GOVERNMENT
A Year as Clinton's Science Adviser: John Gibbons Gives His Account ohn H. Gibbons has been example. Every sparrow that falls President Bill Clinton's scihas to come to someone's attenence adviser for a little over a tion these days. year. In that time, several maThat means you don't have a jor changes have taken place in the chance to really think about the form and function of science and key issues that come out of the technology policy at the executive winnowing process. It's almost branch level—from reorganization too easy to get your hands on of the Office of Science & Technoltoo much information. We keep ogy Policy (OSTP, which Gibbons talking about the fact that a heads) to overhaul of the concept schoolkid can go home and turn of the space station to changing reon a personal computer and aclations with Russia. cess the Library of Congress. Or that you can turn on a television Gibbons, 65, believes he could set and get 500 channels. No one not have been better prepared for the job he has in overseeing all can watch 500 channels, but we government issues that involve do have that access, and, if judiscience and technology. For 14 ciously used, it enables us to years, he headed Congress' Office have the power that knowledge of Technology Assessment (OTA), gives. where just about all science and James Madison talked about technology matters are covered via that. And I think Jefferson would love to have had some of this stuff. So there's good news and various reports and briefings given Congress. Before that, he headed the Energy, Environment & Resources Center at the Universi-bad news. like any strong new technology, it has the capacity ty of Tennessee, Knoxville. He began his career as a physicist atfor enormous assistance to people to achieve their ends but also Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. can complicate that path. It is safe to say that none of the previous 11 White House science advisers has had as wide a portfolio as Gibbons, or as Your answer defines the issue. But how are you learning much access to the high-level policymakers who make decisions to use these technologies in a White House environment on the major issues facing the country. He sits on the three top that is not really interested in speculation or in deep policy bodies at the White House—the National Economic Coun- truths, but instead wants decisions now? At OTA you were cil, National Security Council, and Domestic Policy Council. Hisexpected to give options, not advice. At the White House relationship with Vice President Al Gore, who himself has a your charge is to advise. powerful policy role in the Clinton Administration, is close and I once told somebody that the reason I had so many friends intense. on Capitol Hill was because I never had to make a recomIn short, Gibbons' position is structured for success. No sciencemendation. Several things are different between here and adviser has ever been more in the "policy loop" than he. In this there. To me, the largest difference is that the time within interview last month with C&EN senior correspondent Wil Lep- which we have to pull together information and put it in kowski, Gibbons outlines some of the changes that are occurringfront of people is greatly foreshortened. OTA has the luxuand talL· about what it's like being science adviser these days. ry—and I think essential capability—to back off one notch and do some careful thinking and winnowing of facts and You often quote a sonnet written by Edna St Vincent Mil- narrowing of arguments and help therefore in the elevation of debate. lay, which says basically that the world is inundated with So OTA performs a terribly important function and is an scattered facts that He "unquestioned" and "uncombined" enormous asset to places like this. We get six copies of everywith no loom to weave them into fabric** You tried to do thing they produce. And we use the Critical Technologies Insome of that weaving when you ran OTA Do you have a stitute [an outside advisory arm of OSTP, housed at Rand loom of a similar sort here? Corp.'s Washington office]. CTI affords a little bit of that same Fair question. I think the advance of information technology capacity to the White House. It is able to pull information tohas both helped and encumbered access to facts. On the one gether for us and do some analyses that are off-line, that are hand—and this is the downside—it gives the public more innot decision memoranda. formation than it can handle. Look at news broadcasts as an
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So we went another way and said let's map this thing out and make what we call a virtual agency for each issue, integrating it across the agencies in a form that has sufficient clout to have the whole greater than the sum of the separate parts. So learning from the FCCSET, from the success it had with global climate change and many other areas, we said the process had to be elevated. So we said let's move it to a council level like the National Security Council (NSC) or the National Economic Council or the Domestic Policy Council in which the principals are not assistant secretaries but Cabinet people themselves, with the President as chairman. This was talked about last spring. The You've had afiiUyear here. Could you run through some President bought it in principle, it became part of the National Performance Review, and after a long winnowing to test of the highlights? the ideas out with the Cabinet people and with our counterWhen we came into office, we had to face the reality of getparts in the White House, it all came together in November. ting serious about a very tight budget situation. I often Once the recommendation was here, I went around office by joked that the situation reminded me of the theory of holes. office meeting with people ranging from [Office of ManageThe first thing you want to do if you're in one is stop digment & Budget director Leon E.] Panetta to [National Ecoging. And that's easier said than done. Those folks across nomic Council chairman Robert E.] Rubin to [NSC director] the alley in the West Wing do understand arithmetic, and Tony Lake. it's been a very productive year in terms of understanding how to play limited sum games, how to go up [to Congress] What were the arguments against it? with an honest budget rather than being pie-in-the-sky One thing was whether the President needed to be engaged wishes. in yet another council. The answer to that was yes, and the The second thing we had to do was to deal with the $70 Vice President would be the chair when the President isn't billion science and technology side of the budget that had there. Another was, is it sufficiently important, compared been dominated for decades by defense expenditures, big with the NSC or the economy? The answer, again, was yes, national laboratories, and fancy technologies that were getbecause this Administration puts heavy emphasis on techting increasingly further away from the civilian market on nology and its brother/sister science to help facilitate the which they were becoming more and more dependent. So kind of change that has to occur in our economy and in our we had to reshape that whole science and technology packnation. age into a thing that better mapped the new priorities for While this was developing, we wanted to get some things the post-Cold-War environment. started that would logically be carried out under an NSTC. Initially, we put in the hands of the President and Vice We worked hard on the National Information Infrastructure, President the technology policy framework. It was a packgot the agencies together and the policy people, and began to age they bought, that in fact they worked with us on. It move on that. We began the so-called clean car initiative, tried to cast new directions and reflect what the President which is better titled the partnership for a new generation of and Vice President were saying about technology in their vehicles. We got that moving along after a long process that campaign, and carry it a notch forward. intimately engaged the Vice President in the negotiations and Since that time, we've been engaged heavily in the impleultimately, the President. mentation of those ideas, along with the idea of reshaping the government itself by making more efficient use of technology in its own operations. Part of that reinventing government enterprise was to create the Cabinet-level National Science & Technology Council (NSTC), chaired by the President, which would give OSTP the kind of clout we need, across the agencies, to reshape and integrate the federal science and technology effort. Cn was imposed on OSTP by Congress two years ago to competitively assess specific technologies. Is the name now a misnomer in the sense that it does just about anything you want it to? Yes. CTI is no longer just focused on assessing future critical technologies but is a broader analytical group with wide access within Rand Corp. It can tap different types of experts who can check out things—whether it be automation of manufacturing or what new things are happening in the automotive industry. CTI is now more of an analytical support group for OSTP.
NSTC is supposedly a major science and technology policy invention. How did the idea evolve? Who invented the concept? I honestly don't know. I know we talked about it a lot. I had been watching, with Al Bromley [D. Allan Bromley, science adviser to President Bush], the strengths and weaknesses of the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering & Technology (FCCSET), and we knew one of the strengths was that it was pulling these agencies together to look at R&D agendas. You might say let's have a new agency that puts them all together in one place. I think that's bad because that says you can spend all your time reorganizing government instead of using what you've got.
It's almost too easy to get your hands on too much information.
APRIL 11,1994 C&EN 21
GOVERNMENT to make decisions in which both the public interest and the private interest are carefully examined. And we only move forward on those things where we have a co-alignment of those interests. So we're very clear that we're not just handing money to Detroit, nor is Detroit lying down to Washington. It's a coWe made a venture in which public and private interests are clearly idencommitment tified before deals are made. But we did say we've got to have milestones, goals. And we worked a long time getting that to using threefold increase in mileage a decade downstream, as well as existing agreeing that there were near-term technologies that are particularly relevant to national needs, like pollution emissions, agency safety, and other things. It's a good investment of public resources, especially where it enables our national labs to be resources. more accessible to industry. And it's still evolving. For instance, this afternoon I'm meeting with Mary Good [undersecretary of commerce for technology] on how well this is working. We're trying to work out such things as how you define legitimate participants in this activity, such as companies that may or may not be American. This summer we'll be looking at how the ideas In your categories that make up NSTC, one notices no cat- are moving, what kinds of technologies are emerging, how egoryfor space. What happened to such a usually visible the relationship is developing. entity? Is the eventual goal as concrete as a marketable producSpace is spread across them all. It is part of fundamental retion car that covers all types—Umos to mail buggies? search, it is very much a part of civilian industrial activities, it It's concrete as follows: prototype, production, car. Which is very much a part of national security and international remeans you don't just go out and build one. You build one lations. You gorightacross and you find it. that's a production prototype that in a decade has as a target AU that is clear. But doesn't leaving space out of there sort this kind of threefold mileage gain. We're aiming at something that's capable of being sold to of minimize the political importance of space? large markets because we're after reduction of emissions. We're I understand that. Our position is that space, like energy, is not an end but a means. It's now a means to a variety of ends. after the kind of resilience and power in this industry to compete not only here but in emerging overseas markets. And If you look at molecular biology, that's almost an end in itself we're after fuel flexibility. Those and all sorts of other things. in terms of research. But biotechnology now is not the purWe don't want to say what's going to turn out now because view of one or another industry. It is pervasive in our econothat would prejudice how the technologies will work out. What my. And that's why we feel that such things really ought to we're after, though, includes cars that are commercially salable, be reflected not as a stand-alone but as a part of this whole competitive in the marketplace—likely passenger cars. science and technology enterprise. We do have operationally here an assistant director for Last year, the Defense Department's Advanced Research space; we assigned lead responsibility for the space station to Projects Agency (ARPA) established the Technology Reinthe technology division. All the Landsat and Earth Observavestment Program (TRP) to try to help industry become tion Satellite and related things [are assigned] to the environso-called dual-use manufacturers. How does that fit into ment division, all the international stuff to the national securithe new NSTC scheme? ty division, and the science to the science division. So, if you look at each of the four divisions, there's a lot of space stuff. TRP is another of those virtual agencies—a five-agency coalescence led by ARPA, but the other agencies arerightin there with them. You can't tell them apart. They even wear the You mentioned the clean car initiative. What is that all about? same necktie sometimes. It's one of the most seamless multiThat initiative is a hallmark example of what we are trying to agency operations I think I've ever seen. It's a good example do here. In this case, you're taking resources from across the of what you can do with a commitment to using your existfederal government on an issue relevant to pollution, competing resources in a way that integrates them across these earliitiveness, our dependence on imported oil, all sorts of other er divisions, the National Institute for Standards & Technoloindustries, and wrapping them all into a program that tightly gy (NIST) in advanced technology and technology transfer, integrates the government and the private sector in a longand Defense on TRP. term commitment for a cost-shared partnership in developing the technologies that are going to be needed to really make All these, we believe, are examples that it is fully legitimate this thing happen. in areas of colinear public and private interests to establish partnerships, rather than adversarial relationships, as a way of What happens if industry wants to pull out of it in mid- moving ahead in a new world. And there are a lot of people who argue against that, but we firmly feel this is going to be stream? given a very hard charge by this Administration, and we're There's no long-term contract signed here. But there's a longterm agreement that says we're going to cost-share, we're going confident that it's going to be the way to go. 22
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You never hear about new initiatives in the government to help the chemical industry. The industry is not even asking for them. How do you explain the lack of a specific chemical focus in government technology policy? We say if the seed ground is good, then don't mess around with it. But make sure you've got good seed ground. We wanted to make the R&D tax credit indefinite. We got Congress to go along in making it at least a three-year arrangement. That's very important to the chemical industry, because it's a very innovative industry and [chemical companies] have their R&D agendas and the R&D tax credit directly helps them by making their seed ground more fertile. I think the work we're doing this year on environmental technologies, where we get into process design and process change, is going to present a wonderful opportunity for partnerships with the chemical industry. Is there what you term a virtual agency forming in the environmental technology area? If so, how is that entity shaping up? We're just forming it now. There is an interagency group that has been working for some months now to lay the groundwork for a national environmental strategy. We met this morning with 25 people from different agencies. Commerce, Defense, [the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA), and the Department of Energy (DOE)] are immensly interested in this because (a) they know a lot about it, and (b) they're a good test pit for doing some of these things. We held a forum in late March, much like the forum on basic research that was held early in February to tease out some national wisdom on what the new basis for the support of science by the public should be. Exactly the same thing is happening with the environmental strategy forum, and some of the ideas will feed into the report that will be coming out from the science forum. Again, it's our attempt to not only work across the agencies of government but to draw in the other stakeholders and see if we can't exercise some collective national wisdom. You felt pretty good about that science forum What did you think of Sen. Barbara Mikulski's (D.-Md) talk at the forum, where she outlined her ideas about making basic research more ^strategic"? I thought Sen. Mikulski was very eloquent on that. A lot of folks hadn't really heard what she was talking about until she got down to the meeting. And what's going to happen with that is that there's going to be a white paper on science and it's going to influence the way NSTC's Committee on Fundamental Science goes about its work on giving guidance to the agencies for the fiscal 1996 budget. I would hope it would be ready by middle to late April. Throughout your first year, and even up to now, many in the science and technology communities have complained about being excluded from access to the policy process at OSTP. How do you feel about that? Well, it's hard to know how much access is appropriate. One of the problems in putting together this Cabinet-level NSTC is that it has taken a lot of time. So it may still be a little early to say there hasn't been enough access. I feel that with our limited staff, the people at OSTP are trying to keep up contacts
with outside groups. There will be opportunities for engagement when the President's Council of Advisers on Science & Technology is finally assembled. But the clearance process takes time. We all speak as often as we can to outside groups. People wonder why I don't communicate with them on the Internet, but I only have so many hours. In the international area, what is happening with the Russians, Chinese, and others? An important part of the meetings between Vice President Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin were extensive science and technology bilateral agreements which included intellectual property protection and other things that were pretty tricky to work out. We've also been working very closely with NSC, the Office of the Vice President, and DOE on plutonium and nonproliferation issues with respect not only to the warheads but also to the plutonium-producing reactors. And we have a major meeting coming up with China in just a few weeks on bilateral relations in science and technology. We want to look at some of the success stories in science and technology cooperation between China and the U.S., and then to look ahead and define the interests of both countries that could be good seed ground for potential cooperation. Anything that is obvious to build on? Yes, connectivity between science research and its commercialization. The Chinese have had, for example, a bunch of labs run in the Russian-style Academy of Sciences mode. They're trying to move more to the Western model. They don't have a National Science Foundation but they're trying to develop things like that. They'd like to know our experience. There are also a lot of environmental issues that we both have an interest in. For instance, they're a coal-burning country. So they want to know how they can move along an industrial development path that avoids some of the pollution pitfalls we've had to go through in our learning curve. Can we help them and therefore help ourselves in helping them avoid some of that? And that includes energy efficiency, for example, as well as renewable energy.
I don't have just two guys to report to, I have two champions in the White House.
APRIL 11,1994 C&EN 23
GOVERNMENT Anything new concerning the renewal ofthe U.S.-Japan science and technology agreement? We're going to revisit that this summer. I'm going to Tokyo in June to meet with the G7 science ministers, and before I go I will be reexamining our bilateral relationship. They're interested in doing a lot of things—for instance, mutual participation in global environmental issues, research cooperation, and the like. But we said, and I think properly so, let's get our trade relations straight first. And the President came down pretty hard on it. There's now pretty good news there, and I think that means we can pick up in these other areas with the Japanese. There is reportedly considerable discomfort in Europe regarding the state of relations between the US. and the European Union (EU) in science and technology. What is your reaction to that? [The relationship] is a little fuzzy. But that's one for 1994 and 1995. If you have only a few people working in these areas, you have to use a bit of triage. We have a number of bilateral science and technology agreements to work through. I think the U.S.-EU relationship is more linked to the National Economic Council folks. How would you compare yourself now in your function as science adviser tvith,for example, the first science adviser, James Killian, or President Kennedy's science adviser, Jerry Weisner? When I talk with Jerry Weisner and Al Bromley, I'm constantly reminded of the truth that the office of adviser to the President almost always depends on the personalities engaged. If you look at the relationship between Kennedy and Weisner, it was preestablished, it was a close and personal one, and we were in the midst of a very deep Cold War. So it was dominated by defense and military questions. If you look at Allan Bromley and President Bush, you have a very different situation where there were interposed between Bromley and Bush a lot of characters who thought they also knew a lot of science and technology. And so the relationship there was much more complicated and difficult. If you look at, say, George Keyworth and President Reagan, you find a totally different situation. This situation now is unusual in a couple of ways. One is we have a President who is intellectually very well engaged in the questions of science and technology. We have a Vice President who knows more about some of these things than I do, even though he wasn't trained in science. He has two breakfasts a week just on environmental science and policy. And then you have a President and a Vice President who are inseparable—almost like Siamese twins. The President wants that Vice President with him on every important occasion. I don't think that's ever happened before. And so, with the Vice President given the principal lead on environment, information, and on science and technology, I find I have not just two guys to report to but two champions over there. Obviously, I work more closely with the Vice President because he's got the lead on these things. Now, as we move into the second year, we find that their time is increasingly occupied by a wider diversity of things. It's really tough. But I'm learning how to make my schedule match theirs. On critical issues, it typically takes me no 24
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There is hardly a public policy today that doesn't involve science and technology.
more than a few hours to get a decision through the system over there. There are other things like personnel decisions—first members of the President's Council of Advisers on Science & Technology, new National Science Board members—that have to go through a long process. That doesn't require a direct link to those men, but to people in the White House personnel office and the like. I think in all of these cases you have to look at the personalities involved. Another observation is that however much science was an important ingredient in the Kennedy and Eisenhower years, science and technology are now even more pervasive. There's hardly a public policy that you can look at now that doesn't have an enormous amount of science and technology relevance and content. The demand to keep a coherent and well-tuned process in place underscores the need for this kind of relationship. If we didn't have an OSTP coming into the 1990s, we'd have to reinvent it. And that's what's been happening in the course of the past year: We are reinventing it. We are strengthening it through the NSTC process. It has a lot of testing to be done, but I think it is absolutely essential. Continuing on with your job, what are the most difficult aspects of it? I think the difficulty of this job is like other jobs in a truly democratic society, namely that we are governed by a whole lot of people, and the things we're trying to do are almost inevitably complex or controversial. Otherwise, they wouldn't come here. So getting things done in this environment means you've got to get a lot of bases touched, you've got to do a lot of working with the stakeholders, to the point that you can get a positive decision that moves things forward. And there are so many viable actors out there that can intercede and change the direction of a decision or delay it, it just is very complicated. We describe it as pushing wet noodles. You have a thing you want to get done, but the reality of getting it done is just extraordinary. It's as T. S. Eliot said—that between the image and reality lies the shadow.
J-KEM Scientific And the shadow is all of the complexities of actually making something happen once you imagine it. Once you think you understand the problem technically, you can lay out most beautifully how much money you saved for the people, how much it's going to improve the environment, all the rest. A wonderful story. But then you begin to say, What do I have to do to actually see that happen? And that's where you find all of the buffers in that chemical solution. And an easy answer to your question is that governments, even more than large private corporations, are nearly infinitely buffered against change. So it's frustrating. Nonetheless, if we look at what's happened over the past 12 months, we've got a few scores. Most people don't know how to play zero sum games, and that's what we're playing. We've told the agencies that if you want something new, you have two ways to get it done. One is increase your productivity to the point that you've got some spare money. The other is to cut something out. You've got to stop something in order to start something. And maybe every now and then we'll be moving money between these agencies, and that's the toughest of all. That's why we created the NSTC. What issue or incident has put the most pressure on you as science adviser? The space station. It wasn't just how you take a program— with a lot of momentum and political constituents—that's headed for the cliff, and do something with it. We had to transform that thing and try to understand what it would take to enable the best in it to survive. So we had to downscale it. We had to further internationalize it. But the first thing we had to do in all of that was to reorganize NASA. So that's taken a year of a lot of real struggling. And that's been a tough one because it's a very complex and fast-moving scene. A lot of people are nervous—everybody, in fact, is nervous—and it has demanded an enormous amount of constant attention from us. What we feel is that we made the best of a situation that we were handed when we got here. The same for the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). It had been going in the wrong direction. It was underscored in the previous Administrations that [the SSC] was going to be a U.S. program, almost as though we were still in the middle of the Cold War. And we were in a project in which there were, at the same time, accusations of escalating costs of an increasingly obscure area of science, of the thing being focused more and more just on one state. And so, in the SSC, we tried to stretch it out, we tried to internationalize it. We wanted to support it because it's excellent world-class science. But it also hit the resonance of the Congress and our own concern about budgets. And it took its course. Now we're in the midst of getting ready to go to Geneva to a meeting on the future of particle physics.
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How do you see OSTP's role in social issues, such as welfare reform? Any thought given to that and similar areas? What we try to do in welfare reform, which is a small piece of the whole issue, involves the question of job retraining, education, and schoolwork, in terms of ways of getting peo ple into the working economy. A lot of people believe there are some quick fixes here. But I think there is evidence that shows that these steps take long-term commitments, but they still have big payoffs. So we're looking at the technologies contained in training and education and in schoolwork transitions as an example. Rand Corp. used to do a lot of studies of these sorts of things—social trends—in the past Are you going to use Rand in that way? I can't say, because we're highly limited by the number of people we have and by our resources. And we also have a very active Domestic Policy Council and others, so I don't know how that's going to work out. You've been known all these years as a nice, genial, unabrasive guy. Did you have to lose a little of that in order tofunction in this White House environment? I hire thugs. Seriously though, I don't think you change peo ples' basic personalities. You don't have to be nasty to get ahead. But you do have to understand how things work. And I've been engaged in an extraordinary year of learning and relearning how things work in this particular environment. And it's a complex place to work. The President said it best when he took us all out to Camp David back in early Febru ary last year. He said, "Look, we're all going to be over worked, we're all going to be in a highly interactive mode. Things are going to slip between the cracks. The first thing you're going to think of is why some bastard didn't let you know about something." And he said, "You've got to remember that 95% of that is going to happen because people were either too busy, or they forgot, or they just didn't think of it. Don't be paranoid about what you think may be an affront." And that kind of sense of community he has constantly pushed on us to re member. And I have found that within this White House complex that kind of community almost totally reigns. There's so little real backbiting going on here, that I can hardly tell you about it. Π
