Eric Cantor answers Paul Krugman in the New York Times

By Steven T. Corneliussen

"News of the week" in the 15 February issue of Science quotes House of Representatives Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R–VA) criticizing government funding of social science research. Paul Krugman's column in the 11 February New York Times had cited that criticism under the headline "The Ignorance Caucus" and had mounted a broader attack alleging Republican contempt for science and facts. Now the congressman has responded emphatically in a letter headlined "Republicans and science."

A transcript of the congressman's 5 February speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, includes this: "Funds currently spent by the government on social science–including on politics of all things–would be better spent helping find cures to diseases." Krugman begins by mocking that assertion. His litany of allegations also cites Texas Republicans' condemnation of teaching critical thinking skills and Republican opposition to research on medical treatments' effectiveness, on climate, on sea-level rise, and on the patterns involved in firearm violence.

While "Democrats, being human, often read evidence selectively and choose to believe things that make them comfortable," Krugman charges, "there really isn't anything equivalent to Republicans' active hostility to collecting evidence in the first place."

Facts and evidence? Cantor's letter begins on that topic. Facts "don't support the allegations," he counters. He points to Republican origins for the "effort to double funding for medical research at the National Institutes of Health" and asserts that "the Republican House alone...passed legislation ensuring that foreign-born students educated in the sciences" in the US get to stay. As to "lower-priority programs like social and political science research," he declares, government "can't afford to pay for everything, and governing is about making choices."

The congressman also argues that while NSF can only support 15 percent of the biological-sciences grant applications it receives, "we spend nearly $250 million annually on research in the social, behavioral, economic and political arena, such as a recent $266,821 grant to figure out why voters chose the candidates they did in the 2010 election." He apparently means the NSF project "Political Context and Citizen Response in the 2010 Elections." He exclaims that the saved money "could fund another 1,000 grants in life sciences!"

Cantor concludes: "Reprioritizing government's existing spending to favor saving lives over more political science research is not anti-science; it's common sense."

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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. 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.