Science Has Wolf as New Advocate on Capitol Hill

Representative Frank Wolf, the very religious, very conservative congressman who for 25 years has represented some of Northern Virginia’s richest counties, doesn’t seem to be the kind of politician who would champion science. He’s voted against expanding stem-cell research and against reducing funding for missile defense.

Yet there he was, in early April, standing at a microphone announcing the introduction of his Math and Science Incentive Act of 2005. The legislation would pay the interest on education loans for undergraduate students in math, science, or engineering who agree to work at least five years in their field. The idea came from the book Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America (Regnery, 2005), by former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who was there beside Wolf, applauding the new legislation. Also standing behind Wolf were Senator John Warner (R-VA) and Representatives Vern Ehlers (R-MI) and Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), chairman of the House Committee on Science.

During the press conference, Wolf ripped into the state of US science. “America’s dominance in science and innovation is slipping,” he said. “We are facing today a critical shortage of science and engineering students.”

In early May, Wolf upped the stakes, writing a letter to President Bush, urging the president to support a “tripling of the innovation budget—federal basic research and development—over the next decade.” When the White House responded with a letter saying the R&D budget was fine, Wolf said he was not impressed.

To keep the pressure on, Wolf, working with Ehlers, announced an “innovation summit” to bring leaders from academia and industry to Washington, DC, in the fall to “give greater voice to these … concerns.” Wolf made sure there was $1 million set aside to cover the cost of the summit.

So why did a Republican congressman from Virginia who has spent his career worrying about such things as transportation and gambling suddenly become an advocate for science? It started last October, Wolf said in an interview. “I was asked to speak, to introduce Dr. [Robert] Ballard, who discovered the Titanic. I had an anti-gambling rally that night in Manassas Park, and it was the last night of the World Series.”

Wolf headed to Rachel Carson Middle School, where oceanographer Ballard was speaking. “I had the idea that nobody was going to be there. We got in and the place was packed. There were kids everywhere. That just made me realize that it is possible to maintain an interest in science among kids.”

In January, a few months after the Ballard presentation, the House rearranged its subcommittee jurisdictions. Wolf, who is chairman of the appropriations subcommittee on science, state, justice, and commerce, was given authority over NSF and NASA. NIST was already under the subcommittee’s jurisdiction. Then Wolf read Gingrich’s book, which argues that science and technology leadership is critical for the security and economic future of the US. Wolf said that he later read the New York Times Magazine excerpt of Thomas Friedman’s new book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), which discusses the US loss of technology to other countries. Finally, the congressman saw the movie Longitude, which is based on a book about the effort by sailors at sea some 200 years ago to determine their longitude. “So, all of these things kind of came together at the same time,” Wolf said.

Soon he was meeting with the Council of Scientific Society Presidents and a group of high-tech industry executives. Everyone he heard from, he said, be it an aerospace engineer in the technology corridor near Dulles Airport in Virginia or an engineer from the Manassas water department, told him grim stories about the state of science in the US. An industry executive pointed out that the aeronautics industry is losing market share to Europe, Wolf said, and the Manassas water engineer said he was being recruited by firms in England and Ireland.

“Obviously I want my children and grandchildren to live in a country where we have a strong defense and we’re first in science and research,” Wolf said. “It’s just common sense. If you can’t see it, you must be blind.”

As the chairman of an appropriations subcommittee, Wolf has budgetary power that Ehlers, Boehlert, and other advocates for science in Congress don’t have. Wolf said he did what he could to boost fiscal year 2006 funding for NSF and the aeronautics portion of the NASA budget, but was limited by the overall amount of money that was authorized for the agencies.

Gingrich, though long out of Congress, still has considerable sway and is a staunch advocate of more spending on basic science. The former speaker said he was “personally delighted” by Wolf’s emergence on science issues.

“Frank Wolf is a very serious man,” Gingrich said. “He hadn’t looked much at this issue [science and technology], but when he did, I think he concluded that what we’d been saying was right.” What Gingrich has been saying is that the US is doing a terrible job supporting science, and is “unilaterally disarming in high-energy physics at a time which may well be one of the most exciting periods of physics research in history.”

As the government’s support for basic science slips, Gingrich said, it falls on scientists to “behave like citizens” and support Wolf and other science advocates in Congress. Such support is particularly important for the interest-paid loan bill because it is an “important first step” for Wolf.

When asked why scientists should support a congressman who opposes stem-cell research and the global warming treaty, Gingrich talked about the nature of politics. “It’s real simple. If somebody has a really good idea that you think will really help the country, are you for the idea? Nobody says you have to love Frank Wolf. All of these [science organizations] say they wish it would be bipartisan, then they finally get a Frank Wolf, who shows up for science, and they start finding reasons to avoid helping him. I’m not asking them to make him scientist of the year. I am asking them to ask the legislators to cosponsor his bill, because it is the right bill.”

Wolf is straightforward about why he opposes some issues that many scientists support. “I don’t care if you are a Nobel Prize winner, there are some pretty powerful moral issues involved,” he said.

He intends to keep the pressure on the president to make science a national priority. “The stars are aligned,” he said. “This is an opportunity and an obligation, probably even a moral obligation, for the administration to set off on a new path.”