0.2 Introduction  (Page 5/6)

Since World War II, public consciousness of the importance of science in public affairs has moved increasingly from the periphery to a position much nearer the center of political thinking and action. Yet diverging perspectives, and often major disputes, about the scope of science policy continue to frustrate most attempts to define, let alone formulate, anything resembling a comprehensive national science policy. Arguably, those divergences and disputes have also diluted the effectiveness of science in public affairs.

Occasionally, concepts of what a science policy ought to be emerged from a coherent theoretical concept, such as the efficacy of national planning based on objective data and analysis of constitutional limits on the use of expert knowledge in governance. Sometimes they have been the result of assessments based on historical insight, such as the experiences of war projected into a peacetime era. Sometimes, too, they have been little more than post-hoc justifications for a political fait accompli , such as the insulation of defense-oriented policies from the political debates that shaped science policy more broadly. But in all cases, those concepts have been shaped by—and given shape to—relationships among the institutions that comprise what can be loosely referred to as the U.S. science and technology (sometimes science and engineering) system.

Those institutions include, first and foremost, the components of the presidential science advisory system, including the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). They also include the principal U.S. government agencies that conduct research in their own laboratories and/or support extramural research and development; corresponding congressional oversight committees and the congressional research arms, particularly the Congressional Research Service (CRS); as well as the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which succeeded the Bureau of the Budget in 1974, the Federal Coordinating Committee for Science, Engineering and Technology (FCCSET—after 1993, the National Science and Technology Council—NSTC) that are ostensibly responsible for coordination of the federal research and development effort. They include the university and industrial research and development establishments. Importantly, they also include the complex array of official advisory committees to the principal science-related government agencies, as well as a number of science-related public interest organizations with access to those agencies.

Vannevar Bush’s confident assertion in his seminal July 1945 report that if the federal government adopted his key recommendation, it should support research in universities and adopt a hands-off policy towards research in industry, it would thereby provide an essential basis for continued health, prosperity, and security. That recommendation, which was considered radical at the time, became the cornerstone of U.S. science policy.