0.13 The clinton years: 1993-2001  (Page 2/7)

Gibbons and Lane convinced the president to appoint outstanding members to PCAST, which produced reports that often caught the president’s attention. It apparently was Gibbons who convinced Clinton to upgrade FCCSET to the status of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC).

Nstc

President Clinton established the NSTC as a cabinet-level council by Executive Order on November 23, 1993. In addition to the heads of the principal science- and technology-related agencies who had been members of FCCSET, NSTC’s membership included the Secretaries of State, Defense, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Education; the directors of the Office of Management and Budget; the Central Intelligence Agency and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; and the Assistants to the President for National Security Affairs, Economic Policy, and Domestic Policy.

Most of the NSTC’s work was carried out by the following nine standing committees (each chaired by a senior federal agency official and co-chaired by an associate director nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate):

• Committee on Health, Safety, and Food
• Committee on Fundamental Science
• Committee on Computing, Information, and Communications
• Committee on Environment and Natural Resources
• Committee on Technological Innovation
• Committee on Education and Training
• Committee on Transportation
• Committee on National Security
• Committee on International Science, Engineering, and Technology.

Both of Clinton’s science advisors made use of NSTC to help determine R&D budget priorities and identify cross-agency initiatives that could be packaged as coherent budget requests to the Congress.

John h. gibbons

In 1989, Gibbons, then director of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), had posited that, “Maybe we are working on an outmoded paradigm about who we are and what our world really is. It was once that we had a simple and clear vision of who we are—leader of the free world, saving the world from the darkness of communism. Now we see anachronisms in terms of world security. Is there a new way for us to lead? Should it involve, say, provisions of goods and services without environmental damage? Should that be the new world focus for us?” Wil Lepkowski, C&EN News (April 3, 1989), 12.

Gibbons must have been at least somewhat aware that the new paradigm he called for would soon be articulated as a national system of innovation by Nelson, Rosenberg and their contributors. In any event, the scientific community applauded Clinton’s selection of him as science advisor. Gibbons has published a collection of his writings divided into a book with two parts: the first from 1990, when he was still a senior staff member at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to 1992 when he was nominate as Clinton’s science advisor. The second part deals with the years 1992-1996, while still serving as science advisor pending nomination and confirmation of his successor. John H. Gibbons, This Gifted Age: Science and Technology at the Millennium (New York: Springer Verlag, 1997). A physicist who had been on the faculty at the University of Tennessee and subsequently a senior member of the staff at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, he had served as Director of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) since 1979, and was widely recognized for having made it function as it was meant to when it was established during the 1960s. The prime mover in the creation of OTA was Congressman Emilio Q. Daddario (D-CT), chair of the Science Committee of the House Committee on Science and Technology. After being defeated in his attempt to be elected Governor of Connecticut, Daddario became the first Director of OTA. However, he was judged as being too attuned to the wishes of his former congressional colleagues to prove effective in that position. His successor, Russell Train, was criticized for taking inordinate amounts of time to complete reports requested by the bipartisan, bicameral committee with oversight responsibilities for OTA. Gibbons struck the right balance between being attuned to balancing requests from the oversight committee for studies on the probable downstream effects of technologies, and maintaining the independence of OTA, as well as balancing the need for thorough investigation of a given topic with the issuance of reports in a timely manner.