President-elect Biden’s next steps in science policy

Having secured victory in the 3 November election, president-elect Joe Biden will now speed his preparations to take office on 20 January. With the country still in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health and economic recovery will be top priorities as he builds up his transition team and makes picks for leadership positions in his new administration.

Key elements of Biden’s science policy apparatus can also be expected to fall quickly into place. In 2008 President Obama’s transition named several high-level science officials before Inauguration Day. And during the campaign this year, Biden himself made a point of saying his administration would “choose science over fiction.”

Strengthening science at the White House

The work of Biden’s transition team will take place largely out of public view, with updates posted on the transition’s official website .

Assembling Biden’s White House staff will be an important first step. On 9 November Biden announced a 13-person pandemic task force cochaired by former surgeon general Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner David Kessler, and Yale University public health professor Marcella Nunez-Smith. His team will ultimately also work with at least some of the top federal officials involved with current response efforts. Biden has said one of his first moves after winning the election would be to seek the continued help of Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whose role in fighting the pandemic has waned as the Trump administration has downplayed the need for actions other than vaccine development.

Biden’s effort is expected to involve stronger pushes on testing, medical and protective equipment, public health guidance, and economic assistance, as well as vaccine development. He has indicated he will reinstate routine public pandemic briefings to be run by nonpolitical officials and reverse the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization.

Biden also plans to focus on broader policy issues, particularly climate change , that require an intensive contribution of technical expertise. The transition team has reportedly considered appointing a high-profile climate “czar” to manage efforts such as rejoining the Paris agreement, which the US officially left last week. Considerable effort will also be required to resume progress on the regulatory elements of climate policy. The most significant policy initiatives Biden is envisioning would require intensive work with Congress.

Another important question is what role the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will play under Biden. Under President Trump, the office has kept a low profile, working on a portfolio of issues that has been mostly separate from the mainstream of White House policymaking. Conversely, this spring Biden floated the idea of elevating the office’s directorship to a Cabinet-level job, though it is not clear whether that prospect is still on the table. In any event, the director may well be selected during the transition and will likely hold the additional title of assistant to the president, ensuring direct access to Biden as an adviser. Obama announced his science adviser on 20 December 2008.

Departments and agencies await new leaders

Biden is likely to start announcing nominees for Cabinet-level posts within weeks, though many of his picks for lower-tier Senate-confirmed jobs may not be named until months following his inauguration. With the Senate under Republican control barring Democratic wins in the two 5 January runoff elections in Georgia, confirmation of Biden’s picks could face major holdups, even though science agency nominations are often uncontroversial. A number of Obama’s science nominees faced lengthy delays or failed to receive votes at all for reasons apparently unrelated to their qualifications, especially later in his presidency.

Although the Trump administration is so far prohibiting it, Biden will also dispatch “agency review teams” into the federal government to lay the groundwork for his administration’s assumption of leadership. Among their tasks will be to help prepare for Biden’s first budget request, which is due for release shortly after he takes office. The teams will also work to identify options for immediate executive attention, such as orders and pending regulatory actions that Biden’s administration will wish to withdraw.

For science agencies, leadership appointments and immediate issues at play vary on a case-by-case basis. Here is the situation for some of the most important ones:

Department of Energy. DOE will play a central role in Biden’s plans to advance technologies that can help slash US carbon emissions. One choice he faces is whether to follow Obama’s lead in picking a scientist as energy secretary or turn to someone with a political background, as had previously been more typical. Across the department, Biden will eventually choose nominees for more than 20 positions requiring Senate confirmation, including the heads of DOE’s applied energy offices, the Office of Science, the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, and the National Nuclear Security Administration. Although previous NNSA heads have stayed on into new administrations, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty resigned on 6 November, reportedly due to ongoing disputes with Energy secretary Dan Brouillette.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA has been led in an acting capacity for the entire four years of the Trump administration, first by former Navy chief oceanographer Timothy Gallaudet and now by former Panasonic chief atmospheric scientist Neil Jacobs. Biden is likely to nominate an administrator whose background reflects his focus on climate change, and his administration is apt to replace two scientists recently appointed to leadership positions at the agency who question the severity of global warming. Currently NOAA and other science agencies are gearing up for the next quadrennial National Climate Assessment, and there have been fears the Trump administration would try to tilt it away from the scientific consensus. Although the assessment director the administration just picked , Betsy Weatherhead, is regarded as a qualified, mainstream scientist, the White House has also removed the head of the interagency program that is responsible for the report.

NASA. Biden may decide to choose a woman to lead the space agency for the first time in its history, as Obama’s administrator, Charles Bolden, has suggested . Biden is likely to push back the Trump administration’s aggressive goal of returning astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, but a complete abandonment of the Moon may be less likely, as plans are now well along and a reversal would add to the policy whiplash NASA has endured through successive presidential administrations. Biden will also decide whether to keep the National Space Council, which Trump established to develop a government-wide approach to space policy that integrates exploration, science, defense, and commercial activities.

NSF. Directors of NSF are selected for six-year terms and do not typically change over with a new administration. Notably, the previous director, France Córdova, was one of only a handful of agency leaders appointed by Obama whom Trump kept on, and she stayed until her term expired earlier this year. Trump’s pick to succeed her, Sethuraman Panchanathan, the former chief research and innovation officer at Arizona State University, was an uncontroversial selection , and he too is likely to remain in place. Biden will have an opportunity to fill the agency’s deputy director position, the only other Senate-confirmed role at the agency, which has been vacant since 2014.

National Institutes of Health. The health agency has been led by geneticist Francis Collins since Obama appointed him in 2009, and Trump retained him even though the position typically turns over with a new president. Collins has been involved with some pandemic-related controversies, such as the revocation of an NIH grant that President Trump ordered terminated because it funded collaborative work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. However, Collins has been willing to criticize Trump administration actions, and if he retires or Biden decides to choose a new director, he might stay on until his replacement is confirmed.

Environmental Protection Agency. Biden’s pick to lead the EPA will have the hefty task of reversing course on the Trump administration’s aggressive deregulatory agenda and unwinding certain actions concerning how the agency uses science. In particular, Trump’s EPA has been planning to implement a new rule by the end of this year that would curtail its use of studies lacking accessible data sets, which would make it harder to justify new regulations and renew existing ones.

Department of Defense. Biden is likely to continue DOD’s push to improve engagement with innovative commercial technology companies and more rapidly develop cutting-edge weapons and equipment. Those efforts began under the Obama administration and continued under Trump, and Biden’s widely rumored frontrunner for defense secretary, Michèle Flournoy, has advocated that DOD make “big bets” in technology and take a leading role in mitigating climate change.

Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a 7 November post on FYI, which reports on federal science policy. Both FYI and Physics Today are published by the American Institute of Physics.