Holdren will defend R&D budgets

Presidential science adviser John Holdren vowed to defend the Obama administration’s science and technology budget request for fiscal 2012 against anticipated congressional efforts to make further sweeping reductions in federal spending. Speaking to the annual S&T policy forum of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on 5 May, Holdren predicted that certain federal R&D programs—including basic research at the Department of Defense, carbon capture and storage and fusion research at the Department of Energy, and the multiagency US Global Change Research Program—will likely be especially targeted for reductions by lawmakers looking to cut the budget.

‘The president remains committed to robust growth in key dimensions of S&T,’ Holdren said, pointing to President Obama’s commitment to double the basic research programs at DOE, NSF, and NIST over 10 years and his goal of raising the total amount of spending by government and industry on R&D to 3% of US GDP. Holdren said that Obama had reiterated the need for ‘a coherent energy and climate policy that entails large investments in both mitigation and adaptation’ during a 3 May conversation with Holdren.

‘Virtually all international cooperation comes under scrutiny when budgets are tight, because many members of Congress do not believe that international cooperation in science and technology benefits the United States,’ Holdren said. ‘We believe that our very strategically focused investments in these domains are of great benefit to the US and to the world. We plan to defend those investments, but you can expect some arguments.’

Holdren said he also expects budget cutters to go after the social sciences programs at NSF, the peer-reviewed research programs at the US Department of Agriculture, and the basic research programs of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.

On another topic, Holdren praised the performance of Japanese authorities in sharing with US counterparts information concerning the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in the aftermath of the 11 March earthquake and tsunami. ‘I would say that the level of transparency has been extraordinarily good, really,’ he said, responding to a questioner. ‘We have had representatives from the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] in place with the Japanese team, managing the situation from very early in the game. We have gotten extraordinarily detailed reports multiple times daily from the Japanese authorities, and we’ve been in continuous contact by phone and conference call with the leaders of the Japanese operation.’

Holdren said that he and Energy Secretary Steven Chu had convened ‘an informal group’ of experts in nuclear accident prevention and mitigation immediately following the accident. Consulting daily during the initial weeks of the crisis, those advisers continue to hold twice weekly teleconferences, and have been ‘interacting intensively with the Japanese authorities,’ he said.

‘I think basically we know everything they know,’ Holdren said of the Japanese nuclear authorities. ‘One of the problems in this kind of situation is that nobody knows everything we need to know because it’s extremely difficult to operate and observe in a high radiation environment.’

Holdren said that the administration intends to comply for the most part with a 2011 funding law provision that prohibits NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from cooperating with China on S&T matters. But Holdren, who is also director of OSTP, said the administration will ignore the congressional restriction in cases where it might ‘infringe on the president’s constitutional prerogatives to conduct foreign diplomacy.’ Without elaborating, Holdren noted that ‘some of the things that we are doing with China we believe that if we curtailed them, would infringe on those constitutional prerogatives.’

David Kramer