In the coming weeks, I am probably going to be launching a newsletter. It seems a little redundant with the blog, but it will provide some bonus content, regular updates, and is part of my efforts, like the Discord server, to “do more” with the site, and to grow its audience. Part of the newsletter will be a feature I’m calling “Missing Conversations,” which will consist of editorials and essays on current events-related topics which, from my perspective, are not being addressed in the thoughtful way they deserve. This post is an example of the sort of essay I might write for “Missing Conversations.”
I think of myself as sitting somewhere between scientist and engineer. For all science, engineering, and mathematics are thrown together as related fields, and arguably anyone engaged in one field must at least interact with the other two, they each have their distinct cultures. They enable each other, but there are rivalries, too, born of different ways of seeing the world. Engineers solve problems and make things, while scientists are more concerned with knowledge. The tensions and differences may be best captured in a joke we tell in engineering circles: a mathematician, a scientist, and an engineer are tasked with determining the volume of a ball. The mathematician derives and offers a proof for the volume formula for a sphere. The scientist carefully measures the ball’s volume via several methods, multiple times, and provides an average volume with a standard deviation. The engineer looks up the volume in a table of ball volumes.
For professional reasons, to learn more and keep abreast of recent advances, and from pure curiosity, I assiduously follow a variety of scientific and technical journals, including big names like Nature, Science, and Science Advances. Between these, the sources I follow for space news, and less focused sources like discussion boards on semi-technical topics and general news media, a common refrain since January is a protracted lamentation over changes to US federal funding and priority-setting mechanisms for scientific research. It is understandable, especially from scientific sources, to be inclined to defend this funding, and I have great sympathy for the individuals caught up in the resultant uncertainty, cuts, and chaotic changes; however, what I have not seen in any of these sources and diatribes is reasonable discussion, or even an acknowledgement, of how scientific funding and prioritization should be set. This is a vital conversation, and the present volatility is an ideal opportunity to engage with it.
In a world without resource constraints, there would be no need for this discussion. Researchers and scientists could study whatever interests them, limited only by their imaginations and what can be physically accomplished. Perhaps research would be prioritized by a kind of “prestige economy,” as is often speculated in discussions of post-scarcity economics. However, our world is subject to resource constraints; therefore, not all research can be done, and hence there are application and vetting processes to allocate funding and resources. That funding can come from philanthropic organizations, foundations, research institutions, private capital, even crowdfunding, but the majority comes, through various mechanisms, from the federal government. Inevitably, then, funding decisions are political.
They have always been political. The federal government assumed an assertive role in funding for scientific research and technology development in the World War II era, when advancements in these fields emerged as a potent factor in national security and prestige. The subsequent Cold War and Space Race with the Soviet Union cemented the federal government’s role in this space through a national consensus regarding the value of such efforts, which also included efforts to inculcate STEM education in public schools. That funding for scientific research and technology development is now in the forefront as a political matter is not because it is a newly political matter, but because those decisions were not heretofore the subject of much contention. Although the national imperatives which drove attention and funding for science and technology advancement during the Cold War faded with the Soviet Union’s collapse, motives of national prestige, a lighter consensus on the general value of such research, and the systems already implemented allowed the overall enterprise to continue along without need for question or examination. No longer.
Blame the rapidity of the modern news cycle, always searching for another story to keep people’s attention. Blame conspiracies about the “deep state” and the notable real-world bureaucratic overreach and failures that feed them. Blame the state, perceptions, and changes in the economy since 2008. Blame the failure of citizens to comprehend, and of scientists to explain, the value of such research. The direct and contributing causes of the present administration’s focus on reducing and reprioritizing federal funding for research and development are myriad and largely inseparable from the factors influencing the modern political situation as a whole; the greatest mistake to be made in contemplating these funding decisions is assuming they are the focus and purpose of some cause, rather than a side effect of the overall political moment.
Fundamentally, these funding decisions are political, because the funding is coming from the federal government, which is (at least notionally) subject through the mechanisms of representative democracy to the will of the country’s citizens. They have always been political, but the political wrangling has largely been a matter of top-line budget numbers negotiated in omnibus spending bills and patched over with continuing resolutions. Anyone familiar with the history of NASA, for instance, will be intimately aware of politicians’ influence and effect on which programs and projects are funded. Politics drove NASA’s massive budget cuts after the largesse of the Apollo era. Politics drove key decisions on major programs like the Space Shuttle. Politics have seen NASA’s manned spaceflight program since the early 2000s go through multiple iterations under different names, with different goals, with key components driven more by keeping jobs in certain congressional districts than by practical matters of engineering and logistics (looking at you, SLS). NASA, the NSF, the NIH, and other elements of the executive branch which execute their own research efforts and/or disperse funding allocated by congress for scientific research and technology development have always been subject to politics. The differences today are threefold: first, that there is attention by both the executive branch and the voting public on line item level funding decisions, such as what types of research and which particular studies should be funded; two, that the executive branch is seeking to assert a more muscular oversight of its sprawling bureaucracy, an effort potentially (but not necessarily or definitively) at odds with congress’s powers; and three, that the long-assumed national consensus on the value of certain types of research, especially of fundamental research with uncertain and long-time-horizon returns, is frayed by present economic and social concerns (if, indeed, it ever existed as strongly as we assumed in the first place).
The maze-like, insular, and bureaucratic process of funding decisions for research and development by the federal government allowed those decisions to be made largely behind the scenes, in a rather mechanistic manner. It became a matter of expectation that only the highest-profile research in controversial fields would be subject to individualized attention, and expectation can easily become entitlement. Too often from the scientific community, in bemoaning the recent changes, funding cuts, and political attention, researchers seem to believe they have some intrinsic right to be allowed to study what they desire without public review. A number of times I’ve read an “appeal to experts,” the implication being that nonexperts, meaning both political appointees and the voting public which elected the current administration, are too ignorant and unintelligent to understand and appreciate what the scientists want to research. Not that funding decisions for individual research projects ought to be subject to Athenian-style direct democracy, but it is not unreasonable for there to be political review of funding decisions made with voters’ tax dollars. Given the profound influence of the federal bureaucracy on modern life, keeping it independent and insulated from the political process leaves a massive amount of governmental function and authority to operate largely independent of the electorate’s will and influence.
That independent and insulated authority and power is the prime reason for the focus on a more muscular approach from the executive branch on the bureaucracy. Organizationally, elements like NASA, NIH, and NSF are part of the executive branch. The argument presently being made is that, as such, the president has wide authority over employment, implementation, and decision-making for all elements. In a basic reading, congress makes laws, the executive branch implements them, and the judicial branch reviews them. The executive branch’s role in this process is in its name – it is literally the executor of the laws – but what this means in practice is subject to intense debate. In a sense, that debate is the consequence of several decades of congress abdicating its responsibility to the executive branch, both in the core political administration sense, and in the sense of the federal bureaucracy and its many agencies. Optimistically, perhaps the present paroxysm will induce the legislative branch to reassert its proper role in the governmental process.
These preceding considerations are arguably only relevant because of the third. If there remained a national consensus on the value, absolutely and relatively, of various kinds of research and development, political reviews and a more powerful executive branch would not be perceived as detrimental to the scientific enterprise; indeed, many of the same sources which are now decrying executive overreach were lauding executive overreach by the previous administration when it aligned with their priorities. In that sense, we could view the whole affair with a certain justifiable cynicism, and simply assert that it turns out researchers can be as petty and selfish in their politics as anyone else, for all they dress up their opinions and peer down their noses at those who disagree with them, but to do so would by merely symptomatic of the real issue upon which this entire essay pivots, the changing perceptions and understandings of the value offered by scientific research and technological development. Attention often focuses on fundamental research, because it is viewed as being the least likely to receive funding from other sources, the most abstract, and the “riskiest” in terms of eventual return on investment, but these considerations affect the entire enterprise.
If people do not see the value of scientific research and technology development, if they do not connect these efforts with beneficial impacts on their own lives and on our civilization as a whole, it is not because they are insufficiently educated, intelligent, or conscientious to understand. Nor is it necessarily a failure on researchers’ parts to communicate the impact and importance of their work. Rather, those who are involved in the research enterprise and those who are not are communicating at cross-purposes and in different spheres. The question is not if research (of whatever type, and there are definitely some studies that don’t need to be a priority) is valuable, or conforms to an ideology, or confirms or overturns the current consensus on one issue or another. It is a question, instead, of opportunity cost. Ultimately, that is what this debate is about: the opportunity cost of federal research funding. What is the opportunity cost of spending resources on research which could go elsewhere, to national security, or to infrastructure, or a dozen other priorities? What is the opportunity cost of not spending those resources on research?
There aren’t plain, straightforward answers to those questions. They are not questions that can be resolved by performing a data analysis and determining a multivariate optimization topography. These are questions of relative value, and even if a “right” answer could be asserted, it would be irrelevant. The only acceptable answer is one which is achieved through the debate, argument, and churn of the democratic process, not because it is an optimal answer, a perfect answer, or an ideal solution, but because it is the answer in which the participants will be invested and will therefore find acceptable. If there seems to be resentment for the research enterprise, a certain vindictiveness to the cuts and changes to funding, it likely arises from the sense of disenfranchisement from the process by which that funding is determined and allocated.
I am a strong proponent of investment in research and development – selfish-adjacent, in the case of anything space related, but also research which has no effect on my chosen fields. I see the proposals to cut NASA’s science programs, and I think it a great loss, in many ways, and not merely from a sunk cost fallacy perspective. Yet, I can also see the counterargument. Maybe an improved understanding of dark energy will enable the development of fantastic new technologies which will benefit everyone, but that’s a distant proposition compared to funding to make the electric grid less likely to be crippled by a cyberattack in the first two minutes of the next conflict. Yes, it might be only a few tens of millions, pennies compared to the overall federal budget, but that’s a logical fallacy, too. Trimming a little here and a little there is the way to find savings, whether financially or in your story’s word count. Just the other day I trimmed over four hundred words from a 2400-word story by cutting a few words here and there, no more than four or five at a time.
This is the missing conversation, between the consternation, the strident voices, the impassioned pleas. Like the other missing conversations we will have in coming months, it is a conversation we must have, slow and painful though it may be, though its resolution will likely satisfy no one perfectly. Yes, there are legitimate concerns about the “politicization of science,” but they are not new concerns, nor unique concerns. Are funding bodies more or less the gatekeepers of science than prestigious journals and their editorial boards, or the scientists themselves? Perhaps one administration will restrict research with which it disagrees, and that would be a shame. The next will do the same, but for its own priorities, just as the scientific enterprise filters itself by its priorities and ideologies. If the conversation is not had, if there are only sides, statements, and declarations, more will be lost than a few years of erratic funding.
IGC Publishing 