So What's Wrong With Doubling The NSF Budget, Anyway?

by emptypockets

After overseeing the first NIH budget cut since the Nixon administration, President George Bush claims to be a proponent of basic research:

So I'm going to work with these two Congressmen to pass what we've called the American Competitive [sic] Initiative, which says that we will be the most -- we'll lead the world when it comes to research and development. The federal government should double its commitment to basic research in physical sciences over the next 10 years. People say, why would the federal government be investing? Well, I'll give you why -- the Internet. The Internet came to be because of federal research dollars. iPods -- got one? I got one, you know? (Laughter.) As a result of federal research.

The American Competitiveness Initiative, announced in this year's State of the Union address, includes a declaration by the President to double funding for the National Science Foundation. (And yes the iPod thing is in the official document that your government wrote to explain "science" to Americans.)

A serious long-term commitment to funding basic research would be wonderful. It would help America's economy, help secure our place of leadership in the world, and help to fuel a positive American philosophy about our future. Unfortunately, President Bush and his Republican Congress have simpler goals: to provide themselves with political cover during the midterm elections as pro-science, while they continue to starve out American research.

1. They have made this promise before

In 2002, Congress passed and the President signed The National Science Foundation Authorization Act of 2002. From the House Committee on Science:

"The National Science Foundation (NSF) Authorization Act of 2002” sets the government’s premier research agency on the path to doubling its budget over the next five years. The bill authorizes 15 percent increases in each of fiscal years 2003, 2004 and 2005.

So how's that coming along? Not so well.

The blue line shows the level of funding set by the 2002 Act. The red bars show actual funding. So, did Bush break his promise? Well, tell me if you've ever heard this excuse before:

The executive branch shall construe the purported condition as advisory, since any other construction would be inconsistent with the principles enunciated by the U.S. Supreme Court... The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch, to protect the deliberative processes of the Executive, and to submit to the Congress such recommendations as the President judges necessary and expedient.

In other words, the President is above the law, and he never promised nothin' to nobody nohow anyway. Did the Congressional Republicans break their promise? Absolutely. It is important that they be held to remember it -- and that we don't in 2006 swallow the same baloney they were feeding us in 2002.

2. It is cover for starving NIH

Even if Congressional Republicans remember their promise this time, the NSF funding -- which is long overdue -- is not being used as a genuine investment in basic research, but as political cover for starving out NIH. (Disclosure: I receive funding through NIH.)

What is the difference between NSF and NIH? NSF funds primarily the physical sciences -- physics, chemistry, engineering, computer science, math, geology, astrophysics -- and a sliver of social science. NIH funds biomedical research, both clinical studies (trying out new treatments on patients) and basic research (understanding how genes, cells, and organs work, in the lab).

The 2006 NSF budget is $5.6 billion. The 2006 NIH budget is $28.7 billion -- more than five NSFs put together.

NIH is "by far the largest federal supporter of R&D at colleges and universities, with nearly two-thirds of the federal total." President Bush's Republican Congress is holding its budget dead flat.

It is not that NIH is more important than NSF -- indeed, almost all progress in biology follows from advances in the kinds of research funded by NSF. But NIH is much bigger than NSF. Congressional Republicans are not putting more money into basic research by doubling NSF -- they would just be playing an Enron-style shell game, robbing one agency to pay another.

Consider this: Increasing the NIH budget simply to keep up with inflation in 2007 would have cost $1.1 billion. The entire 2007 increase for NSF is $440 million.

This is not an honest investment in American research.

3. Boom-and-bust funding drives young people out of science

The NIH recently completed its own five-year budget doubling (1998-2003). Frankly, it wasn't such a good idea. The inflation rate for biological research outpaced nationwide inflation. But more importantly, that level of growth is unsustainable -- both in terms of realistic budget considerations, and in terms of the number of quality PhDs the US can produce. It is simply not reasonable to expect the country to double its scientific output every five years.

The ten-year doubling goal for NSF is more modest. It amounts to a little more than 7% increase each year, or a few percent over inflation. These budgets shouldn't be planned as five-year or ten-year investments, though. Five years is the time for one graduate student to get one Ph.D. Ten years may pass before that entering student has to apply for her first independent grant. If we are asking young people to commit to a career in academic research, we need to make at least an equally long-term commitment to funding them. Budgets should be set to increase a minimum of 5% per year over fifty years -- not doubling in five or ten.

Look at NIH. It just completed its doubling, then in a year went from 15% per year increases down to just keeping pace with inflation, then sharply into its first real cut in 36 years. Now it is flat again. That is a boom-and-bust cycle -- something any Texan can recognize.

The effect was that universities began expanding their biology departments, building new labs and hiring. Now there is a wave of recently-hired assistant professors who were able to get jobs but are facing an ever harder time getting grants to do any research. Recently, the NIH funded as many as 1 in 3 grant applications -- it has already dropped to 1 in 5, and those that do pass are getting funded at lower levels.

Undergraduates deciding whether to continue to grad school are seeing these hard times and uncertainty. Grad students deciding whether to continue on the long road into academic research are seeing it, too. We can pour as much money as we can afford into high school and college science education, but we are not going to get more scientists out the other end if they see an unhappy life filled with risky bets ahead. Boom-and-bust doesn't only hurt the research of today, but it punches more holes in an already leaky pipeline for bringing American students into basic research.

The good news

Politically, funding basic research is a terrific wedge to separate moderate Republicans from fundamentalists. In the House, moderate Republican Mike Castle of Delaware has been willing to stand off against conservatives unwilling to fund NIH. In the Senate, moderate Republican Arlen Specter has been a long-time ardent advocate of science funding -- probably a better advocate than most scientists themselves, something he recently chided us for.

"We're going to do more -- and we're going to ask you to do more." Specter said the advocates should stage a million-person march in Washington, D.C., with "enough people to be heard in the living quarters of the White House." He also said that groups should hold protests against 27 Republican senators who voted against increasing NIH funding. "You ought to march on them in their cities," he said, adding, "This is a battle that has to be waged by the 110 million Americans that are suffering from these illnesses in the United States"

Not only is the issue of science funding a politically useful tool, but it is also an area where we can expect to make solid gains. There are enough moderates in Congress that we don't need to regain control of either house to see an increase in funding. This is a an area where it is not all-or-none -- this is an area where every seat counts.

If you get a funny feeling in your gut when Bush says he supports science funding, your gut is right -- he doesn't. Bush and Congressional Republicans have made this promise before, are using the NSF as political cover while they starve science funding overall, and their lack of a sustainable long-term plan is depleting the next generation of scientists. I've avoided writing about science funding because I feel I'm too close to it, and it would come out preachy. But I hope this piece is useful to you if you need to debate policy with a moderate Republican. As always, I look forward to your comments.

Comments

[margaret]

Science funding is exactly the one true thing which could elevate this country back into the realm of greatness from which it has fallen since Bush came into office. Your "preaching" is exactly what we need to lay down the facts to people who have not paid attention to this problem: hear that, media of all kinds?

[RossK]

Margaret is right. And the best and brightest, many of them who came to train are now starting to flee instead of stay

As someone in the science geek business who left your fine country at the top of the boom (I left for reasons other than ones of funding) it is very sad to see my colleagues who stayed, some of them darned fine biomedical researchers, now faced with the prospect of getting out of the business altogether because NIH grant funding rates have now fallen below the 10% mark (ie. for every grant submitted less than one gets funded, which means that once the folks at Harvard, Stanford, the NIH institutes and UCSF get there's there is very little left for, say, Kansas - it's Thomas Frank all over again).

And for those folks who are hanging in there, guess where they now send their grants?

Why to NSF, of course, where they squeeze out the basic folks who are already there.

.

[RossK]

Sorry....for every 'ten grants' submitted, only one gets funded....

[jerry]

Professors need cheap hands to do modern medical research, so in the biological sciences they've given them PhDs to motivate and compensate - and have produced a glut of scientists who will find a greater need for their skills in teaching, here and abroad, than in research. Biotech research is so expensive that it will always be something of a luxury item in any economic community.

The NSF has been underfunded relative the NIH over the past decade so some people are happy, physical scientists have been moaning for years about their lack of funding growth relative to medical science but there have been good reasons for this. In the heartland there is some resentment toward government sponsored medical research, doctors living high on the hog and being feted by pharmas all day....

[emptypockets]

Thanks for comments.

Margaret, obviously I agree with you, but interestingly someone linked to here overnight (see the trackback) as an example of a biased politico making a weak rationalization for government-funded science. It's helpful, because I was thinking about writing a post to the tune of "What Good is Publically-Funded Science Anyway?" I'd be interested in hearing others' thoughts on the answer.

(My own answer is that critics like the one above don't understand the difference between basic research and applied research -- and that basic research is one of those common goods that it is the purpose of government to provide.)

RossK, the effect of science funding on American researchers leaving and international (primarily Korean, Chinese, and Indian) researchers coming in is a very good point I barely touched on here. As to the grant success rate, the number I found was 19 percent (see text directly below Figure 3) -- do you remember where you found the 10% number?

The grant success rate is a somewhat weak metric, because as it falls researchers begin to submit duplicate grants to different institutes within NIH knowing that fewer are getting funded overall and wanting to increase their odds. So, even if the grant success rate falls in half we don't know if that is half as many researchers getting grants, or the same number of researchers submitting twice as many applications to hedge their bets. (What we do know from it for sure is that the ratio of administrative overhead in writing and evaluating grants, compared to the amount of science output being done from the grants funded, is going in the wrong direction.)

The other danger of looking at percent of grants funded is that it is kind of like unemployment figures -- even in unemployment rates are low, it may be that someone who was making $20/hr has had to settle for a job below his ability level making $10/hr. Likewise, today even with the grants getting funded, they are being funded less -- and, as that goes down, many universities are taking a bigger cut of overhead out of the grant for the same reasons. So in the end, even getting one grant funded is not leaving the scientist with enough to run a lab on, in many cases. The nastiest part is that NIH has begun cutting grants that were already funded -- so someone may have been given a $500,000 five-year grant (at $100,000/yr) and already hired people on it, and now 2 or 3 years into it is seeing the grant cut by 10% or 20% -- when the research is already rolling, and the grad students or post-docs have already been taken in. That is just a really ugly situation, and it fuels the great uncertainty that makes it so difficult for young people to see basic research as a sound long-term career.

[emptypockets]

jerry, that is an interesting misconception. Especially so because if doctors (that would be MDs by the way) are living high on the hog, it is from "consulting" fees and privately-funded studies that are handed out by private industry (like pharmaceutical companies), not from NIH funds.

A lot of the the NIH funds go to PhDs doing research that wouldn't be funded by private industry -- or, if it were to be funded, the results wouldn't be made publicly available. (Even more so if the results go against the best interest of the company that funded them.)

The "cheap hands" that we do research with are technicians, who make in the $25k - $35k/yr range. The cheap minds that we do research with are graduate students getting their PhDs, who make around $25k/yr these days. But for all the time we spend training them and letting them learn by playing around and making mistakes, we could much more easily hire a technician army (indeed, some people do). The PhDs themselves, working as post-docs, generally make in the $35k - $65k/yr range, depending on years of experience (for "perma-docs" who've been around a long time it can go up to $75 or $80k/yr). Without the PhDs, American basic research dies, because they are the next generation of scientists we're training. Technicians (usually with a bachelor's degree in science) are, for the most part, the cheap disposable resource -- PhDs are more valuable.

You're right that we're producing more of them than we can employ, but it is not a bad idea to have some of them go into business, law, public policy, teaching, other fields -- they are smart and well-trained people, and can help us avoid ridiculous mistakes like this one I posted on recently.

[jerry]

I think that a significant number of people in "middle-America" (geographically, or in mind set) see NIH scientists as an extension of a bloated and greedy government that takes taxes away from them and their small communities and gives it to wealthy states (to spend on inner-city poor people) and to elite insiders (like scientists).

This sort of rational has obviously been central to Republican policy and has been strongly cultivated by Republican groups for some time, despite data showing that federal tax revenues actually flow from rich to poor states - so cutting taxes would disproportionately affect poor red/Republican states (but not the relatively few wealthy Republicans).