Policy Research? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Policy Research
May 7th, 2007Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
From today’s New York Times a tale of incredible myopia all too common in the Bush Administration:
When Jon Oberg, a Department of Education researcher, warned in 2003 that student lending companies were improperly collecting hundreds of millions in federal subsidies and suggested how to correct the problem, his supervisor told him to work on something else.
The department “does not have an intramural program of research on postsecondary education finance,” the supervisor, Grover Whitehurst, a political appointee, wrote in a November 2003 e-mail message to Mr. Oberg, a civil servant who was soon to retire. “In the 18 months you have remaining, I will expect your time and talents to be directed primarily to our business of conceptualizing, competing and monitoring research grants.”
For three more years, the vast overpayments continued. Education Secretary Rod Paige and his successor, Margaret Spellings, argued repeatedly that under existing law they were powerless to stop the payments and that it was Congress that needed to act. Then this past January, the department largely shut off the subsidies by sending a simple letter to lenders — the very measure Mr. Oberg had urged in 2003.
May 7th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Roger,
What’s the policy research angle? This is more a failure of program implementation and/or evaluation. Neither of these are necessarily connected to policy research.
May 8th, 2007 at 12:22 am
Hi David-
Jon Oberg was doing policy evaluation research — pretty important if performance matters — and when he brought to his supervisor was punished as the bearer of bad news. Effective implementation depends upon effective evaluation, and effective evaluation is a research function.
Thanks!
May 8th, 2007 at 6:50 am
Roger: a bit of a side point, I know, but what is the spend on climate research at the moment? How does this compare/relate to other budgets, for example energy R&D, or spending on ‘perceived threats to national security’? And do you think that the time has come to classify GW as the latter?
May 8th, 2007 at 7:07 am
Fergus- Thanks. Climate research is about 5% of health research and about 25% of energy R&D. It is less than the homeland security R&D budget. If you want some actual numbers see:
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/tbres08p.pdf
There is really no line item for “perceived threats to national security” other than DHS, and I would not recommend transferring any climate funding to DHS;-) On the other hand, developing effective policies in response to climate change (adaptive) would beenfit from a closer connection to the mission agencies, and national security is an important mission, so there is probably some merit to what you suggest.
Thanks!
May 8th, 2007 at 9:13 am
Can somebody explain why the term ‘climate change ‘ seems to used almost exclusively as opposed to the term ‘global warming”?
May 8th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Tom- “Global warming” is just a subset of “climate change” as discussed at Climate Science on May 1 2007 in the weblog entitled “Confusion in the Definitions of Global Warming and Climate Change” [http://climatesci.colorado.edu/2007/05/01/confusion-in-the-definitions-of-global-warming-and-climate-change/].
People who use the term “climate change” when they mean global system heat changes (i.e. “global warming”) are significantly oversimplifying the climate system.
May 9th, 2007 at 5:15 am
I have a theory that most of the public were really actually looking forward to a bit of warming so the new theory about warming possibly causing cooling via gulf stream shifts started to be really pushed forward. Hence global warming becomes global climate change and all bad weather; hot, cold, wet, dry can be easily attributed to it some way or another. Of course dry areas always get drier, wet areas get wetter, windy areas get windier etc. From whence comes all this pessimism?