Government and science: a dangerous liaison?

• Author: Butos, William N.
• Position: Viewpoint essay

With the rise of the modern state, science has become increasingly subject to government intervention in its funding and direction. This tendency's underlying driving force has been the growth of government itself. The governmental impetus to ensure politically determined adequate levels of scientific research and development (R&D) and to manage such efforts took hold in the twentieth century principally as a consequence of nationalistic hostilities or perceived threats of external aggression. This rationale was eventually augmented by more broadly based social agendas and by the "market failure" claim that academic economists advanced in the late 1950s (and since) with respect to the production of R&D, especially so-called basic research (see, for example, Nelson 1959; Griliches 1960; Arrow 1962). Since 1949, as shown in figure 1, the extent of government engagement in science has trended upward significantly, and the prevalent thinking of our times is that only fiscal constraints limit the magnitude of government funding of science.

There are serious reasons, however, for thinking that the liaison between government and science carries with it unrecognized dangers for the functioning and integrity of science as a reliable generator of knowledge. It is not so much that government seeks to exert a blatant and crude control over the content and direction of scientific inquiry--although such heavy-handed intrusion has precedents, most notably in the USSR--but that the structure and conduct of seemingly benign and generous government funding of science has side effects that generate instabilities in scientific activity in the short run and corrode the structure and adaptability of the system of science itself in the long run.

In this article, we briefly survey the relationship between government and science, concentrating on the situation in the United States in the twentieth century. We discuss in some detail the theoretical rationale for government funding, showing that it is open to serious question: its model of market failure in science is highly suspect, and its implications for the remedial effects of intervention do not stand up to even casual empirical scrutiny. Calling attention to the nakedness of the standard economic rationale, however, does not touch the actual political rationales. Following other commentators--Greenberg (2001), in particular--we direct attention to the interaction between these rationales and scientists' understandably strong desire to have their work well funded. Although we find Greenberg's and others' detailed descriptions of unease within science to be compelling, we think they suffer from a lack of any clear theoretical model of science as a social system. Therefore, to point the way toward a more comprehensive treatment, we devote considerable attention to an exposition of the various ways in which government funding interacts with scientists and the system of scientific activity to produce the unanticipated effects that concern us.

Historical Background

The U.S. government has funded isolated scientific research projects (broadly conceived) since the early days of the republic, as evidenced, for example, by the War Department's support of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the congressional appropriation to support Samuel Morse's electric telegraph. The Civil War accelerated and broadened a federal presence in science, including the use of scientific advisors for wartime purposes and the congressional establishment of the National Academy of Science (NAS) in 1863. The federal government established the Department of Agriculture and the land-grant system of colleges, both of which provided institutional bases for government-funded scientific research that have persisted to this day. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 established a permanent regulatory demand for scientific expertise. With the outbreak of World War I, the Navy Department constituted a naval consulting board (headed by Thomas Edison) to seek out applications of technologies for military purposes; it would become the Naval Research Laboratory after the war. President Woodrow Wilson created the National Research Council (NRC) as an offshoot of the NAS to study the government's scientific needs. The NRC coordinated wartime projects in optics and gas warfare that involved the military, private contractors, and government-sponsored university R&D. At the end of the war, this government-industry-university establishment was largely dismantled, and although the NRC was given permanent status, its activities during the 1920s greatly diminished owing to a lack of funding (see Dupre and Lakoff 1962; Rahm, Kirkland, and Bozeman 2000, chap. 2).

Although a government presence in scientific and technological R&D was well established by the beginning of World War I, it was not based on a principled, coherent, or explicit "national science policy." Instead, government support for science served largely transitory wartime exigencies. But this situation would change under Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration with the continuation of the Depression and the approach of war. In 1933, Roosevelt set up the Presidential Science Advisory Board and the National Planning Board (NPB) to enlist scientific expertise for solutions to the Depression. In 1934, the National Resources Board (NRB) replaced the NPB and subsumed within its jurisdiction the Science Advisory Board. As Feldman, Link, and Siegel point out, "after all the organizational issues were settled, the federal government recognized ... that it had and would continue to have an important coordinating role to play in science and technology planning toward a national goal of economic well-being" (2002, 13). (1)

Of special note was the NRB's publication of a 1938 report entitled Research--A National Treasure, a comprehensive survey of government, industry, and university scientific activity that would provide the rationale and justification for a governmental science policy. The report argued that the government

1. is constitutionally obligated to support science and technology related to defense, scientific standards of weights and measures, and certain regulatory functions;

2. is more effective than the private sector in carrying out research, especially when private costs of research are high relative to its practical or social value; and

3. can stimulate industry research that is expensive and has unpredictable or delayed financial payoffs. (see Feldman, Link, and Siegel 2002, 13-14)

Once war broke out again, the government moved to harness scientific resources for military purposes. Of the 92,000 working scientists prior to the war, about 19,400 were employed in the government, and more than 72,000 were employed, in roughly equal numbers, at universities and at the more than 2,200 industrial laboratories (Feldman, Link, and Siegel 2002, 14). In 1940, Roosevelt established the National Defense Research Committee, replaced in 1941 by the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), to organize scientific and technological resources for the war effort. Under the chairmanship of Vannevar Bush, the former president of the Carnegie Institution in Washington and a one-time vice president of MIT, the OSRD did not conduct research, but it did establish contractual relations--a protocontractual framework--governing collaboration between government funding agencies and university and industry entities that undertook and administered sanctioned research. (2)

As World War II drew to a close, no concerted effort was made to dismantle the government's wartime involvement in science, in contrast to the post-World War I experience. Instead, Roosevelt asked Bush to prepare a report analyzing how the OSRD's role could be played in peacetime collaboration of government and the scientific community for achieving "improvement of the national health, the creation of enterprises bringing new jobs, and the betterment of the national standard of living." (3) Bush's report, published in 1945 as Science--the Endless Frontier, is perhaps the decisive document charting the institutional framework for science in the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The report claimed that government support of science is essential for medical advances, national security, economic welfare, and full employment. Bush argued that attaining these goals required that the "Federal Government should accept new responsibilities for promoting the creation of new scientific knowledge and the development of scientific talent in our youth" (25). This "national policy for scientific research and education" (28) was to be financed by government funds, making payments to industry and subsidizing research as well as undergraduate and graduate student scholarships in universities. In addition to recommending expanded support for research and applied work conducted by government laboratories, the report highlighted the special role that colleges and universities should play in basic research. (4) The institutionalization of the federal government's reconfigured role was to be attained by the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF), whose purpose was to "develop and promote" federal science policy and to implement policies aimed at supporting "basic research in non-profit organizations" (28). The report also charged the NSF with responsibility for developing scientific talent and for supporting long-range research with military applications.

Bush's central claim was that material progress depends on new scientific knowledge and that such knowledge, in turn, depends on what he called "basic research": research performed without thought of practical ends, as he defined it. (5) Implicit in this claim was the assumption that the federal government must provide the dominant guiding, coordinating, and financing role for the growth of scientific knowledge. He rested this assumption...