Dissecting the NSF
by Hal_10000
The Republicans, continuing their “balancing the budget by cutting $1 million items” policy, have stumbled upon this turd of an idea:
We are launching an experiment - the first YouCut Citizen Review of a government agency. Together, we will identify wasteful spending that should be cut and begin to hold agencies accountable for how they are spending your money.
That sounds good. Surely, they’ll start out with something big that wastes tens of billions of dollars a year, like the Department of Defense or the Department of Education or the Department of Transportation, right?
First, we will take a look at the National Science Foundation (NSF) - Congress created the NSF in 1950 to promote the progress of science. For this purpose, NSF makes more than 10,000 new grant awards annually, many of these grants fund worthy research in the hard sciences. Recently, however NSF has funded some more questionable projects - $750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players and $1.2 million to model the sound of objects breaking for use by the video game industry. Help us identify grants that are wasteful or that you don’t think are a good use of taxpayer dollars.
The potential danger to science here is massive. The danger comes not from the public, who have a perfect right to ask about where their money is being spent. The danger comes from Congress, which has recently made noises about micro-managing science. From Bobby Jindal’s bizarre bashing of volcano research to Sarah Palin’s ignorant caterwauling about fruit fly research, our Congress—mostly Republicans, but some Democrats too—have demonstrating a spectacular lack of understanding about what science does and what programs are important. They don’t bother to learn anything, of course. They just identify programs that sound bad and attack them (Cantor’s page specifically asks the public to look for Religious Right dog whistles like “lawyers”, “culture” and “museum").
Politicians are simply not equipped to judge science and frequently don’t bother to try to educate themselves when they try to do so. Back in the 90’s, one of the Republicans bashed research into ATMs, not bothering to even look up the research to discover that the ATMs in question were Asynchronous Transfer Modules. I’ve heard others trash “cloning”, which most often refers to a technique of amplifying DNA for research into genetic markers of disease. The public, actually, is probably better at reviewing science since members of the public are not generally so narcissistic as to assume they don’t need to learn anything before shooting their mouths off.
Of potentially greater concern is the wedge this could create to defund research that certain politicians don’t like, such as global warming research. Defunding that may sound fine to the skeptics in the audience, but the same people don’t think we should be investigating anthropology, genetics or cosmology. Or at least not aspects that contradict their ideas.
If we need to cut science funding to balance the budget—and I think it’s a bad place to start cutting—the way to do it simply to cut NSF’s budget and let NSF figure out what programs they can ditch. Maybe we can shift some gross budget items. But having 535 lawyers looking over scientists’ shoulders is bad medicine.
Just to be clear: I’m not opposed to accountability for publicly funded research. One of the reasons this program can happen is because all NSF-funded programs are required to make available a summary of research written for the general public that explains, in non-technical terms, what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. I strongly support this policy and I know few scientists who oppose it. Our funding does, after all, come from the public and they have a right to know what’s being done with it.
In fact, having the public go through NSF layman’s summaries might be a really great thing since they would learn that the title of research programs—or some lazy political shithead’s snide comments about it—do not explain what it actually does (see the fruit fly research referenced above). The public learning about what scientists do is always a good thing. The less we act some like mysterious brotherhood and the more we let the public see the sometimes confused, sometimes wrong-headed but eventually systematic way we do things, the better.
But keep the politicians out of it. Especially from a party that has shown an alarming idiocy when it comes to science and an even worse laziness when it comes to learning about what they attack.
(Full disclosure: I have, in the past, been funded by NSF and applied, unsuccessfully, for support from them.)
Update: As a palate cleanser, here is latest awesomeness from the field of extrasolar planets. We’ve found water vapor in a planet 42 light years away.
Comments
That boat sailed 60 years ago…
All you have to do to verify this is look at how government has treated the AGW cultist and their claims.
the same people don’t think we should be investigating anthropology, genetics or cosmology
I wonder if Sarah Palin is wondering why we need to pay for research into makeup?
Considering that we are not a manufacturing country, science and research are the only two paths to continuing our standard of living. If we don’t make things that we can sell, we should be learning things that we can sell.
Considering that we are not a manufacturing country,
As someone that’s spent almost their entire adult working life in manufacturing, I’m pretty much obligated to point out that you’re wrong. There is a massive amount of manufacturing done in the US, and it isn’t of the variety that can be done in some pissant job-shop in Vietnam or Costa Rica by people making $4 a day.
I’m gonna second SO there, we still do a LOT of manufacturing, in this country. The company i work for is about to corner a massive portion of the market in its field, and with new developments in our product line, we are sure to have a steady influx of orders.
Yes, in some areas of the country, and in some market segments we still do have a strong manufacturing base. I work for a company that supplies manufacturers (but we supply them with software that we make.. you know, sciency things). But we don’t manufacture goods to the extent that we did, and many cities are dying in part because of the loss of the manufacturing base.
But keep in mind, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing.
Oh, and here’s a link..
But we don’t manufacture goods to the extent that we did, and many cities are dying in part because of the loss of the manufacturing base.
Well, if you want to keep your factory job in the USA, you might to tell the union to get lost…
The number of jobs continues to decilne while output continues to increase. We are manufacturing more products with fewer people.
It is due to progress in automation.
I wonder if they’re bothered by the $37 million given to a Noah’s Ark theme park (by the Kentucky state government), or is it just public funding of science that gets up their noses.
The number of jobs continues to decilne while output continues to increase. We are manufacturing more products with fewer people.
It is due to progress in automation.
No it’s mostly do to bullshit accounting that count for productivity things manufactured by “our companies” in their off shore plants by outsourced labor.
Source please Muirgeo1, I’ll go get some cleaning supplies so I can clean up the info enough to read it after you pull it out of your ass.
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That boat sailed 60 years ago…