An Analysis of Proposals for a Department of Science Brooks

Teck&~ InSo&& Vol. 8. pp. W-31 (1986) Ptintcd in the USA. Au tights ~tved.

0160-791x186 ~3.00 + a0 copyright a 1986 Fetgamon Journals Ltd

An Analysis of Proposals for a Department of Science

Harvey Brooh

New proposals for the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Science are a hardy staple of American science policy discussion. It is difhcult to discern the first origins of such proposals in American history because they came in different guises at different times, and it hard to say which proposals really corresponded to what would now be regarded as a Department of Science. Several of the Founding Fathers advocated the creation of a national university, of which advanced scientific training was to be an important component, but, though officially sponsored, it was not to be publicly supported and nothing came of the proposal.

The bequest of British merchant, James Smithson, in 1829 to the United States of America, to found in Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institu- tion, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men2 precipitated a national debate which finally culminated in the acceptance of the bequest by Congress in 1846, and the appointment of Joseph Henry as its first Secretary, but the fledgling institution confined its activities to what could be supported with a modest annual endowment income of $30,000.3 By 185 1 Alexander Bathe was arguing that an institution of science, supplementary to existing ones, is much needed in our country, to guide public action in scientific matters,4 but this had more the character of the scientific advisory organization which was later created as the National Academy of Sciences in 1863, with Bathe as one of its most influential proponents. 5

Once again in 1884 the appointment of the Allison Commission, made up of three members each from the House and the Senate, revived the debate over a cen- tral scientific organization for the federal government. At the instigation of a member of the commission, Congressman Theodore Lyman of Massachusetts, one of a very rare breed of scientifically trained members of Congress, the National Academy appointed a committee whose members suggested that the time is near when the country will demand the institution of a branch of the executive . . . devoted especially to the, direction and control of all the purely scientific work of the government. 6 However, the Academy committee lacked the courage of its

Hawey Bmo&s Walt Dean of Engakeetikg and Appikd Pbytis at Haruardjvm 19S7 to 1975, and Ij now Benjamik Peak professor of Tecbnoiogy and Pu& Pohiy. He ba been a member of the Presaikntl Science Advisory Committee and tbe Natkal SciGnce Board, and has sewed as Cl&man of the Nataimai Academys Committee on Science and Pu& Policy.

19

20 Harvey Btvo.4.r

convictions, concluding that such a new institution was politically infeasible, and advocated instead a more modest consolidation of four existing government scientific bureaus. The arguments against a Department of Science carried the day in the Allison Commission which, in the words of Hunter Dupree, concluded that the full potentiality of science in the government could be achieved only if it permeated the whole structure rather than being concentrated into one department , representing a special professional interest .* This is an argument that is still powerful today, and was indeed used by President Nixon to justify the removal of the Presidents Science Advisory Committee and the Office of Science and Technology from the Executive Office of the President in 1973.~

Once again in 1903, Theodore Roosevelt appointed a Committee on the Orga- nization of Government Scientific Work, but this resulted only in some reshuffling of existing bureaus. lo A similar fate befell the Department of Science idea in the hands of a National Academy committee in 1908 which Congress requested in an appropriation bill to consider certain questions relating to the scientific work under the United States Government.

31; World War II and Beyond

The closest the nation came to getting a cabinet Department of Science, or its equi- valent , probably arose as an outgrowth of the role of science in World War II. Dur- ing that war virtually all of the nations scientific effort outside of the civil service laboratories was centralized under the Office of Scientific Research and Develop- ment (OSRD) under the direction of a civilian, Dr. Vannevar Bush, who reported directly to the President. In contrast with the policy followed during World War I, when there was a rush to commission prominent scientists as officers in the Armed Services, l2 scientists were mobilized as civilians in civilian-managed laboratories, many of them on university campuses. Since there was very little science other than that directly related to the war effort, OSRD became in effect a cabinet level De- partment of Science devoted . . . to the direction and control of all the . . . scientific work of the government. When President Roosevelt asked Bush to form a committee to study the lessons of World War II for the postwar organization of American science, I3 OSRD became the natural model. The National Research Foundation which the Bush committee proposed closely resembled many subsequent proposals for a Department of Science. It appeared to concentrate almost all mission-oriented science which was not highly specific to a particular government end user into the new foundation. It explicitly included a division of military research and a division of biomedical research, for example,4,15 just as in OSRD during the war military R&D was thought to be too vital to the nations security to be exclusively entrusted to the military services. l6

Yet the subsequent political debate over the Bush proposal never really focused on the issue of centralization. Instead it revolved around the issue of political ac- countability as manifested in the appropriate degree of policy control of the new agency by scientists outside government (on the model of the old National Ad- visory Committee for Aeronautics, which Bush had chaired before the war) as compared with politically accountable full-time government executives. Thus the

Department of Scimce Ptvposah Adysti 21

centralization proposals of the Bush committee failed to be realized, not because the desirability of centralization was explicitly debated and rejected, but because other agencies were created by Congress and the executive to lill the vacuum left while the governance of the proposed new science agency was being thrashed out in the political arena. First the Office of Naval Research, then the Atomic Energy Commission were created and began supporting both basic research and generic applied research on a generous scale. Later separate research offices were formed in the Army and the Air Force, and the Public Health Service assumed responsibility for postwar biomedical research. In each case the relation of the research supported to the agencys mission was interpreted very broadly; virtually any fundamental scientific advance was viewed as of potential value to national security, for example, and each agency argued that, in the absence of a National Science Foundation, it had a responsibility to fill at least part of that role in addition to its sponsorship of research of more obvious relevance to its particular mission.

By the time the National Science Foundation was finally born in 1950, much of the ground proposed for Bushs National Research Foundation had already been occupied by the various mission-oriented agencies, each of which was, surrepti- tiously or overtly, competing for the prestige of becoming the principal patron of science in the federal government. The early budgetary history of the fledgling NSF does not suggest, however, that it would have been able to function like a Depart- ment of Science even if it had been created as originally proposed in 1946. The political climate was simply not ripe for large-scale government support of science and technology divorced from the major national preoccupation with military security and the growing confrontation with the Soviet Union. Even after the NSF became operational, much of its miniscule, but growing, budget had to be justified in terms of its contribution to national security and the training of scientists and engineers for participation in military R&D. I8 It was not until after the launch- ing of Sputnik in October 1957 that the budget of NSF began to climb rapidly, reaching $100 million only in 1962, at which time it still represented less than 1% of federal R&D expenditures.

Sutd and Beyond

The period of national soul-searching which followed Sputnik once again surfaced the issue of centralization in the management of science and technology by the federal government. The position of Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology was created by Eisenhower, with the incumbent, James R. Kil- lian, Jr., reporting directly to him, and serving as a full-fledged member of the National Security Council. Over the next several years the Office of Science and Technology (OST) was created, along with a Federal Council for Science and Tech- nology (FCST) which was supposed to coordinate the science planning activities of the principal federal agencies having strong R&D programs. New positions of scientific advisor or assistant secretary for R&D were created in many cabinet departments in order to centralize science planning and raise the general political visibility of the science function. I9 Offices to coordinate materials research (CCMRD) , oceanographic research (ICO), atmospheric research (ICAS), and

22 Harvey Bmds

science information were created within OST with management responsibility assigned to the Presidents Science Advisor in his newly created alternate role as Director of OST and Chairman of the Federal Council.zo The statutory, but long dormant, function of NSF as coordinator and evaluator of all federal R&D was partially transferred by means of the Presidents reorganization authority to the Director of OST, with NSF reduced to a data collection and staff support role which it had always been more comfortable in fulfilling anyway.

In the first years of the Kennedy administration Senator Humphrey launched a suong new push for the creation of a Department of Science, and such an option at first received sympathetic consideration in the new adminisuation. This was, perhaps, the most ambitious of all the proposals for a Department of Science and Tech- nology (DST), with almost all federal R&D to be centralized in a single agency-in many respects more centralized than even Bushs National Research Foundation, since, in addition to NSF, it was to include all of NASA, all of NIH, a considerable part of Defense R&D, virtually all the R&D activities of the Atomic Energy Com- mission (AEC), most of the R&D activities of the Departments of Commerce and Interior, thus including most of the civilian-oriented federal laboratories.

There were also several other less ambitious proposals, such as combining the National Bureau of Standards, the fundamental physical and materials sciences parts of AEC, and the space science parts of NASA, with NSF in a single agency. The creation of OST by means of the Presidents reorganization authority, as de- scribed above, was the final outcome, and the one favored by the great majority of the politically involved members of the scientific community, including the Presi- dents Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). Probably the most compelling argument for the preservation of the decentrahzed, pluralistic structure which had grown up since World War II, was that science should be kept as organizationally close as possible to its ultimate users, with each mission agency being primarily responsible for the support of all the science, including basic research, related to its mission. At this time R&D was regarded as serving primarily the direct needs of the federal government itself, not the broader needs of the national economy, a view which was reflected in the fact that more than 90% of all federal R&D in the early 1960s was in the three areas of defense, space, and atomic energy, and federal R&D itself comprised over two-thirds of the total national R&D effortZ3

The DST idea continued to be revived in various guises throughout the 20 years following the mid 1960s. According to a recent study by the Congressional Re- search Service, there have been no less than 100 separate proposals for a DST during this period. 14 When Congress created the Office of Science and Technology Policy in 1976, three years after President Nixon had abolished OST and PSAC, many Congressional proponents of the reorganization wanted to see it go much further, The 1976 Act called for the creation of a special commission to study the organization of science in the federal government, with a legislative history clearly indicating a hope that such a study would lead to some kind of cabinet-level Department of Science. 25

Throughout the whole period from 1960 onward Congress was pushing strongly for a more centralized organization close to the President and accountable to Con- gress which would act as a sort of general staff for federal R&D, though not neces-

Depatiment of Scimce Proposah Analysti 23

sarily a cabinet department. The 1976 Act, for example, called for an elaborate series of reports of the nations entire R&D effort, including a Presidential state- ment on the nations overall R&D strategy, modeled after the Presidential state- ment on economic strategy contained in the annual Economic Report of the Presi: dent. This never came to pass because the Executive Branch in each successive administration dragged its feet in implementing the Act, maintaining that such a centralized strategy for R&D by itself was impossible. Thus the tension continued between two radically different concepts of OSTP, one as a kind of general staff putting forth a grand plan for science each year, and the other a staff agency of limited scope primarily serving the immediate decision-making needs of the Presi- dent in areas involving technical considerations in which he chose to take a personal interest. a6

The pressure for centralization also manifested itself in a desire of Congress to create special purpose cabinet or independent agencies to deal with specific areas of science and technology, agencies with a mission primarily of research, development , demonstration, and testing but a minimum of operational or service respon- sibilities. This, of course, had a long history, beginning with the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1946, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958, and the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) in 1974. There were several attempts to create a separate Ocean Science and Engineering agency or a separate Atmospheric and Oceanic agency,27 but these never succeeded. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), created in 1963 as part of the Department of Commerce, did bring together several separate government activities in these areas, but the Navy, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Interior, and even NASA maintained their own separate and fairly large-scale activities involving either or both oceans and atmospheres.

All these proposals, successful and unsuccessful, could be regarded as mini- Departments of Science within restricted domains of science, and experience with them can perhaps help illuminate some of the advantages and disadvantages of a more comprehensive DST, as I shall discuss later.

Still another strand in the DST debate arose in the mid- 1960s in connection with the rapid expansion of graduate education and research in the universities. This was a proposal to bring together into a single agency all federal support for academic science and advanced scientific training, including national laboratories and centers that were primarily extensions of the academic scientific enterprise, such as the centers for high energy physics, radio-astronomy, optical astronomy, atmospheric and oceanographic research, but leaving the more mission-oriented non-academic research in the mission agencies. The most complete exposition of this proposal came in a Congressional committee report proposing the creation of a National Institutes for Research and Advanced Studies (NIRAS)O, but an only slightly different version of the same idea was put forward in the first Congres- sionally mandated report of the National Science Boa.rd.19 The NSB proposal was novel in that it provided for pluralism in the support of the direct costs of research by mission agencies (estimated at about 35 % of aggregate costs) but consolidation of all indirect and other institutional costs in a single agency. This would have

24 Harvey Btvoh

made the U.S. support system for academic science much more similar to that which has subsequently evolved in Britain and most of Europe, particularly Ger- many.3o Both these proposals were often referred to as $5 B. departments of science, in contrast with the $25-550 B. departments proposed by Senator Hum- phrey and others.31

The Presidents Commission Pro~osd

The most recent DST proposal has come from the Presidents Commission on In- dustrial Competitiveness,3z more specifically from its Committee on Research, De- velopment , and Manufacturing. The Committee proposal, adopted unanimously by the full Commission, was to include all non-defense federal R&D in a single new department. The only agencies explicitly excluded would be DOD, Agricul- ture, and agencies such as EPA and FDA whose R&D directly supports a statutory regulatory mission. 34 It would also apparently exclude the manned space program of NASA, but would include the unmanned science and applications programs of that agency-presumably on the theory that the manned programs are so heavily involved with the military that they could not be split off effectively. This would be a $15 B. DST, somewhat intermediate between the Humphrey and NIRAS proposals .

The principal rationale for the Commission proposal is that by consolidating the major non-defense R&D funders into a Department of Science and Technol- ogy, the Government would have a focus for developing and implementing R&D policies better designed to meet the needs of industrial competitiveness. This is considered of paramount importance because the Commission has concluded that R&D and technological innovation are primary factors in US economic performance and therefore require the special attention and political visibility that is best embodied in a cabinet department. By implication the Commission thus attributes the deterioration of US economic performance in recent years primarily to a lag in R&D and innovation, a contention which is debatable at best, and to which I will return below .35

From the arguments given by the Committee on Research, Development and Manufacturing of the Commission, one can infer that their primary focus was on federal laboratories, and the inefficiencies caused by the assignment of even the large multi-purpose laboratories to mission-oriented agencies, where it is difficult to use their full capabilities for broader national purposes which do not fit with the statutory mission of the parent agency. They point out that there are 700 such laboratories which spend about $18 billion a year, nearly three times what the federal government spends on academic research; however, this figure includes the laboratories of the department of Defense, the weapons laboratories of DOE, and the Manned Space Flight Center of NASA, so that the argument is somewhat mislead- ing. Private conversation with a member of the Committee confirms that they probably had in mind primarily the consolidation of federal laboratories in their recommendation, and were less concerned with extramural programs.

Department of Science Ptvposds Analysti 25

Discussion -Means vs. Ends

It is interesting to observe that almost all the proposals for a Department of Science have surfaced when the country was focusing major attention on a particular policy area seen to be served by science and technology. Thus the Humphrey proposal was debated at a time when the national security aspects of science were paramount, owing to the crisis of national confidence created by Sputnik, and the centralization of R&D support and planning were viewed as means of serving this urgent national security need more efficiently. The analogy with the creation of OSRD at the outset of World War II was rather close. The Soviets were seen as having achieved technological superiority over the United States because they were better able to mobilize their technical resources in support of their technological contest with the Americans.

Later in the 196Os, when the expansion of the university system, particularly of advanced training, and the problem of increasing access to the system, had become important national policy objectives, the proposals that surfaced were concerned mainly with the centralization of academic science, including both basic research and graduate education, and the development of new institutional capacity (this was the period of centers of excellence and the various science development programs).

By the late 1970s the nations attention had shifted to economic competitiveness, and this focus steadily intensified in the early 1980s. Hence it is hardly sur- prising that the next set of DST proposals was justified mainly in terms of this new preoccupation.

These examples are but manifestations of a much more universal phenomenon of the American political system. Whenever a particular policy area becomes of special importance to the country, recommendations are heard to collect all activities related to that policy area into a single agency, usually a cabinet department or an independent agency more accountable to Congress. But of course each such topic cross-cuts many other topics and constituency interests, and the question soon has to be faced as to whether closer coordination along one dimension of a cluster of activities diminishes coherence and coordination along other dimensions. For example, when environmental degradation became a national priority in the early 197Os, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Council on Envi- ronmental Quality (CEQ) were rapidly built up, less attention was given to the effects of policies on economic development and competitiveness or on the nations energy supply or self-sufficiency. After the 1973 embargo the nations energy supply and self-sufficiency began to compete for attention; a cabinet level Department of Energy was created with a broad mandate, and energy and environment policies frequently came into sharp political collision. Indeed this collision of priorities tended to paralyze coherent policy formation in both areas, since both the DOE and the EPA each became an advocate of its own assigned policy goals, and there was no adequate mechanism for balancing the two against each other.

However, in the case of the DST and many of the other science-focused agencies such as AEC, NASA, or NOAA, the coordination problem arises between means and ends. Both AEC and NASA, for example, collected a certain cluster of scien-

26 Hawey Bmo&s

tific and technological techniques into a single agency, where an effort was made to develop and refine these techniques in a coordinated way to serve many different social or political purposes. Thus, in ARC you had weapons development for the military, nuclear propulsion for submarines (and at various times also for aircraft, rockets, and merchant ships), radioisotope technique developments for agri- culture, medicine, and industrial process controls, research on the structure of mat- ter at the most fundamental level. In NASA you had satellite communications, weather, earth resources and ocean remote sensing, investigation of the upper at- mosphere, space and planetary science, and, most recently, space manufacturing. Homogeneity with respect to means or techniques thus inevitably entailed heterogeneity with respect to social and economic goals.

The focus on means within a single framework may be very economical of scarce resources when the technological area in question is in its infancy, with few people who know anything about the underlying science and technology, but it may become progressively less effective as the field grows, the technologies proliferate and differentiate, and the number of practical uses and users increases. Then the adaptation of particular versions of the technologies to the needs of particular users becomes a more and more important part of the mission; the number of knowl- edgeable people increases, and the need for the conservation of generic skills declines. At the same time the agency organized around means runs the risk of becoming a collection of solutions looking for problems. All applications using the particular skills and techniques commanded by the agency are given priority without adequate consideration of alternate technologies serving the same social purposes simply because they lie outside the principal competence of the agency. 36

Hence, the greater the coherence with respect to the logic of means, the less likely there is to be coherence with respect to ends, and a coherent approach to the requirements and preferences of the ultimate users of the technology. Cabinet or agency status may then serve simply to give one particular means a preferred status in serving a given end: nuclear power for electricity production, satellite remote sensing for earth surveillance, nuclear weapons for war fighting. Competing means to the same end never are properly compared, and one particular means tends to become an end in itself, with its own vested interests and vocal advocates.

Placing means together in one organization may tend to remove or isolate the design process from operational users, especially in government, where organita- tional aggrandizement tends to be the most easily quantifiable measure of the success of an agency or department. Science and technology considered as a whole are means par exceljence. A Department of Science and Technology, while possibly achieving some scale economies and experience curve advantages in some technical areas relevant to a multitude of social purposes, would at the same time create new problems of adaptation to any single purpose by separating designers from users.

The current proposal for a Department of Science and Technology is derived, as we have seen, from concern with US economic competitiveness, yet many analysts believe that the weaknesses in US competitiveness lie not in the R&D process itself, or from a lack of new ideas or ability to originate technological innovations, but rather from failure to translate such ideas as rapidly into marketable products and processes as some of our competitors. 37 In other words the weaknesses in US tech-

Depaement of Sake PTVPOSCU? Andysir 27

nology lie in that part of the overall innovation process that lies beyond the R&D stage, in the interfaces with production and marketing and in the two-way feed- back between ultimate users and R&D performers or product and process designers. Insofar as the American economy is concerned, these interactions are likely to be attenuated rather than reinforced by isolating science and technology in its own department with its own external constituencies and Congressional sup- porters. It is likely to result in less, rather than more, attention to the needs of the market and manufacturing as part of an integrated systeln of innovation. It is also likely to lead to less attention to the second order consequenceso3 of the deploy- ment of new technologies, as happened most dramatically in the case of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power under the jurisdiction of the AEC and the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE).

As a generalization one can assert that a single agency works well when it is assigned a single, overriding technical objective without any mandate to balance a multiplicity of goals or effect a compromise among the pressures of a variety of con- stituences. Perhaps the two clearest examples of such a situation are provided by the Manhattan Project in World War II, and the Apollo Program in the 1960s. In both these cases technological feasibility was the overwhelming issue, and neither economic cost, market considerations, or social costs were of much importance. In the case of the Manhattan Project extreme secrecy insulated the program from public scrutiny, or even debate within the government regarding the ethical and political implications of the program. In the case of Apollo the program was carried out in the spotlight of publicity; in the build-up stage there was overwhelming public support. Yet after the death of three astronauts in the Apollo capsule fire, there was much more public questioning, although the momentum of the original commitment, plus the unusual political skill of a very experienced administrator, James Webb, carried the program through to a successful conclusion. Even in this case, however, there were serious conflicts between the overriding Apollo goal and the broader-based scientific missions of NASA, while at the same time opposition to the space program from the political constituencies of the Great Society programs of the late 1960s became increasingly intense. The point is that a single overriding goal, especially one closely associated with a particular set of means, cannot sustain political attention over any period of time. As the goal begins to be achieved, or even if it tends to recede, other social priorities demand attention, and the original policy coherence is lost.

With the success of Apollo, the consensus that had supported it began to come apart and neither NASA nor the administration as a whole was ever able to co- alesce around a new set of national goals that could be pursued with the same single-mindedness as Apollo. Indeed many of the advantages of a single agency devoted to space began to be less apparent as the new technologies matured and began to move into operational application. Conflicts between NASA and the NOAA began to arise over the design of weather satellites, and NASAs provisions for handling the huge amounts of data from weather satellites proved to be inade- quate. Problems have been even more murky and confused in relation to the various applications of remote earth sensing; it proved very difficult to be respon- sive to the needs of a wide range of users, and there was a continuing battle over

28 Harvey Brooks

how remote sensing should be paid for. The story of satellite communications was somewhat more satisfactory, with the creation of COMSAT and INTELSAT as semi-private and semi-public corporations, but even here the longer-term future is not so clear as new communications technologies such as optical fibers begin to compete with some space applications.

The experience with AEC and NASA suggests that a Department of Science and Technology might perform best in circumstances where economic, social, and market considerations could be minimized- where technical feasibility was the overriding issue. But it also suggests that such a department would begin to en- counter difficulties in proportion to its success as its projects moved from technical feasibility to potential social applications.

The more technical development has to be influenced by political or market logic as opposed to purely technical logicJg the less likely it is to be successful in a Depart- ment of Science and Technology. Conversely, agencies whose goals are defined primarily by social or economic considerations need broad and fairly intimate con- tact with science in order to be continually alert to new possibilities. Too great a separation of technical means from social ends is too likely to lead to technological white elephants - brilliant technical successes that prove to be social or economic disasters.

What Then?

Science and technology in the Federal Government serve too large a variety of social and economic goals to be placed in a single agency. There is no doubt that at the present time too little policy attention is given to the potential contribution of federally supported R&D to US economic competitiveness in the world economy, and this aspect of the overall system deserves some rethinking. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether this is the primary source of the loss of US industrial competitiveness, or whether the problem lies primarily with the organization and support of R&D. As a nation we spend more in absolute terms on R&D than any of our competitors, or even than any coherent combination of our competitors such as the EEC.40 This is true even when we consider only industry-financed industrial research.

It is true that we spend a smaller fraction of GNP on civilian-oriented research than several of our competitors, including especially Germany and Japan, but it is doubtful whether R&D as a fraction of GNP is the proper measure of innovative effort because of the large spill-over effects of R&D between organizations within a country. 41 Nevertheless, some of our R&D, including some privately financed industrial R&D, may be less efficient than that of some other countries because it is too proprietary, leading to unproductive duplication or imitation in an effort to keep up with what competitors are thought to be doing. This happens especially in the more generic stages of research and early development, which are often treated as pre-competitive in other countries and exempted from anti-trust regulation. But it seems likely that the major source of our competitive difficulties lies in the efficiency with which we are able to convert new knowledge to viable commercial products and industrial processes, and this will not be helped very much by reforms

Department of Science Proposals Analysis 29

in our R&D alone, least of all those parts of the national R&D effort that are per- formed or sponsored by the Federal Government.

Many factors outside the R&D process itself affect the way R&D results are uti- lized, and our primary attention should probably be focused on these factors, especially those that determine the integration of R&D with manufacturing and marketing and link innovation to user needs and requirements. The necessary link- age is a two-way one, with technology development guided by market strategy and business planning at the same time that the latter is influenced by emerging opportunities in science and technology. It is wrong to regard technology as a sort of dezls ex machina which determines business strategy, but it is equally wrong to regard science and technology as activities which simply respond passively to indepen- dently determined business strategies or the dictates of the market.42

From the standpoint of science policy what is needed is not revolution but evolution in the national R&D system. There is a valid need to overcome some of the parochialism of statutory agency missions, particularly in the utilization of some of the large multidisciplinary federal laboratories, which should be treated more as a common national resource than they are. There is a need for more experimentation with new mechanisms of support, particularly those that provide incentives for collaboration between industry and universities and between industry and government laboratories. A good example is the present experimentation of the NSF with the establishment of multidisciplinary Engineering Research Centers on University campuses,43 though this could run the risk of loss of flexibility in the system in re- sponding to new scientific opportunities. Industrial scientists and engineers should probably have a greater role in the evaluation of, and the setting of priorities for federal research without, however, being permitted to dictate the research agenda. There is probably a need to moderate or dilute the too exclusively discipline-based reward system in universities, and to encourage greater specialization among universities . 44

Above all, however, there is a need for greater expertise within the Federal Gov- ernment about the competitive health of various American industries, better knowledge of longer-term trends in technologies and markets, better mechanisms for achieving a greater consensus among the relevant actors on simply the &scrip- tion of what an industrys problems are and how~they are likely to evolve over time. The challenge would be to prevent this exercise from being captured by any one disciplinary perspective to the exclusion of others. It must integrate technology, microeconomics, and social and demographic trends in an attempt at a coherent description of what is happening to the American economy and the division of labor in the world economy. This is not the sort of task that is likely to be carried out effectively by the management of a Department of Science and Technology.

Notes

1. A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies andActivities to 1940 (Cm- bridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 15.

2. Ibid., p. 66. 3. Ibid., p. 79. 4. Ibid, p. 117.

30 Harvey Btvobs

5. Ibid. p. 140. 6. Ibid., p. 216. 7. Ibid., p. 217. 8. Zbid., p. 231. 9. David Z. BcckIer. The Precarious Life of Science in the White House in Science and Its Public: The Chang

ing Relationship, &se&&f, Summer 1974, pp. 115-134. cf. cspcciaBy pp. 127-128. 10. Duprcc, op. cit., p. 294. 11. Ibid., p. 295. 12. Harvey Brooks, Impact of the Defense Establishment on Science and Education in Natro~Scicnce PO&~,

Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Science, Rcscarch and Development of the Committee on Science and Astronautics, US House of Representatives. 91st Congress, 2nd Session, no. 23 (Washington, DC: US Gov- ernment Printing Office, 1970). cf. cspcciaIly p. 934.

13. Vanncvat Bush et a/. , Science tbe End& Frontkr: A Report to the Presiaknt on a hgmm for Postwar S&n- #c Reseutrb (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, July 1945) reprinted as NSF-60-40 in July 1960 by the NationaI science Foundation, Washington, DC, cf. letter from President FrankEn D. Roosevelt to Vanncvat Bush, November 17, 1944, reprinted on pp. 3-4.

14. Ibid., pp. 34-40. 15. Harvey Brooks, The Physiczl Sciences: BcIlwcthcr of Science Policy in James Shannon, cd., S&t~cc and tbe

Evolution of Pub& Pohcy (New York: Rockefeller University Press, 1983) pp. 105-143, cf. cspcciaIly pp. 108-109.

16. Vanncvar Bush et aZ., op. tit, pp. 33-34. 17. J. Mcrton England, A Pattvn for Pure S&nce: be National Science Fonnrkrtion J Forma&e Years, 1945-S 7

(Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1982). 18. Ibid, Chapter 11, pp. 211-226. 19. Presidents Science Advisory Committee, Strengthening American Science (Washington, DC: US Govcrn-

mcnt Printing Office, December 27, 1958). 20. Reorganization Plan no. 2. June 1962. 21. Senate Bill #2771, presented by Senator Hubert Humphrey January 31, 1962, and passed by voice vote

August 8, 1962: Establishment of a Commission on Science and Technology. The Bill authorized a 12-member commission to consider, inter ahit, the cstabhshmcnt of a Cabinet-level Department of Science and Technology.

22. Harvey Brooks, Tbe GwernmentofScicnce (Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 1968) cf. especially Chapter 1, pp. 1-18. for a detailed discussion of the pros and cons of a Department of Science ss they were viewed in 1961.

23. Harvey Brooks, Government Support of Science, McGkaw-HiL. Yearbook of Science and Technology (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1963) pp. 11-21.

24. Presidentid Commission Seeks Department of Science, in Daniel S. Greenberg, cd., Science and Govern- ment Report, Vol. XIV, no. 20 (December 1, 1984); Michael E. Davcy, Christopher T. Hill and Wendy Schacht, Establishing a Department of Science and Technology: An Anllysis of the Proposzl of the Prcsi- dents Commission on Industrial Competitiveness, CongrcssionaI Research S&cc, Library of Congress, May 30, 1985, report no. 85-122 SPR.

25. Public Law no. 94-282. Nationsd Science and Technology Policy, Organization and Priorities Act of 1976; cf. also A Legihtive History of the Natiiona( Science and Technology Policy, Organizatz~n and Priorities Act of 1976, prepared for the use of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and the Committee on Human Resources, US Senate, April 1977.

26. H. Brooks and E.B. Skolnikoff, Science Advice in the White House? Continuation of a Debate, Science, Vol. 187, January 10. 1975, pp. 35-41.

27. Presidents Science Advisory Committee, Effect&e Use of the Sea (Washington, DC: US Government Print- ing Office, June 1966).

28. See Tbe NatiOna/ Znstiwtes of Reseazb and Advanced Studies: A Recommenhion for tbe Centrahahn of F&e& Science Rerponsibditk~, Document Serial N, 42-363-0, Report of the Subcommittee on Science. Research and Development of the Committee on Science and Astronautics, US House of Representatives. 91st Congress, 2nd Session. (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1970); cf. abo Harvey Brooks, note 15, pp. 127-129.

29. National Science Board, Towara? a Pnbk Policy for Gradsate Edncatzon in the Sciences, NSB 69-l (Wash- ington, DC: US Government Printing Office. 1969).

30. NASINAEIIOM, Outfook for Science and TecbnoIogy: Tbe Next Five Ycmz, Report of the Nationai Research Council published in collaboration with the National Academy of Sciences (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1982); cf. especially Chapter 13, Research in Europe and the United States. pp. 513-618.

31. Cf. note 21.

Department of Science hposals A&ysk 31

32. Presidents Commission on Industriai Compctitivcncss. G/oba/ Competitin: The New Redi2y, Vol. 2 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. January 1985); cf. Report of the Committee on Rcscsrch, Dcvelopmcnt and Manning, pp. 61-99.

33. Ibid, pp. 61-93. 34. Cohn Nomvan, A New push for a FcdcraI Scicncc Dcpartmcnt, News and Comment, Science, Vol. 226.

Dcccmbcr 21. 1984, pp. 1398-1400. 35. Presidents Commission, op. cit., p. 66. 36. Harvey Brooks, The Govwmest ofScience, op. cit., Chapter 2, pp. 19-53. 37. I-huvcy Brooks, %chnology as a Factor in U.S. Compctitivcncss, Chapter 9, in Bruce R. Scott and Gcorgc C.

Lodge. cds., U.S. Conspeririocncrs in the Wor/dExmomy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press. 1985) pp. 328-394.

38. Raymond A. Baucr with Richard S. Roscnbloom and Laura Shatpc, Second On& Conrequencex A Metb- odologicd hay on rbe Ienpect of Tecbndogy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1969).

39. Henry W. Lane, Rodney G. Bcddows and Paul R. Iawrcncc. Memugsisg Lurge Resemb andDeveLopment Pro- grams (Albany, NY: State University Press, 1981); cf. cspcciaIIy Chapter 6, Organizing the Technical Logic, pp. 100-121.

40. Harvey Brooks, Can Science and Technology Rcscuc the Faltering U.S. Economy? Mu&tveis and So&~, Vol. IX, no. 1, pp. 1-12.

41. Harvey Brooks, National Science Policy and TcchnologicaI Innovation, in BNCC Landau and Nathan Roscnbcrg, cds., The Positive Sun G&e: Hanrcssing Technology for Economic Ghwtb (Washington, DC: NationJ Academy Press, 1986). pp. 119-168.

42. Harvey Brooks: %chnology, Evolution, and Purpose. in Modem Technology: Problem or Opportunity, Due&u, Winter 1980.

43. Nationll Academy of Engineering, D& Compton, Chairman, ChdehJesfbr Engineenkg ReJea?vb Centen (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1983); Nationll Academy of Engineering, Statcmcnt on the Engineering Mission of the NSF Over the Next Dccadc as Adopted by the NationaI Science Board at Its 246th Meeting on August 18-19, 1983, The Btidge, FaU 1983, pp. 31-32; Robert M. White, Strengthening Bngi- neering in the Nat&al Science Pornahtion: A View jvm the Presiaknt of the Nat&d Acad;Nny of Engi- neenkg (Washington, DC: NationaI Academy of Fnginccring, 1983).

44. Harvey Brooks, Thoughts on Graduate Education, The Grudwzte]oumd (Austin, TX: The University of Texas of Austin, 1971). Vol. VIII, no. 2. pp. 319-336; BNCC L.R. Smith, cd., The S&ate of Ghduu:e Educa- CMn (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1985) cf. cspcciaIly Harvey Brooks, The Outlook for Graduate Science and Engineering, pp. 181-188.

Documents

An Analysis of Proposals for a Department of Science Brooks