0.2 Introduction  (Page 2/6)

While this was by far the largest and most coordinated federal effort to formulate science policy, it was not the first. Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and others at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 proposed granting the new federal government authority over the conduct and support of science (the proposal failed, largely because it was seen as taking too much power away from the states). The Civil War years saw an expanded federal reach into science aided by the absence of opponents, who were sitting in the Confederate capital in Richmond. The 1862 Morrill Act established a system of land grant colleges and the 1863 chartering of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) created a science advisor to the federal government. Another 1863 act led directly to the 1889 establishment of the Department of Agriculture (USDA). In 1884, Congress tasked the Allison Commission with determining whether there should be a federal Department of Science. With the onset of World War I, the federal government created the National Research Council in 1916.

But the Franklin Roosevelt administration the first to try its hand at long-range science-policy planning. Roosevelt’s New Deal introduced two novel ideas regarding federal authority over science: it asserted the right and responsibility of the federal government to become directly involved with issues previously considered off limits; and it advanced the then-novel idea that new programs and budget initiatives should include long-range plans.

Those two decisions had a substantial influence on the subsequent state of science policy in the United States.

Both decisions, made in response to perceived crises, addressed the desire of Roosevelt and his senior policy advisors to have the federal bureaucracy adapt itself to an era of rapidly changing technological capabilities, and both asserted the need for federal access to institutions’ scientific knowledge.

The ideas underlying these two decisions reflected different perspectives on how government ought to accommodate to technological changes, and on the scientific or expert knowledge required to address them.

Each decision also was made in response to a different crisis. The Brownlow report was requested by a president concerned with government's response to social and economic issues underlined by the Great Depression, and derived from the premise that the federal government had to engage in rational planning in order to fulfill its constitutional responsibilities. To that end, government should make full use of the knowledge and management insights derived from the social sciences. One member of the three-man Brownlow committee, Charles E. Merriam, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, was a member of the Science Committee of the National Resources Committee, the latter chaired by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, and was instrumental in the development of the 1938 report, Research: A National Resource , which in some respects qualifies as the first significant blueprint for a coherent U.S. national science policy, particularly its first volume, Relation of the Federal Government to Research .