Picking up from last week’s posts on the science of science policy, I want to shift emphasis to what happens after the research program generates useful information about relevant investment decisions.  Here things move from the rationality encouraged by Dr. Marburger to the competing interests and priorities of politics that may make any useful knowledge generated by the research program wither and die.  He’d be the first to admit that he doesn’t have a good idea about how to address this problem, and I make no claims that what follows will fit the bill either.  But there is no effective S&T wide discussion of strategy and tactics in approving policy, and the lackluster record of this community reflects it.  We need to change how we support our arguments and desired policies, as well as adjust the strategies and institutions we use to give these policies life, if there is any hope of being taken more seriously than we are at present.

Many of the science and technology organizations in Washington are disciplinary in their focus, and are more concerned with advocacy than research.  While it certainly makes sense in supporting the interests of their members and their disciplines, it can lead to a diffusion of effort in support of science and technology.  the biological sciences and the engineering disciplines have umbrella organizations (FASEB and IEEE, respectively) that help alleviate some of this stovepiping, but the basic problem remains.  The organizations that are arguably for all of science and technology – AAAS and the National Academies -  are more involved with their research and service activities, and what advocacy they do is relatively mild.

The disciplinary societies focus on funding for their disciplines, and the general groups are more general in their money goals.  A main reason there is an emphasis on funding for physical science disciplines is to ‘make up’ for the doubling of the NIH budget.  Biomedical advocates are arguing for their dollars even before the physical sciences doubling finishes.  This zero-sum game ultimately does neither group any favors, and fails to acknowledge that the federal government may have research priorities independent of some general notions of balance.

Other organizations in Washington do a more thorough job of integrating their advocacy and research missions.  Traditional think tanks like Heritage, Brookings, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Council of Foreign Relations, the Center for Security and International Studies, and the Cato Institute fall in this category.  They each have their particular ideological and/or subject matter perspectives.  And while there are small outfits focused on science and technology in these think tank spaces (Science Progress and the New Atlantis), they are both smaller components of larger organizations.  Would something like an S&T focused Heritage or Brookings help take the knowledge generated from the science of science policy and transform it into new policies?  Possibly.  Absent an entity like it, or some kind of organization focused on that goal, it certainly seems a lot harder to convert useful science policy knowledge into useful science policy.

This probably leaves an odd taste in the mouths of some.  There may well be another way to get the knowledge generated about science and technology policy into the minds and hearts of policymakers without seeming like such a shill.  The trouble is in policy it’s not enough to simply write the paper with policy recommendations and get it printed.  There needs to be an effort to push the paper and its recommendations out into the world.  Policymakers get enough stuff thrown at them that they need to filter it.  A paper with nobody pushing it won’t get the same attention as one that has someone pushing it, regardless of the relative quality of the two.