In the skeptical world, one of the topics that comes up frequently is how politics should take science into account when making decisions. In this story we are looking at the opposite, how politics changes science by controlling funding. Dr. Daniel Sarewitz writes about how NSF and NIH funding should not be doubled, as President Obama supports, rather that the same level of funding should be targeted to achieve specific goals. In general, I agree with him with a few caveats.
First, the NSF has a relatively efficient, streamlined, and trustworthy process for selecting the science it funds, and so should be able to accomodate a slug of funding. However, I believe that doubling any funding will result in some amount of excess waste, be it in increased management, unnecessary overhead, or overbuilding the reporting infrastructure (will there be more peer reviewed journals to report the extra results immediately?). It is primarily the idea that extra funding without concrete results in doing less with more. This also assumes that there will be enough quality science that is currently unfunded that will be able to float to the top and fill the funding excess gap.
Second, who decides what are the best goals for the science community to achieve? Currently, scientists associated with the NSF work in committees to decide which projects and research will be funded. This is true whether the science is fundamental or if it has large scale practical applications. Politicians, Congress and the White House, will be the ones deciding which avenues will recieve additional funding. Currently, Congress only gets involved in the very large projects, such as the National Collider, and look at how that went. I believe the track record for the traditionally non-scientific politicians prevents them from making good decisions about specific projects and in aiming science goals. Does this mean that scientists will need to begin lobbying politicians in order to get funding for their work in the future? Beware the Scientific Industrial Complex.
I think that the current method for funding science works. I also think that getting politicians involved in deciding science funding is a mistake. So, the solution to me is broadening the NSF mandate to fund additional projects when additional funding becomes available and investing in the science management and reporting framework. In that way, the best science will be safely funded by scientists and the extra funding will end in results that are reported.
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