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National Council To Revamp Federal Science And Technology Policy Process NSTC has been shaking down for about a year, and three questions arise: What is it? Has the Clinton Administration really embarked on one of the most drastic and exhilarating recastings in the 50-year history of science and technology policy? Or might it not simply be dressing up already proven budget and coordination procedures? Wil Lepkowski, C&EN Washington Make no mistake, the NSTC corps of about 2,000 executive branch particiA little more than a year ago, the pants are as busy as squirrels gathering / % White House announced the for- nuts for winter. And those at the White X l L mation of a new, high-level unit House level—the staff of the Office of aimed at revamping the federal science Science & Technology Policy (OSTP)— and technology policy process. Named are especially enthusiastic. They are hopthe National Science & Technology ing to make a "science" out of the federCouncil (NSTC) and chaired by the Pres- al budget process, in their efforts to inteident himself, the unit was to give sci- grate R&D with social and economic ence and technology the kind of clout it issues. It is an exhilarating time. had never had before in integrating sciThe actual effects of this new 'Virtuence and technology policy with broad- al agency/' as OSTP staffers call it, will er national goals. not be seen until the appearance early NSTC would have a position equal next year of the fiscal 1996 budget. The to that of the powerful National Securi- annual budget process swings into its ty Council, National Economic Council, critical phases in the fall, coinciding and Domestic Policy Council. It would this year with a time of intense political tackle serious problems and issue di- turmoil and public disgust with government. Hopes are high that NSTC rectives signed by the President. will succeed dramatically in an Administration that is suffering repeated blows to its public image. The work of NSTC is to cast all federal programs and projects in science and technology around six major national goals instead of around traditional agency missions. The goals are: • A healthy, educated citizenry; • Job creation and economic growth; • World leadership in science, mathematics, and engineering; • Improved environmental quality; • Harnessing information technology; and • Enhanced national security. As further sparkle to the firmament, the Office of Management & Budget (OMB) and OSTP have also laid out for the agencies a set of "policy principles" that they must use to justify any research or development program. These princiGreenwood: science and technology is a unit
• New panel crystallizes initiatives, interagency interactions, budgeting rationale that existed informally with predecessor
Johns: new ways of setting R&D priorities pies include emphasis on peer review, investment in human resources, investment in fundamental science, integrating civilian and military research, integrating environmental objectives into other goals, establishing cost-shared research programs with industry and state governments, support of research that anticipates and prevents problems, promotion of international research, and ensuring equal opportunity for women, minorities, and the disabled in their technical careers. NSTC planners created nine committees to ensure that federal R&D spending conforms to these goals and principles. And the committees break down into subcommittees. The Committee on Civilian Industrial Technology, for example, has subcommittees on manufacturing, electronics, automotive, materials, construction, and environmental technology. The prospect for the budgetary philosopher-engineers who are to track it all is, to say the least, daunting. "I don't know how we're ever going to measure progress in those six larger goals alone," says one veteran OMB staffer. "They're so general." OCTOBER 10,1994 C&EN 21
GOVERNMENT But the process is moving along. And agencies have been told how to justify their programs in terms of the new contexts—which previously were always implicit in setting R&D budget levels. Fiscal 1996 budget requests, cast in a form that conforms to those principles and priorities, were due to OMB from the agencies on Sept. 29. To aid future R&D decision-making, OSTP has instructed its research arm— the Critical Technologies Institute—to build a computerized database that tracks every R&D project funded by the government (C&EN, Sept. 26, page 4). A goal is to make it easier to detect duplication. Some observers of the process say it is analytic overkill, that too much data breed not only excessive control of agency procedures but also chaos and human stress. Others say the technology is available, the drive to coordinate is clear, and there's no alternative but to try it and find out if such a tool is really useful. "What we are doing through NSTC," says Lionel S. (Skip) Johns, associate director for technology at OSTP, "is inventing new ways of establishing R&D priorities." Johns, who is White House cochairman of three of the nine committees set up under NSTC and who essentially oversees a fourth, says one of the truly innovative aspects of the new pro-
cess is that industry will be involved in setting the technological priorities. "Industry must have a cut in all these cases," he says. "We just had input from the aerospace industry. We want to get these critiques because the Administration's technology policy requires industry to put up money." The council, managed at OSTP by Angela Smith-Diaz, has only recently gotten fully staffed and organized, and is yet to receive any input from the recently appointed outside body called the President's Council of Advisers on Science & Technology. PCAST is the chief vehicle for outside input and is cochaired by two people: science adviser John H. Gibbons and John Young, former president of Hewlett-Packard, the big electronics manufacturer. PCAST has yet to have its first meeting. But it does have a secretariat that also is headed by Smith-Diaz. An agenda is being planned, but Smith-Diaz, pending PCAST's first meeting, can't say what it is, or, indeed, when Clinton will find the time to meet with his technical elite. A late October date is hoped for. But at the level of committees—and subcommittees within committees that, in turn, overlap with adjoining working groups—NSTC's Ptolemaic wheels within wheels are turning. Fully 17 meetings are scheduled during October,
not to mention the scores of meetings within and between agencies that were necessary to plan those higher level meetings. "It certainly does take up a lot of time," comments a National Science Foundation (NSF) member of one of the subcommittees. But, she says, the actual content of the meetings isn't much different from other budget planning exercises in past Administrations. "We're looking at ways of doing business differently," she adds. 'There are parts that are evolving. There are parts that have the potential of being more revolutionary. But it's hard to tell which they are yet. I do think there will be some long-term lessons learned that can be applied to next year's budget process. But what I see at the moment is collection of a lot of information. One doesn't know how the various players will act on that information." For all of its intricate celestial mechanics, the NSTC remains, nevertheless, grounded by the realities of budget making. The NSTC process remains in a very real way within the traditional triangular coordinates of OSTP, OMB, and the agencies. All have their interests—OSTP to coordinate, even integrate; OMB to keep control of the budget process by setting levels and making sure the cards aren't stacked; and the agencies, which always ma-
Administration will stress nine priority areas in 1996 budget The Clinton Administration will stress nine priority research areas in the fiscal 19% budget that will be submitted to Congress next January. Work in the priority areas has been planned and coordinated by the National Council on Science & Technology. The nine priority areas are: • Environment and natural resources. Includes what was called, under the old Federal Coordinating Council on Science, Engineering & Technology, the global climate change initiative. It also embraces programs in integrated ecosystem management; socioeconomic dimensions of environmental change; development of science policy tools to link the physical, biological, social, and economic sciences with environmental policy; data collection and management; and environmental technologies. • High-performance computing and communications. Continued development of computer hardware, software,
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and interactive networks as part of the National Information Infrastructure. • Partnership for new generation of vehicles. More popularly known as the clean car initiative. It has three goals: manufacturing productivity improvements, increased fuel efficiency and emissions reduction, and development of a production prototype with three times the fuel efficiency of today's vehicles. • National electronics manufacturing initiative. Basic technology for the National Information Infrastructure. Includes work on high-speed processing, shortened design time, flat panel displays, speech/handwriting recognition technologies, among other areas. • Learning productivity. Focuses on development of a new set of tools for measuring learning. • Building and construction. Goals are to increase construction productivity; improve product quality, including energy efficiency and improved indoor air quality; increase use of renewable
resources in construction; and improve worker health and safety. Expands on activities that were for decades the province of the old National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards & Technology. • Transportation. Covers such things as improved materials, monitoring instruments, tools, construction methods, and design concepts for construction and renewal of the physical infrastructure. • Peacekeeping, special operations, and low-intensity conflict. Development of new technologies to carry out intelligence and covert operations, control disorder, and improve ability of armed forces to operate in remote locations. Includes programs on unmanned air, surface, and subsurface vehicles and sensor enhancement packages for individual personnel. • Databases to support R&D in health, safety, and food. Collection of basic information in these areas to be the basis of better budget decisions.
National Science & Technology Council has formal ties to White House National Science & Technology Council (NSTC) Chairman: Bill Clinton (White House) I NSTC deputies
1
Comm ittee on Health, Safety & Food R&D Chairman: Phil Lee (HHS) White House cochairwoman: M. R. C. Greenwood
Committee on Funddmental Science Cochairmen: Neal Lane (NSF) Harold Varmus (NIH) White House cochairwoman: M. R. C. Greenwood
Committee on Information & Communication R&D Chairwoman: Anita Jones (Defense) White House cochairman • Skip Johns
Committee on International Science, Engineering & Technology Cochairmen: Tim Wirth (State) Carol Lancaster (AID) White House cochairwoman: Jane Wales
Committee on National Security Chairman: John Deutch (Defense) White House cochairwoman: Jane Wales
Committee on Environment & Natural Resources Research Cochairmen: Jim Baker (NOAA) Ronald Pulliam (Interior) White House cochairman: Bob Watson
group
Committee on Civilian Industrial Technology Chairwoman: Mary Good (Commerce) White House cochairman: Skip Johns
Committee on Transportation R&D Chairman: Mort Downey (Transportation) White House cochairman: Skip Johns
Committee on Education & Training R&D Chairwoman: Madeleine Kunin (Education) White House cochairman: Henry Kelly
Note: AID: Agency for International Development; HHS: Department of Health & Human Services; NIH: National Institutes of Health; NOAA: National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration; NSF: National Science Foundation.
neuver to hold on to or enhance what they already have. So will NSTC make a difference in a basic process that doesn't change all that much? It could. And several tests lie around the corner. In August, OSTP issued an NSTC report called "Science in the National Interest/' It laid out some 18 points on where research needs to be headed to remain viable and relevant. "Will it be able to implement them?" asks one seasoned observer of science policy in Washington. "Will all the enhanced clout of NSTC make any difference in cross-government initiatives? I know it's too early to tell, but that's what I want to know." His questions, of course, are not answerable yet. NSTC's Fundamental Science Committee, headed by M. R. C. Greenwood, has the job of following up on them as well as convincing the scientific community that researchers can do fundamental work that is still relevant to OMB's six goals. Greenwood said in a talk last month that one of the most challenging tasks in her job is devising a new model of science policy—that is, fundamental re-
search policy—for the new times. The new model, she says [in talking about the report], regards science and technology not as separate spheres, "but much more as a whole." "We need a model in which we talk about science and applications and even product development in a much more interactive way. Anyone who lives in these modern times knows that this is the way science works today. The current model of basic research leading to applied research leading to development, products, and processes is changing, and I think we need to allow it some breathing room," she adds. She also says the scientific community needs a more coordinated approach to improving the scientific literacy in this country and that it must establish formal programs to ensure that it reaches out to its surrounding communities more effectively. "Scientists are going to have to make their arguments much more clearly, and they're going to have to be able to talk about science in a way that is meaningful to children, to people who worry about crime, to people who care about the environment, to people who want to
know whether their food is safe or whether their bridges are engineered properly," Greenwood maintains. Some members of the science and technology policy community are not entranced with NSTC. They think the science and technology policy process reached an apex of practicality in the Bush Administration when D. Allan Bromley was science adviser. Bromley carefully crafted a Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering & Technology. FCCSET, often pronounced "fixit," was the mechanism by which several major interagency initiatives were coordinated by priorities and budget. FCCSET, like NSTC, which has no pronunciation, formed about 60 working units, and the activity was just as intense as it is now. As Bromley writes in his recently published account of his White House years ("The President's Scientists," Yale University Press, New Haven, 1994), more than 2,000 people were involved at any one time in the FCCSET process. FCCSET's priorities included major initiatives in global climate change, high-performance computing and comOCTOBER 10,1994 C&EN
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GOVERNMENT munication, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, science and math education, and advanced materials science and processing. All of these areas were considered of the highest national priority and virtually were ensured generous Congressional funding. Under that setup, OMB controlled the coordination process through a "cross-cutting" mechanism by which examiners in one section (for example, the National Institutes of Health) would meet with counterparts in another section (for example, NSF) to seek out duplication in, for example, biotechnology programs. It was Bromley's FCCSET that shaped the content of the big initiatives and whose OSTP staff first participated in the OMB-controlled crosscut process. The FCCSET mechanism was one of Bromley's crowning achievements during President Bush's single term, and on their departure, Bromley said he hoped the process would continue in the Clinton Administration. Under Gibbons, it has, in fact, but with a difference. "Bromley had been proud of what he had built," says Johns. "And in the environment he was operating in, he was justified. But if you looked at FCCSET, all the initiatives were formed for political purposes. I'm not saying that was either bad or good, but the global climate change initiative was a response to the [then upcoming] United Nations Conference on Environment & Development. The high-performance computer and communication initiative was forced by Congress. Each initiative was either mandated or formed for defensive reasons. Together, they all represented 12% of the R&D budget. But you couldn't tell how much was being spent on any one because there was so much overlap among them all. And the FCCSET process was not strategic." Many in the science and technology policy community question that interpretation. They believe that the apparatus Bromley set up was perfectly adequate to get the coordination job done, and it should have remained in place. They argue that Cabinet-level individuals were involved in top FCCSET meetings, and OMB did the same crosscuts then that it is doing now. The crosscuts "are hard," says one OMB official. 'They are a lot of work. But with regard to functions on a day-to-day basis, I'd be hard-pressed to see any difference between Bromley's FCCSET and Gibbons' NSTC." 24
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Beckler: an absolutely new ball game A professor of public policy at a university near Washington, D.C, takes an especially critical view of NSTC. "I've been around so long that my criticism may be out of date," says the professor, who asked not to be identified. "But it seems to me that NSTC could be a waste of time, energy, and focus. To me, it represents the last gasp of the Camelot crowd—that whole category of people who still believe that the key issue in government science and technology policy is coordination of science and technology across the agencies. Everyone knows that the vast majority of federal R&D funds supports the specific missions of departments and agencies. That's why coordination across the agencies will always be a marginal activity. Under NSTC, the entire federal bureaucracy is being 'FCCSated' toward an increasing proliferation of themes. The result is that when everything is important, anything is important." An NSTC participant from NSF finds NSTC to be a mixed operational bag at the moment. "NSTC works best with people who already were involved in the FCCSET process. The NSTC process takes a lot more time than OSTP or OMB ever envisaged. NSTC has turned out to proliferate more committees and subcommittees than FCCSET did. And OMB people are not sure whether NSTC knows where it is going and whether it will get there." However, one former OMB official, Joseph Hesir, now a private consultant, says the NSTC mechanism is all the more important these days because of
severe restrictions on the budget. Hesir says NSTC is in some respects a logical progression and outgrowth of Bromley's FCCSET. 'They laid the groundwork for NSTC to operate on a higher level, with a broader scope," he observes. "Clearly, something like this is needed because the budget caps are so stringent that they will require harder decisions on priorities than at any time in the past." David Z. Beckler, who served as chief of staff to the Presidential science advisers until the post was abolished by President Richard Nixon, says NSTC is commendable as far as it goes. "It's a major step in the evolution of the science advisory apparatus for the President. It's an absolutely new ball game." But now, he says, NSTC needs to look ahead. There is a need, says Beckler, who most recently served on the staff of the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology & Government, to be "more critical about these new processes at the White House," and he hopes NSTC will do that. Beckler believes it is time now to "bore in on how the Administration's industrial programs are assessing the actual successes of R&D in the companies." As for NSTC itself, Beckler believes its main agenda should be a "better integration of science and technology into domestic, economic, and national security policy." A functional NSTC, he notes, might have ensured the presence of a significant number of people with a health research background on Hillary Rodham Clinton's health task force. None was present. "What I'm talking about," Beckler says, "is the next generation of science and technology policy. There should be a better integration of a broader array of national and international policies with science and technology. We need harmonized policies. NSTC needs to integrate the broader concerns into its agenda and to integrate the staffs. People on the science and technology side should, in time, become players in the nonscience and nontechnology areas." On the whole, then, most observers are encouraged by the mere creation of NSTC. Says one veteran Capitol Hill staffer: "At least NSTC has raised the profile of the coordination issue and the budget. The easiest thing to do is ... say it's not going to do anything. But we can't be sure until we see if that's the case. So I'm encouraged." •
