0.11 The carter and reagan years: 1977-89  (Page 8/10)

Important issues in this largely policy-for-science category included: the level and distribution of support required to maintain the national research system; how to deal with the physical erosion of university research facilities; establishing criteria for selecting among competing, large-scale scientific “megaprojects”; and providing appropriate incentives for students to pursue postgraduate study in science and engineering.

White house science council

Sensitive to criticisms that the OSTP during the Carter years had been too inward-looking, Keyworth established a White House Science Council (WHSC) in 1982, with members drawn from universities, industry, and government laboratories. The stated purpose was to assist the science advisor in examining issues affecting federal science agencies and to conduct studies of programmatic and policy problems cutting across agency lines.

Unlike the defunct PSAC or the aborted PCST, Keyworth’s council was responsible to the science advisor rather than the president, had access to the president only through the science advisor, and had no explicit authority to set its own agenda. Thus it failed to provide the direct, independent channel of communication between the president and the scientific community that Golden advocated, although it did provide a channel for external advice to reach OSTP.

Several WHSC reports, including Research in Very High Performance Computing (November 1985) and the Report of the White House Science Council Panel on the Health of U.S. Colleges and Universities (February 1986), made strong pleas for stronger cross-agency coordination. But while a few specific recommendations of these reports were reflected in subsequent budgets, their implicit, collective plea for more serious attention to fundamental national research system issues went unheard. By 1987, bipartisan congressional resolve to control a politically unacceptable federal budget deficit killed any chances that budgetary support for the national research system would grow at all. The Graham-Rudman-Hollins Balanced Budget Act of 1985 required that the federal budget be balanced by 1991. However, when 1991 approached, Congress repealed this legislation.

Status of the science policy act

It is hard to fault the Reagan administration for failing to resolve problems that had beset American science policy for more than forty years. But the administration was sharply (and fairly) criticized for failing to recognize that a strategic reorientation in science policy might have provided it tools for addressing serious national problems, including economic problems. Other nations, particularly in East Asia, were implementing successful, coherent industrial science policies that posed a serious challenge to the global economic position of the United States. A close reading of the Science Policy Act’s legislative history could have offered a framework for such a reoriented policy. But by 1981, even Congress seemed to have abandoned any serious attempt either to convince the executive branch to adopt a broad, strategic approach to science policy, as intended by the 1976 act, or to coerce it to do so by means of its oversight authority or its control of the federal budget.