Politicization of Scientists
I've been spending a lot of time this week preparing the annual progress report for one of my grants (it's so unreasonable for them to give me $40,000 and then expect me to justify how I spent the money...), so I was reminded of a recent post by Sean Carroll on science funding. The article links to a David Appell post and a set of PowerPoint slides from a talk by Joel Parriot of the federal Office of Management and Budget.
It's always dangerous to read raw PowerPoint files, because any speaker worth listening to says a lot of things that don't make it into the slides. The general picture I got from them was of something sort of like a good blog-- the talk presents a brief sketch of what it is that Parriot does for OMB, and what the implications of that are for science in general. I think he was trying to be forthright, within the confines of his job.
Of course, given that he is a part of a government agency, his advice ends up being somewhat vague and self-contradictory. In his advice slide, he recommends "let[ting] the science drive the case," but that would seem to run hard up against the "Ethos and Mythos" of OMB on the previous slide, particularly the part saying that "Appetite of community for more $$ is boundless; everyone claims to be doing compelling, ripe-for-great-advance work." Given that "letting the science drive the case" basically amounts to arguing that your work is compelling and ripe for great advances, it's hard to see how anyone is going to make a distinction between proposals.
And "Many decisions are political at their core, so community needs to be more politically astute, but partisanship should be avoided" may be the most useless advice ever offered.
I do think that his description of the "Ethos and Mythos" of the scientific community is dead-on, though. It's put even better in the closing slide, with a quote from Sherwood Boehlert:
Congress is not besieged by groups asking for money that they describe as necessary to help their own narrow interests in the short run. The argument that science funding is a long-term national investment does nothing to set scientists apart. All that sets you apart is that scientists are the only group that thinks they're making a unique argument.
High-energy physics has been particularly awful in this area, working from the assumption that "This is really fundamental" is some sort of magical rhetorical trump card. Yeah, it's fundamental, touching on the origins of the universe, yadda, yadda, yadda, but it's also really, really expensive. You need to offer a little more justification than simple curiosity as to why it's worth spending millions or billions on the next generation of accelerators. Particularly when the budget is limited, and other areas of science can offer more immediate benefits.
Anyway, I though Parriot's slides were really interesting to look at, and his general advice seemed sound. It was rather depressing, though, to see his remarks being spun as some sort of extreme hackwork in the original Appell post and the comments. Granted, that's a small sample, but if we've really gotten to the point where anybody associated with the executive branch is automatically presumed to be some sort of ridiculous political flack (the man's a career OMB staffer, for God's sake-- he could be a Democrat, for all you know), well, that's just Not Good At All.
Posted at 4:42 PM | link | follow-ups |