Allocating Federal Funds for Science and Technology (1995) / Chapter Skim
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Part I: Improving the Allocation Process for Federal Science and Technology
Part I: Improving the Allocation Process for Federal Science and Technology
Pages 1-38
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IMPROVING THE ALLOCATION PROCESS / 1 Part I Improving the Allocation Process for Federal Science and Technology 1
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Competitively funded research and development projects subject to national merit review and conducted in every state of our nation have proven particularly effective. Federally funded university science and engineering, in addition to yielding new discoveries, has produced new generations of scientists and engineers who serve in academia, industry, and government and also fill critical management positions there.
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Defining a Federal Science and Technology Budget To obtain advice on an appropriate budget design, Congress asked this committee to recommend criteria for federal support of research and development. Federal research and development expenditures are reported in current budget documents as being more than $70 billion annually.1 Almost half of this amount, however, is spent on such activities as testing and evaluation of new aircraft and weapons systems in the Department of Defense, nuclear weapons work in the Department of Energy, and missions operations and evaluation in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
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The conclusions, recommendations, and discussion are organized and presented to serve the following five purposes: 1. Make the allocation process more coherent, systematic, and comprehensive; 2.
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Conducting clinical research on cancer chemotherapy and clinical trial methodology -- at NIH, FDA, and academic health centers (NIH, FDA, CDC) Studying ethnography and sociology of drug abuse rituals related to AIDS transmission -- at state health departments and universities (NIH, CDC)
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Adapting cognitive science of language recognition for development of natural language software -- at universities and national laboratories (NSF, NIH, DOD) Developing strong, high-temperature alloys for engines, but not for a jet engine for a particular aircraft -- at universities, NASA centers, DOD laboratories, and private firms (NASA, DOD)
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The budget should be sufficient to serve national priorities and foster a world-class scientific and techni cal enterprise. Currently, the federal research and development budget is typically defined as the sum of the research and development funds obligated or proposed by federal departments and agencies for programs and facilities classified as R&D.
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• Does the FS&T budget recognize presidential initiatives, which might include national security needs; technical training of personnel in areas of national need; promising scientific opportunities; human spaceflight; research and development of economic importance, such as materials science; emerging public health problems; environmental or disaster mitigation; international projects; or responses to policies of other countries? • Does the FS&T budget reflect overall federal budget constraints?
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Guidance is sent to agencies listing presidential priorities, including trade-offs and reallocations across agencies that reflect these priorities, as well as crises, opportunities, or evaluations. An extract of the President's budget message to Congress might read: "The federal science and technology budget is $XX billion dollars.
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• Are the procedures for evaluating quality and mechanisms for using such evaluations both satisfactory? • Does the peer or competitive merit review process used in recommended programs identify the best projects and performers, whether intramural or extramural?
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• Does the allocation process fund the best performers equitably? Does it allow for the aspirations of institutions to improve their ability to compete and contribute nationally?
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A more coherent FS&T budget process in the Executive Branch should help Congress as well. The Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government recommended reorganization of the congressional committee structure and other measures.7 Even without such reorganization, however, the current budget process could be improved by making it more open, soliciting better advice about research and development needs from outside experts, and assessing research and development needs early in the process.
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Considering the FS&T budget as a coherent whole can improve the allocation process but cannot eliminate conflicts among agencies, among congressional committees and subcommittees, between the Senate and the House of Representatives, and between the executive and legislative branches. Such conflict is a part of the decentralized system of checks and balances in the U.S.
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leadership from among those recommended by the panels will be made by the President and presidential advisors as part of the budget process. As an example, an extract of the President's budget message might read: "I propose that the United States need not be so far ahead in experimental particle physics, but should operate at world levels, in this case by contributing to construction of the particle accelerator in Geneva, sponsored by the CERN, and funding the participation of U.S.
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The FS&T budget process must be coupled to systematic review of investments by the nation's best scientific and technical experts, reporting to the highest reaches of government, to produce an appropriately balanced mix of activities. The committee emphasizes that wise federal investments will lead to the creation of new wealth in the future to an even greater extent than they have in the past.
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. Many reports on federal laboratories have been produced in recent years, including major reviews in the past year of Department of Defense, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Department of Energy, and National Institutes of Health laboratories.10 All conclude that federal laboratories have an important role in a balanced program of federal science and technology.
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For some purposes, such as software system design and integration, private-sector firms increasingly have the highly sophisticated research and development capabilities that once justified unique arrangements with federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) .14 In addition, an increasing burden of federal regulations on those federal laboratories operated by universities and private firms has reduced many of the advantages of operation by nongovernment contractors, such as freedom from federal civil service restrictions and procurement regulations.
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NSTC judged management of DOD laboratories to be "generally effective," but noted that DOD "missed an opportunity" to improve cross-service integration, reduce redundancy, and shrink existing laboratories.24 The NSTC review and the agencies' own internal reviews, as well as the recent reviews of intramural research at NIH, are only now taking hold. The recommendations of the many reports, as well as oversight actions by Congress, should improve the effectiveness of the federal laboratory system, reducing its size and cost and improving its management.
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that support projects initiated by academic researchers and are awarded according to highly competitive merit review. Conducting FS&T at academic institutions has several major benefits: • It takes advantage of the originality and creativity that students -- and their faculty advisors -- bring to research; • It produces exceptionally well prepared scientists and engineers who not only will be the next generation of faculty, but also will work productively in, and transfer technology to, industry and government; • It allows for easy adjustment of the funding levels in a field because the funding commitment is for a specific project of limited duration; • It uses merit review to promote the highest quality of work regardless of overall funding levels; • It draws on academia's own system of reward and recognition, which helps ensure the high quality of the researchers applying for federal grants and keeps them motivated; • It promotes rapid dissemination of new ideas through the tradition of open publishing and interchange among scholars in academic research (although such interchange is recognized as not being appropriate for classified research)
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IMPROVING THE ALLOCATION PROCESS / 21 be more difficult than collaborations among colleagues located at different institutions but working in the same field. Those who pioneer new fields or attempt to bridge research interests among departments or whose work centers on collaboration with other universities, federal laboratories, or industry may risk not being funded or may encounter difficulties in securing space and other resources.
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Although examination of these critical issues is beyond the scope of this report, the committee believes that government policies, such as those related to taxation, regulation, intellectual property rights protection, social mandates, and others, are usually more important to commercial outcomes than is direct government funding to industry. The government should not subsidize specific private firms for projects that they would undertake anyway.32 In a suitable economic context, a firm engaged in product or process innovation will capture or "appropriate" a large fraction of the benefits that it creates.
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They include the Advanced Technology Program, the Technology Reinvestment Program, the Manufacturing Extension Partnerships program, Small Business Innovation Research grants and other small business set-asides, and direct government subsidy to private firms. Those programs have different goals and structures but share in their intention to cultivate industrial innovation.
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This mode of funding has several important advantages. It promotes the scientific and technical quality and originality of proposals; it permits awards to be made on the basis of competitive merit review procedures; and, by investing in projects and people rather than institutions, it makes the research and development system more flexible and responsive to changing scientific opportunities and national needs.
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Competitive merit review involves the use of criteria that include technical quality, the qualifications of the proposer, relevance and educational impacts of the proposed project, and other factors pertaining to research goals rather than to political or other nonresearch considerations.38 Open competition means that, at some level within the framework of an agency's mission, researchers propose their best ideas and anyone may apply and be funded regardless of institution or geographic location. However, in the case of highly targeted missions, quality can also be maintained by knowledgeable program managers who have established external scientific and technical advisory groups to help assess quality and to help monitor whether agency needs are met (see Supplement 3 and Box II.8)
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That approach enables those two agencies to choose the best performers. Accordingly, use of competitive merit review to allocate federal funding should be the default presumption, supplemented with other mechanisms for inherently governmental functions that cannot be accomplished through competitive merit review.
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To the extent that performance review and program evaluation come into wider use in assessing FS&T funded activities, they will have to incorporate expert judgment of quality, impact, and other important aspects that will benefit from the use of outside reviewers.46 Ideally, in government as in the private sector, every organization should ask basic questions about the need for its continued existence on a regular basis. In one formulation, every department and agency and each subunit and activity should answer the following questions satisfactorily:47 What is our mission?
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The Federal Demonstration Project sponsored by the Academies' Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable demonstrates that improvements can be made without sacrificing important goals.49 RECOMMENDATION 13. The federal government should retain the capacity to perform research and development within agen cies whose missions require it.
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The growth of federal science and technology from multiple roots in mission agencies has resulted in a pluralistic research and development system. Although some may see needless overlap in such a system, in reality pluralism is a great source of strength, an advantage over the ways research and development are organized in many other countries.
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The corollary proposals provide the basis for continuing excellence -- emphasizing programs and people rather than institutions, subjecting all federal science and technology activities to competitive merit review, linking science and engineering research to education, and maintaining a pluralistic system of research and development tied to public missions. The committee's recommendations are designed to help root out obsolete or noncompetitive activities, allowing good programs to be replaced by even better ones.
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Though an early cosmological vision of the universe's birth existed, it had yet to win its popular name,"The Big Bang," or to gain the theoretical underpinnings and experimental backing that now make it the standard model for the cosmos's origin. The Earth's crust was accepted as a solid shell, not the giant, separate blocks of rock portrayed by the theory of plate tectonics, which came together in the 1950s and 1960s and provided earth scientists with a general framework to explain the cause of most giant earthquakes, why volcanoes exist where they do, the birth of new oceans, and the timeless drifting of the continents around the globe.
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The committee has chosen to use research and development, except when it is explicitly referring to its proposed budget index, federal science and technology (FS&T) , and the work encompassed by it.
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10. Department of Defense, Department of Defense Response to NSTC/PRD #1, Presidential Review Directive on an Interagency Review of Federal Laboratories, February 24, 1995; Department of Defense, Draft Interim Report to the National Science and Technology Council, Presidential Review Directive 1, October 12, 1994; Defense Science Board, Laboratory Management Interim Report, background for the Base Closure and Realignment 1995 (BRAC 95 Addendum)
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15. Dorman Report, 1995; Foster Report, 1995; Galvin Report, 1995; Packard Report, 1983; NSTC Report, 1995.
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23. National Science and Technology Council, Interagency Federal Laboratory Review, Final Report (NSTC Report)
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Recent attention to acquiring dual-use technologies from commercial sources and exploiting defense technologies in commercial markets stems from this reversal in the traditional flow of new technology. This circumstance is noted by the Committee for National Security of the National Science and Technology Council, in National Security Science and Technology Strategy (Washington, D.C.: Office of Science and Technology Policy, 1995)
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39. Dorman Report, 1995; Galvin Report, 1995; Foster Report, 1995; Bishop/Calabresi Report, 1995; and Cassell/Marks Report, 1994.
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documents the number of task orders and NASA employees that oversee the Jet Propulsion Laboratory contract and judges them to be excessive. The Galvin Report (1995)
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