Nature editorial and news article probe prospects for federal science funding

By Steven T. Corneliussen

Nature this week considers the outlook for those who lobby in Washington for science.

Revised 10/20/11:The “combination of the economic downturn, concerns over the budget deficit and anti-science rhetoric from the Tea Party have created a difficult environment for those paid to persuade US lawmakers to find funds for research,” says the editorial “Positive spin: Science lobbyists must boost the appeal of research to policymakers.”

"The environment is toxic. It's dysfunctional. It's like it's always been, but worse," says Mike Lubell of the American Physical Society, as quoted in Nature’s companion news article “Lobbyists confront US budget crunch: Money for advocacy is tight as federal cuts loom.”

Nature’s news article explains the stakes for science in the deliberations of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. If it fails to generate a financial plan by 23 November, the 2013 budget will contain across-the-board cuts to discretionary spending, which includes science.

Meanwhile, lobbyists are seeking to “persuade scientists to approach their representatives in their home districts,” the news article says, under the assumption that “legislators will feel more sympathetic to science once they realize that federal research dollars flow back to major employers in their districts.” Some science groups are scaling back on lobbying “because their members cannot afford to keep up membership fees” — though Michael McPhaden, president of the American Geophysical Union, reportedly says that that society has chosen “to become more actively engaged after several years of little activity.”

All scientific societies, the article says, “are haunted by the possibility that the lean times for science are more than a temporary blip resulting from the bad economy” and by the fear “that the steady budgetary growth that the entire US scientific enterprise has come to rely on is in jeopardy.”

Nature’s editorial sees cause for optimism in “the fact that, historically, both US political parties have worked to protect science from cuts.” The editors recommend saying “investment” instead of “funding”; they call for arguing that scientists spend public money efficiently; and they advocate emphasizing “how money spent on science contributes to education.”

Now the 20 October Washington Post contains an article headlined “Supercommittee’s lack of progress on debt reduction raises alarms on Hill.” It begins this way:

With a Thanksgiving deadline fast approaching, a powerful congressional panel devoted to debt reduction is running in rhetorical circles, unable to break the impasse over taxes that has long blocked aggressive action to tame the national debt.

Though the committee’s 12 members have been meeting for nearly two months in closed-door sessions, lawmakers, aides and others involved in the process say they have yet to reach consensus on the most basic elements of a plan to restrain government borrowing.

The lengthy, detailed article adds at one point that “the lack of progress is raising alarms on Capitol Hill and beyond as lawmakers and other observers grow increasingly worried that the panel is running out of time.”

---

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.