – it is the single largest source of Federal funding for basic research.

This gets right to the heart of what’s wrong with the second point in the proposed criteria.  It suggests that the authors hope to eliminate the concept of basic research, by requiring projects to solve problems already identified as having the utmost importance to society.  I posit that many of the currently identified problems (and/or currently employed solutions) faced by society would not have been identified under this constraint.  A strength of the current process of peer review within NSF (and the other federal research agencies) is that one expert who sees a possible, unsolved piece of a potential problem can decide to pursue it further, if they can convince a jury of their peers and a project manager (typically a senior scientist on loan to NSF from academia) that the concept has merit.  This is no easy task; something like 10 % of all grant proposals to NSF actually get funded, but a well-made case stands a chance.

In the worst-case and rare scenario where NSF allocates funds to a duplicative or flawed project (a typical NSF project might be $300-400,000 over a three year period), these public funds are still not going to waste.  Unlike in the private sector there is no accumulation of wealth in academia.  Federal money flowing into academia flows right back out (typically to the private sector, but also right back to Federal coffers).  Of $400,000 allocated to a university professor for a 3 year grant, 50 % (varying by institution) goes to the host university as overhead.  With these funds the university supports capital projects (providing jobs), hires staff (more jobs), and improves the educational experience of its students (so they can get jobs).  Since the funded professor is unlikely to have time to actually conduct the research, they will hire a graduate student (a job, at less than the annual earnings of a Starbucks barista) and probably employ a couple of undergraduates part time.  The graduate student will need materials and equipment to carry out the research, which funnels a portion of the NSF investment straight to the private sector.  If there’s anything left from that original $400,000 the professor and graduate students might present their findings at a conference (more private sector – US airlines only, by existing rules!), and the professor might actually pay themselves some salary (they’ve been busy teaching, advising, conducting outreach, and otherwise supporting their institution while the graduate student carries out the project – but they are typically only paid part time for these activities).

That got a little longer than I originally intended, so I’ll only raise a quick objection to the third point in the proposed criteria.  It makes no sense to enforce a rule against duplicate research for two reasons.  First, the scientific community is quite good a policing itself on this account.  The reviewers on an NSF proposal review panel are working scientists.  Their own grants are competing for the same limited pool of funds.  Does Lamar Smith really think that they aren’t going to be harsh on a proposed project that will unnecessarily duplicate work already being funded?  Projects do need to overlap, and problems do need to be probed from different angles by different research groups.  It is probably not clear to someone outside a given field however, when two project are complimentary and when they simply duplicate work.  So why not leave this assessment to the experts on a review panel?

Clearly there is a lot that the scientific community can do better, in terms of how it conducts research and how it holds its members accountable.  There is a lot of momentum in the community to improve these things.  Despite these shortcomings science has done a pretty good job, fostering a system of (reasonably) open exchange, and a system for evidenced-based progression that is unparalleled elsewhere in society.  I can’t resist the barb that it’s a bit presumptuous for congress to question this system, at least before they develop one that works equally well…