Quiet White House Science Office Stirs Fears but Also Raises Some Hopes

Across the country, scientists are watching with dismay as the months tick by without any appointment of a White House science adviser.

The omission is “symbolically worrisome,” said one of those researchers, Christopher F. D’Elia, dean of the College of the Coast and Environment at Louisiana State University. “We’d like to see scientists respected, and a scientist as the science adviser.”

But a less-visible, if arguably more consequential, White House absence is now compounding — or, to some minds, possibly easing — those anxieties in the university research community.

It’s the job of “convening” — the unglamorous backstage chore of getting various government agencies to agree on research priorities, and then helping to make sure those strategies are reflected in federal funding.

Most public attention surrounding the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy tends to involve its director, and the administration’s failure so far to choose one. But the leaderless office also deserves attention for its role as the main coordinating body for officials throughout the government to confer on a range of scientific matters affecting their agencies.

University scientists directly affected by such opaque bureaucratic structures include Steven L. Rolston, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park who is part of a worldwide push to invent a new generation of superfast computers using quantum technology. Governments in Europe and China are committing billions of dollars to the chase for quantum computers. American scientists appear to be in the lead, but Rolston and other experts fear that may change if the U.S. government can’t agree on a coherent strategy for pushing forward.

The OSTP’s coordination responsibility stands to shape the outcome. In the case of quantum computing, governmental divisions that might head off pursuing their own strategies — if not corralled by the policy office — include the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Air Force, Army, Office of Naval Research, and various intelligence agencies.

Done well, coordination between such agencies and with outside parties can result in successes like the National Nanotechnology Initiative. That was an idea kicking around Washington into the late 1990s, when the science-policy office finally pulled together various agency leaders and shaped their ideas into a firm budget proposal, said Neal F. Lane, director of the office at the time. In the nearly two decades since, that program has funneled tens of billions in federal research dollars to dozens of U.S. universities, helping to drive some $1.6 trillion in overall economic activity associated with nanotechnology. “If you can generate enough good ideas in an initiative to get the president’s attention, you can bring new money to funding research,” said Lane, an emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University.

Without such coordination, however, scientists working on major research challenges can only watch as their federal support shrinks or gets wasted on ineffective or misguided pursuits.

“If there’s not continuing pushing,” Rolston explained, “then things just grind to a halt, especially with a change in administration and a potential change in priorities.”

For Rolston, that uncertainty hovers over lab tables filled with components like ultra-high-vacuum chambers, fiber-optic couplers, and precision mirror mounts. A quantum computer built from such parts would vastly multiply processing speeds by looking deep into atomic structures to extract a far more numerous and wider range of signal states than the simple 0 or 1 options afforded by today’s slabs of silicon. That quest has advanced to the point, Rolston said, where the perfection and miniaturization of his components will require sophisticated cooperation — and funding coordination — between computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians, and engineers.

Encouraging Sign

At least for quantum computing experts, the science-policy office has given a positive sign: It just hired Jacob M. Taylor, a prize-winning Harvard University physics doctoral graduate, to serve as its assistant director for quantum information science. “Someone, somewhere decided this is a priority,” Rolston said. “This is encouraging.”

But other fields are seeing less clarity. Much of the anxiety, according to top research officials at several universities, may just reflect a lack of information from the office, which a year into the Trump administration is still offering the public a bare-bones website lacking any mention of officials or staff.

Without any sense of OSTP’s organizational structure, said Roger M. Wakimoto, vice chancellor for research at the University of California at Los Angeles, it’s hard to know the fate of the more than 40 panels of federal officials — gathered under headings like Nuclear Defense Research, Water Availability and Quality, Medical Imaging and STEM Education — that the policy office managed during the previous administration.

“If they had a master plan for these committees and the council, they would have done something by now,” Wakimoto said in an interview. Whatever organization may exist at OSTP, said Mridul Gautam, vice president for research and innovation at the University of Nevada at Reno, it isn’t yet evident. “Maybe it will show up at some point,” he said.

That point, however, might be drawing near. Officials of the science-policy office, speaking on the condition they not be identified by name, said that all interagency coordination panels that existed in the previous administration still remain. And they said the office, even without a director, is in the process of adding some panels while removing others that had grown dormant, and arranging others into new groupings that better reflect current administration priorities.

One of the most significant changes, the officials said, will be the addition of a “science and technology enterprise” grouping, to capture panels on topics like “open data,” which affect a growing number of scientific endeavors. And while it has not publicly posted its staff on its website, the office provided The Chronicle with a current staff list that shows about 50 employees, close to the 70 that it had at about the same time in the Obama administration. Many of the job descriptions so far suggest emphases on applied research, rather than basic, though the office is still growing.

The size of that list “amazes me,” acknowledged Howard J. Gobstein, executive vice president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. “I did not realize it was so large, and so I’m pleased to see that,” said Gobstein, who led a congressionally authorized review of OSTP in the 1980s and served in the office in the 1990s.

Both Gobstein and Tobin L. Smith, the vice president for policy at the Association of American Universities, said they were especially encouraged by the appointment of Jeffrey D. Weld, executive director of the Iowa Governor’s STEM Advisory Council, to serve as senior policy adviser and assistant director for STEM education at the policy office. “While there was a period in the administration where not much was happening there,” Smith said, “it now appears that OSTP is staffed and is up and running.”

Still, such assessments vary widely. “I think they’re not as bad as everybody thinks they are,” said D’Elia of Louisiana State. “But they’re definitely not pushing things in a direction that I would hope they would.”

That kind of sentiment can differ even within fields. D’Elia just this month attended a conference in Washington of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership, at which two OSTP officials gave presentations. Yet just last fall, he said, the administration banned officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from making presentations at the Coastal & Estuarine Research Federation meeting in Rhode Island.

Even if the administration isn’t directly “demonizing science,” it should be doing more to speak out against those who clearly are, D’Elia said.

That points to a widely shared concern underlying whatever the science-and-technology policy office does in the current administration. Even a fully staffed OSTP, said Kumar Garg, assistant director for learning and innovation in the office under the Obama administration, may get sidetracked by an administration so ideological that it proposed cutting the National Institutes of Health budget by 20 percent without apparently realizing the wholesale devastation that would cause to medical research. Too often when it comes to the administration’s approach to science, said Garg, now a senior fellow at the nonprofit Society for Science & the Public, “the only signals are negative.”

That might even explain why the OSTP has kept a relatively quiet face, and might continue to do so, even if that uncertainty leaves some in the university research community uneasy.

Gobstein recalled the example of the late John H. Marburger, who directed the policy office under President George W. Bush and faced research-community criticisms over matters like scientific integrity and stem-cell research. But later, Gobstein said, appreciation grew as scientists learned of Marburger’s internal role in administration debates. “After the fact,” he said, “we found out that he was far more effective than perhaps we knew during the administration.”

That suggests anyone working in the current administration might not be able to publicly please university scientists. “This is a different type of administration — we all know that,” Gobstein said. “And given that, for all we know, this OSTP could be very, very successful in their domain if they build relationships and go about their work quietly.”

Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.