Under proposed rule, science funding must pass political review

[AUDIO LOGO] IRA FLATOW: Hi. Ira here. And you’re listening to Science Friday.

The federal grant-making system that supports a lot of US science research has a process. Researchers submit grant proposals that are vetted and scored by a committee of experts in that field, with top-scoring proposals recommended for funding in that ever shrinking pool of dollars.

That’s how things have normally worked for decades. But a proposed rule change at OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, would bring a major shift, inserting a political review process to ensure the funds that are released match the priorities of the president. Those rules are now in a public comment period.

In a recent editorial, Dr. Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, called the change “another red alert for American science.” He’s with me now. Welcome to Science Friday.

HOLDEN THORP: Thanks, Ira. Great to be here.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s talk about how big a change that is, please.

HOLDEN THORP: well, normally, and for the last 80 years– I think this is what has made American science dominant in the world– we have had a system where the review of scientific projects by the peers of the scientists who propose them have always taken precedence over any political considerations about the science itself. And that is a vision that goes back 80 years, to when someone named Vannevar Bush proposed to Harry Truman how this all should be set up.

And the idea was that the curiosity and scientific judgment of scientists was going to get us to science that would be better for the United States than if we allowed it to be drawn into the political process, which would have two problems. One is we could do science that isn’t that meritorious just for a political agenda, or we’d have to deal with the fact that political administrations change back and forth all the time, and that would make it very hard to sustain projects long enough to have them pay off.

And I think any analysis would say that the promise of what was envisioned in 1945 has been realized up until two years ago, when the US was the dominant place for science in the world. But now what is being proposed is that politicians would have much more control over the science that gets done, including being able to cancel any project without cause at any time that has been evaluated according to the normal processes using funds that were appropriated by Congress. And those cancellations could be done by the executive branch. And that is something new.

And if you go down from there, there is a regular political review that would be required of every single project. And then that feeds off into a lot of other problems where international collaborations would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, and lots of things that get away from the idea that science is a public good that serves everyone and is best when it’s judged on the science itself and not the political ideas of the day.

IRA FLATOW: When you said 1945 and how long ago this was, and I heard about this OMB idea, my mind went to the famous Lysenko case, where the Soviet Union, under Stalin, going back to ’45, chose to politicize science and putting research under party control, judging ideas by whether they conform to party dogma instead of evidence. And they punished scientists who challenged the official line. And this sounds frighteningly familiar to this OMB directive politicizing science.

HOLDEN THORP: Yeah, a lot of people are drawing that connection. And I think it’s a fair one. I tend to be an optimist. So I’m hoping that we haven’t quite reached that point yet because we have a few more controls in place than were present in the case that you imagined. But it’s certainly important for us to mobilize and make sure that people know that the scientific community objects to this.

And I think the challenge with that is something like OMB is really in the weeds. Most scientists, to the extent that they might follow this– they might look and see whether the amounts appropriated for the agencies were the same or, hopefully, a little bit higher than they were the year before and then forget about it because normally, OMB just complies with the wishes of Congress and disperses the money. But I think as we’ve seen throughout this administration, we have an activist OMB that has its own agenda.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s talk about the actual text of this OMB rule. And it says the changes are related to “transparency, accountability, and proper oversight for the federal grant-making process.” That’s a big word salad meaning what?

HOLDEN THORP: Well, I think two things. One is the administration has made a lot of statements about what it views as meritorious science, particularly in the realm of whether it has been reproduced or not and whether it can be reproduced. And there, the scientific community bears a little bit of the burden for allowing this to happen because there have been some high-profile incidents of papers that went wrong. And that’s made it easy to cast doubt on a lot more science than just the few incidents where this happens.

But I think the other part they’re talking about is the president’s priorities as it relates to, for example, social science and studying things like climate change and vaccines that are politically charged and the idea that the administration ought to have influence over whether those things are done or not. And I think one of the things people aren’t looking at with this, if you’re a fan of President Trump doing that right now, is that these regulations would be in place.

And if history is any guide, one day, the administration will switch hands. And when it does, I can’t imagine that a Democratic administration would overturn these regulations because who wouldn’t want this kind of power? And so this is going to cause, at the very least, a whiplash effect. And much more than that, if you’re a fan in one direction or the other of how this is implemented, that’s going to be frequently undone.

IRA FLATOW: Do you think this is going to prevent younger scientists from entering the field if, as you say, this whiplash goes back and forth and back and forth, wondering about their careers?

HOLDEN THORP: Yeah, I think that’s the biggest worry that all of us have. You have several things going on here. One is the administration has made it much harder for people from outside the United States to come here to study. And the thing that has probably more than anything else made the US a scientific power is that we’ve always welcomed the best talent from anywhere in the world, whether it’s here in the US or elsewhere, to drive our scientific effort forward.

And then I think beyond that is if you’re a young person in the US and you’re thinking about what you might do with your scientific training, is staying in the world where you’re going to be supported by scientific grants with all these uncertainties the best way to do that? I think that’s– it’s understandable if young people concluded that it wasn’t.

I’m constantly out on the road, encouraging them stay the course, tell them about all the swings we’ve had back and forth over history, and hoping that they’ll hang in there with us. But that’s a worry we all have. And if we lose a generation, it’ll be highly ironic because one of the main points in 1945 of starting the science agencies and doing the work in the universities was that it would allow us to bring back people who had fought in World War II who were very talented who were going to need more training and not lose that generation. And now we’re talking about losing a generation of scientists 80 years later for a completely different reason.

IRA FLATOW: Is there any kind of pushback that you see might be effective in mitigating what the OMB wants to do?

HOLDEN THORP: Well, the regulations are open for comments. And it’s true that the administration doesn’t have to follow those comments. But there are tens of thousands of comments now. And I think people should go on and make their comments, not because necessarily it’s going to stop this in the immediate term. But as time goes on, as people lobby Congress and perhaps file lawsuits to try to do things about this, the more obvious public outcry is documented, I think the more effective that can be.

And then I think the next thing is to– if you want to do something about this, write to your members of Congress and tell them that you’re concerned about this and that you respect the idea that Congress appropriated this money and that OMB’s job is not to put its own agenda on that, but to honor the power of the purse that the Constitution gives the Congress and disburse the money according to the law.

IRA FLATOW: That’s the irony of this whole thing– is that when the White House took all this money out of funding of science and NSF, Congress rightfully said, this is important stuff, we should put that money back in, which they did. And then OMB said, oh, yeah? Well, we’ve got another method we can keep this money from going out.

HOLDEN THORP: Yeah, that’s a fair analysis.

IRA FLATOW: And so now here we are again at– looking for this pushback in the other direction. I know you’ve been following science policy for years. So how likely do you think this proposed change is actually going to take effect?

HOLDEN THORP: I try to be optimistic about it all. I think that it’s possible it could take effect for some time. It could be undone by stronger language in the next budget bill, for example. But that might mean that it could take effect for a time.

If you’re more optimistic, maybe you hope that Congress can persuade OMB not to go down this road if we get to the right people. But I’d say at this point, it’s certainly possible that these regulations could go into effect, at least temporarily, while the next budget bill, for example, gets done, which could have language in it that makes it more difficult to do this.

And then lawsuits could get filed. And that could go to the courts. And we’ve seen this over and over again in the last 18 months with indirect costs and various grants that got canceled and universities that were prohibited from taking grants. And so I would expect this to go down a very similar bumpy road that has a lot of back-and-forth in it.

IRA FLATOW: A lot of bumpy roads in this last couple of years–

HOLDEN THORP: It certainly has been. And you got to give a lot of credit to a lot of scientists out there who are still getting science done in this environment. I go all around the country. And most of the time, people want me to explain a lot of these things that are going on and try to cheer them up, somehow. But I think I’m always the one that’s cheered up because I go to places where there are graduate students and postdocs chugging away in the lab, producing knowledge, and going on despite all of the rhetoric and signals that they get that are trying to stop them from doing that.

IRA FLATOW: Well, Holden, thank you for doing what you do.

HOLDEN THORP: It’s an honor to do it. And thanks for all you do to get the word out to people.

IRA FLATOW: You’re welcome. Holden Thorp is editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

This episode was produced by Charles Bergquist. And if you have a comment or a question or a story idea, we do want to hear from you. Give us a call– 877-4-SCIFRI, 877, the number 4, SCIFRI. Thanks for listening. I’m Ira Flatow.

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