Marburger calls for a new academic field of study in ‘the science of science policy’

Anyone following the year-to-year development of US science and technology (S&T) policy would have to conclude that the process is chaotic, ad hoc, and pays little heed to long-term planning. One need only look at the National Institutes of Health, whose budget, after a five-year doubling that ended in 2003, steadily declined in inflation-adjusted terms for the next five years. Now, mainly as a result of funding provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), NIH is getting a windfall of $10 billion—a 38% increase over 2008.

A second disconnect between science policy and its implementation occurred with the passage of the America COMPETES Act in 2007. In response to expert advice that the US lead was slipping fast in a variety of measures of science and innovation, the law authorized a 10-year doubling of federal R&D programs covering basic research in physical sciences. But lawmakers failed for two years to come up with the necessary appropriations. Now, with ARRA money flooding into those programs, there is growing concern that the onetime surge will exacerbate the boom-bust funding cycle that scientists decry.

A need for models

Against that backdrop, John Marburger, who was science adviser to former President George W. Bush for nearly eight years, returned to Washington recently to pitch his proposal for the creation of a new field of academic study that he believes could help the US achieve a more rational science policy. In Marburger’s view, faculty and students of “the science of science policy” would create and work with predictive models to help determine the impacts of different policy options, in the same way that econometric models are used to help guide economic policy.

In a lecture at George Washington University on 29 April, Marburger lamented how “narrow advocacy trumps objective planning” in the setting of US science policy. Calling the sudden bonanza for NIH an “extreme example of the irregular style of American science policymaking,” Marburger marveled at how Senator Arlen Specter, who was then one of three Republican senators on whose votes ARRA’s passage hinged, used that leverage to shower another $6.5 billion in stimulus spending upon NIH, on top of the $3.5 billion that had previously been allotted to the agency. In a single year, NIH’s allocation, which already accounted for half of all non-defense R&D funding, jumped from $30 billion to nearly $40 billion.

“I would like to change this,” Marburger said. “I would like to have science policy tools that are so credible that their products are embraced by [science] advocates as well as the technocrats. Having the predictive power of physics or quantum mechanics or Newton’s laws is out of the question for policy analysis, but I believe we can move the standards for science policy analysis and implementation closer to what already exists in the world of economic policy.” Today’s S&T policymaking process is inadequate, he argued, because nearly all the thousands of experts who sit on the hundreds of federal advisory committees “are advocates for specific projects, programs, or fields of science.”

A quick response

Marburger, who has returned to the physics faculty at Stony Brook University, first began in 2005 to call for S&T policymaking to be set aside as a separate field with its own schools, professors, journals, conferences, and “above all, its own standards, developed in open forums and promulgated in the usual ways by professional societies.” While claiming little credit for the idea, he said, “there was in fact an immediate response,” with actions, including the formation of a “science of science and innovation policy” program in NSF’s Office of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. That program has now awarded several rounds of grants totaling $23.4 million, and an interagency task group with representation from 17 agencies was convened in 2006 under the auspices of the National Science and Technology Council.

Last December the task group issued a road map defining the science of science policy as “an emerging field of interdisciplinary research, the goal of which is to provide a scientifically rigorous, quantitative basis from which policy makers and researchers can assess the impacts of the nation’s scientific and engineering enterprise, improve their understanding of its dynamics, and assess the likely outcomes.”

The road map report argues that the rationale for specific scientific investment decisions “lacks a strong theoretical and empirical basis. Accordingly, given the magnitude of the federal investment and the importance of that investment to our nation, science policy decision makers must have at their disposal the most rigorous tools, methods and data that will enable them to develop sound and cost-effective investment strategies.” The document identifies 10 major science questions tied to three main themes: understanding science and innovation, investing in them, and using the science of science policy to address national priorities. Whether anything comes of the recommendations remains to be seen. William Valdez, the Department of Energy official who cochairs the task group, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual science policy forum on 30 April that the Obama administration had extended the task group’s lifetime by six months; a decision for the longer term is pending.