What Do House Republicans Want From the NSF?

Republicans leading the House science committee have spent much of the past two years ratcheting up the pressure on the National Science Foundation.

They’ve sought information on several dozen grants awarded by the NSF. They’ve made increasingly strident attacks on some of its choices. And for several weeks now, committee representatives have been trekking out to NSF offices in Arlington, Va., to inspect grant paperwork.

The oversight campaign has left researchers worried that the committee is trying to impose partisan priorities on scientific processes. But a committee aide involved in the work said the panel’s escalating pressure could ease soon. All it would take, the aide said, is for the NSF to meet a demand made by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the committee’s chairman: that each new grant award include a brief summary explaining the project’s value.

“Immediately, it would change the nature of the dialogue,” the aide said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

House Republicans are growing confident that, by that yardstick, their much-criticized mission will be largely satisfied. At that point, committee representatives have said, oversight would continue—as the committee has come to realize how much it had ignored the NSF previously—but ideally on a less-confrontational basis.

To date, the relationship has been tense. The committee’s investigations, during which Congressional staff members have reviewed grant documents intensively, were arranged through months of negotiations with the NSF.

Those visits followed months of questions and criticism by Mr. Smith and other Republicans both within and outside of his committee. The targets typically involved projects in the social sciences or those that touch on politically sensitive topics like climate change.

Universities and their researchers have grown increasingly alarmed by the committee’s actions. In a statement last month, the Association of American Universities said the investigation might intimidate scientists instead of making their work more transparent.

“It is having a destructive effect on NSF and on the merit-review process that is designed to fund the best research,” said the AAU, which represents 60 leading public and private U.S. research universities.

The AAU suggested that the committee, despite its talk of providing dispassionate oversight, appears to be “substituting their judgment for the expertise of scientists on the vital question of what research the United States should support.”

But committee members have insisted that their work in no way represents an attempt to impose a political agenda on the NSF. “Congressional oversight isn’t a threat or a punishment; it is helpful,” Mr. Smith said in a written statement to The Chronicle. “When agencies conceal information, bad things can happen.”

The visits stemmed from the NSF’s determination to protect the confidentiality of its grant-review process. Typically, the agency recruits panels of subject-specific experts from around the country; those experts travel to Arlington to spend a few days reading through grant applications and advising the NSF staff on their merits.

In the NSF’s view, keeping those comments confidential is critical to ensuring that experts—who are often professionally familiar with the applicants—will participate in the future. The agency has tried to protect that confidentiality by limiting Congressional staff investigators to reading transcripts of the evaluation sessions on site, and then leaving the building with only notes. The committee has grudgingly accepted those terms, though its investigators have complained that the logistics have greatly slowed their review.

Much of the concern from universities and other advocates of scientific exploration reflects uncertainties over the capabilities of the House committee and its staff. The main committee representative conducting the inquiry is a political scientist by training. The committee is confident that he sufficiently comprehends the science. “The need is not to understand the science to the depth of the experts in the field,” the committee aide said. “The need is to exercise conscientious and capable oversight.”

That brought a rebuke from Dahlia L. Sokolov, a science-committee staff member representing Democrats during the investigative work. “It’s bad enough they are seeking to pass judgment on social-science grants, which at least are written in relatively plain English,” Ms. Sokolov said. “What the heck do they expect to glean from engineering, computer science, chemistry, etc., proposals? I have a Ph.D. in bioengineering, and I wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of most of it.”

One project that Republicans have held up as a particularly egregious example of NSF waste was a $300,000 grant to the University of California at Davis to study the mechanics of how bicycles operate. After reviewing the grant’s paperwork at the agency, the committee described it as a misguided attempt to increase bike ridership in the United States. The researchers contend the objective was far more nuanced, aimed at creating mathematical models both for the sake of general knowledge and for the purpose of developing other vehicles.

Committee Republicans have also described their surprise, after reading the paperwork on about 20 grants, to learn the basics of how the NSF grant-review system functions. “There seem to be some differences among program officers in how they process external reviewers’ comments,” said the Republican staff member who requested anonymity. “Some program officers treat the reviewer comments as the last word. Some aren’t averse to going directly to their program directors to get projects approved.”

But among NSF officials and outside scientists, those practices are well known. The grant system intentionally requires approvals by program officers, division directors, and others, including advisory committees that “provide additional checks and balances on the portfolio of work funded,” said Maria C. Zacharias, an NSF spokeswoman. “This process has served the nation well, over more than 60 years.”

‘National Interest’

The committee played down the significance of its early focus on grants in areas like the social sciences, climate change, and public education. The plan, committee representatives said, is to eventually sample grant paperwork from all NSF divisions. The committee’s spokesman and staff aide declined to answer questions on the criteria by which the committee chose that first round of grants to examine. They acknowledged, however, that much of the selection process was based on complaints from fellow Republicans, both in and out of Congress.

By dollar value, some of the committee’s biggest targets are not even university lab scientists. The three largest grants in the first round of reviews were all designed to promote teaching about climate change and related issues: $5.6-million to Columbia University to develop climate-change educational curricula for a variety of settings, including museums and classrooms; $3-million to the Association of Science-Technology Centers, a global organization of museums; and $2.5-million to the Oakland Museum of California.

The NSF has long devoted a share of its budget to projects in areas like museums and school curricula that are designed to share scientific knowledge with the wider public, said Joan E. Ferrini Mundy, the agency’s assistant director for education and human resources. “It’s not a new area for us,” she said.

Such spending has typically enjoyed bipartisan support over the decades, said Marc Rothenberg, the NSF’s recently retired historian. And when there has been criticism, it has come from both parties, he said.

Social sciences have often taken the brunt. “No one claims to know theoretical physics,” Mr. Rothenberg said, quoting an oft-heard explanation from a former NSF colleague. “It’s hard to critique a theoretical-physics research project and say it’s a waste of money, but everyone thinks they understand the issues that are raised in some of the social-science projects.”

The House science committee has also sown confusion and anxiety by insisting that the new public summaries for each NSF grant explain the “national interest” of the work, preferably with an economic rationale. Mr. Smith has given conflicting signals on what he means by that.

In some contexts, he has suggested that research should lead to a clear and definable benefit for the nation. “House science committee questions about NSF grant-making have one goal: to make NSF and our nation’s scientific-research enterprise stronger and more relevant to our nation and its people,” the chairman said in the statement.

In other settings, he has been less demanding. A fan of astronomy, Mr. Smith gave a September interview to Planetary Radio in which he mused about a cherished poster in his office—a photograph taken by the Hubble telescope when scientists pointed the taxpayer-financed instrument toward a random spot of apparently empty space. They were pleasantly surprised to find it contained some 3,000 galaxies with 100 million stars each. The scientists who took the photo and made the discovery, Mr. Smith said effusively, were acting “purely out of intellectual curiosity.”

The NSF already requires grant applications to include a section explaining the “broader impacts” of proposed projects. As the UC-Davis grant demonstrated, even those plain-spoken descriptions can lead to misunderstandings. The committee has not explained what additional clarity the new summaries would provide. NSF officials said they too are struggling to carry out the idea, though they said the requirement is already being followed for newly approved grants.

Once that compliance becomes more evident, committee representatives said, relations with the NSF should improve. Despite all the criticism from scientists, the committee aide sounded an optimistic note: The result of this process, he argued, will only be greater public support for federal spending on research.