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The Vannevar Bush proposal was submitted to a president convinced that the United States was likely to get involved in the war in Europe. It derived from the premise that successful prosecution of that war would require the government to draw on the nation's non-governmental scientific institutions. Bush proposed linking those institutions to government through a coordinating committee of scientists directly responsible to the president.

Both reports qualify as strategies for using scientific knowledge to address critical national problems. The Brownlow report sought to improve linkages with social and economic policy-making and with their practitioners in academia. The Bush proposal focused on the natural sciences and engineering disciplines, particularly those relevant to national defense.

During the Kennedy administration, the noted scholar Harvey Brooks, a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, considered the pros and cons of creating a cabinet-level Department of Science. Brooks introduced the idea of a duality: policy-for-science and science-for-policy. The former incorporates policies related to the financial support of science and the development of human resources for science and technology. The latter has to do with the uses of science and technology to advance policy goals of a presidential administration.

Since the 1960s, virtually every presidential administration and a large majority of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have been in favor of federal support for university research, although there are inevitable disagreements about funding levels and distributions among science and engineering fields. They have also been in accord with a set of principles underlying policy-for-science: e.g., the autonomy of the non-government science communities in selecting and pursuing research projects, basing financial support upon scientific merit rather than any political considerations such as regional distribution of support, and the importance of peer review.

In contrast with the general agreement in the United States not only with the principles underlying policy-for-science as well as the issues it encompasses, there continue to be serious disagreements about science-for-policy. Upon reflection, the reasons are almost self-evident. Priority issues that science can and should address change with time. For example, when the first presidential advisory system was created in 1957 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, it was concerned from the outset primarily with defense- and space-related issues. In contrast, the priorities of the Obama administration include the environment, alternative energy sources, and health. Likewise, priorities for policy issues depend on the party controlling the White House and, to some extent, the Congress. For example, the second Bush administration ignored and for much of its eight years virtually ridiculed mounting evidence for global climate change. In contrast, the Obama administration has assigned a high priority to the effective use of science to reduce the greenhouse emissions responsible for global climate change.

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Source:  OpenStax, A history of federal science policy from the new deal to the present. OpenStax CNX. Jun 26, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11210/1.2
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