We have no national policy for science. The
Government has only begun to utilize science in the Nation’s welfare. There is
no body within the Government charged with formulating or executing a national
science policy. There are no standing committees of the Congress devoted to this
important subject. Science has been in the wings. It should be brought to the
center of the stage—for in it lies much of our hope for the future.
—Science—The Endless
Frontier, 1945
There must be a single point
close to the President at which the most significant problems created in the
research and development program of the Nation as a whole can be brought into
policy discussions.
—A Program for the
Nation, 1947
Scientific research
daily becomes more important to our agriculture, our industry, and our
health.
—Harry S. Truman, 1948
In the wake of World War II, there was widespread
acknowledgment of the contributions organized science had made to the allied
victory, and scientists emerged from their ivory towers to be hailed as national
heroes. President Truman praised the war efforts of physicists in a statement
released immediately after the bombing of Hiroshima, saying, “But the greatest
marvel is not the size of the enterprise, its secrecy, or its cost, but the
achievement of scientific brains in putting together infinitely complex pieces
of knowledge held by many men in different fields of knowledge into a workable
plan.” Secretary of War Henry Simpson was
more effusive and personal: “No praise is too great for the unstinting efforts,
brilliant achievements and complete devotion to the national interest of
scientists in this country.”
Science became a media darling as well. The
August 12 Sunday New York Times featured a
report by Richard Lewis on Albert Einstein, who “explained the principles of
nuclear energy and did so in a manner simple enough that even I could understand
what he was talking about.” The same edition noted that Princeton University
planned a series of weekly radio broadcasts on issues of current scientific
interest featuring “university scientists who helped develop the atomic bomb.”
The magazine titled its lead article “We Enter a New Era—the Atomic Age,” and an
accompanying photo essay featured brief biographies of Marie and Pierre Curie,
Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Ernest Lawrence.
The front page of the August 15 Times, announcing the surrender of Japan, also
reported on “Secrets of Radar Given to the World,” explaining that the OSRD had
finally been permitted to release the full story of what Sir Stafford Cripps, a
member of wartime British Prime Minister Churchill’s inner circle, was quoted as
calling, “the greatest invention of the war.” General David Sarnoff, President
of the Radio Corporation of America, flatly asserted, “If a statesman believes
that his country’s interest would be better served by isolation than by
participation in a world security organization, let me suggest that he debate
this question with a scientist rather than a politician.” And the Times, after acknowledging the singular scientific
achievement of the bomb, asked editorially, “Is this to be the end? Are we to
lapse into the old more or less nationalistic pursuit of science when great
issues are at stake? Why can’t there be more international cooperation in
dealing with arthritis, cancer, hormones, vitamins, or for that matter the whole
field of science?”
As a result, by the end if 1945 the notion of
linking U.S. science with national social and economic objectives seemed a less
partisan issue than it had during the late 1930s. Since science-based technology
had contributed demonstrably to military success, it was almost self-evident
that science could be mobilized to provide peacetime benefits, contributing to
national security and domestic prosperity. As Roosevelt put it, “New frontiers
of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision,
boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war we can create a fuller and
more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life.”
Postwar optimism about the promise of science was part
of a broader, nationally shared conviction that the United States had both the
material resources and the moral authority required to assure domestic health
and prosperity and maintain a beneficent world order. William D. Carey, who had
come to the Bureau of the Budget in 1942 with a master’s degree from Harvard’s
Littauer School of Government, later recalled:
You have to think of the atmosphere. This was post war, most of
the world in ashes, the U.S. riding very, very high, dreaming great dreams—the
Full Employment Act, United Nations arrangements, Point IV, the Marshall Plan.
And then, along in parallel, there was to be a new age of science, of
creativity. This was all to be part of a great strategic thrust toward the good
society: high employment, unlimited opportunities, superb education, civil
rights. And so we come to the institutional arrangements.
And the opportunities
presented themselves. The atmosphere was that we had a new world, and all would
go well. There was a very short window of idealism and optimism that closed very
abruptly. Out of that, the progression of the institutional arrangements that
followed were cast in instrumental terms—in terms of national needs.
A striking example of postwar optimism about the
efficacy of science-based knowledge for policy-making was the establishment of
the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) in the Executive Office of the President
as part of the Employment Act of 1946. The most obvious example of a comparable
foreign policy initiative was the Marshall Plan, implemented in 1948.
The genesis of the CEA is already implicit in
arguments, advanced in the 1937 Report of the
President’s Committee on Administrative Management, that specialized
knowledge and objective data are prerequisites for effective governance. That
proposition was also explicit in Vannevar Bush’s 1940 plan for a National
Defense Research Committee and its successor, the Office of Scientific Research
and Development. The assumption that in peacetime science merited at least
special political consideration, if not special access to the president,
underlay creation of the Atomic Energy Commission in
1946 and the National Science Foundation in 1950. And to a remarkable extent,
that assumption was accepted by the Bureau of the Budget and the Congress.
All of this momentum notwithstanding, there was
little consensus about how to achieve even broadly shared goals. Even before
Pearl Harbor, there had been discernible conservative reaction against the
economic and social innovations of the New Deal. Within a few months of Truman’s
taking office, a congressional coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats
was mounting an effective challenge to his attempts to further Roosevelt’s
domestic agenda. The November 1946 mid-term elections returned Republican
majorities to both Houses of Congress for the first time since 1930, and the
party seemed poised to recapture the presidency in 1948, for the first time in
sixteen years.
The evolution of science policy between the end
of World War II and the invasion of South Korea in June 1950 was conditioned by
the volatile domestic and international political environment of those years.
There was no consensus about how science could best serve the national interest,
or even what national interest outside of national defense science was supposed
to serve.
Few at the time denied that science could have
significant potential impact on a wide range of enduring national problems. Yet
traditional political interests identified with the principal areas of potential
impact (agriculture, health, and national defense, for example) were reluctant
to relinquish control to the putative guardians of a broad science policy.
Moreover, the would-be guardians themselves could not agree on terms under which
science could accept federal support. Political passions triggered by the novel
proposition that government could legitimately support non-government research
obscured the larger issue of how government could establish a broad policy to
link that research with essential national objectives.
Appropriate links between science and specific
areas of national concern, then, were considered piecemeal in debates over the
charters and prerogatives of individual agencies, including the Department of
Defense, Atomic Energy Commission, and National Institutes of Health. Much of
what passed for a broader debate about national science policy was concerned
with the scope and authority of a proposed new agency, originally called the
National Research Foundation and later the National Science Foundation, which
was envisioned as the single federal entity empowered to channel federal funds
to non-government research, particularly in universities. This vision was never
realized; in the five years between its proposal and creation, other agencies
began supporting university research.
The outlines of a broad debate about post-war
science policy began emerging in 1943, when West Virginia Democratic Senator
Harley M. Kilgore introduced the Science Mobilization Act, which included
several provisions for organizing and focusing postwar science and technology
resources. Included in the Act was creation of an Office of Scientific and
Technological Mobilization, an independent federal agency coordinating all
federal science and technology agencies and providing assistance for basic and
applied research in government laboratories, small businesses, and universities.
The office was to be overseen by a board and advisory committee, each comprised
of representatives from science and technology, industry, small business, labor,
agriculture, and consumer interests.
In 1944, Kilgore drafted a new bill, renaming
the federal science agency the National Science Foundation. Because Kilgore’s
emphasis had shifted entirely to postwar science-government relations, hearings
on the bill were postponed until the end of the war in Europe.
By that time, the Vannevar Bush-led
scientific establishment was preparing a counterproposal, in the form of a
report entitled Science—the Endless
Frontier (often referred to as the “Bush report”). Officially
transmitted to Truman on July 5, 1945, the report came in response to a November
1944 Roosevelt letter to Bush, in which the President emphasized that “the
research experience developed by the Office of Scientific Research and
Development and by the thousands of scientists in the universities and private
industry, should be used in the days of peace ahead for the improvement of the
national health, the creation of new enterprises bringing new jobs, and the
betterment of the national standard of living.”
Roosevelt’s letter had raised four questions
concerning the declassification of wartime research results; the organization of
a program for medicine and related science; government aid to research
activities by public and private organizations; and a program for discovering
and developing scientific talent.
Although Science—
the Endless Frontier included several recommendations intended to
strengthen existing research capabilities in bureaus within the Departments of
Agriculture, Commerce, and the Interior, its centerpiece was the recommended
creation of a National Research Foundation, which would be “a focal point within
the Government for a concerted program of assisting scientific research
conducted outside of Government.” In addition to awarding
scholarships and fellowships, the foundation would furnish “the funds needed to
support basic research in colleges and universities.” Additionally, it would
“coordinate where possible research programs on matters of utmost importance to
the national welfare…formulate a national policy for the Government toward
science…sponsor the interchange of scientific information among scientists and
laboratories both in this country and abroad…ensure that the incentives to
research in industry and the universities are maintained.”
An Act establishing the National Science
Foundation was signed into law in May 1950. Although its approach to federal
support for science was much closer to the Bush than to the Kilgore concept, the
scope and authority of the National Science Foundation were considerably
diminished from what either Science—the Endless
Frontier or the Kilgore legislation had envisioned. Indeed, the
National Science Foundation that finally emerged in 1950 was a bit player among
other more established, more powerful agencies. In particular, Bush’s hope that
defense research would be included in the National Science Foundation’s charter
was not realized. While medical research was not explicitly excluded, the
legislative history of the National Science Foundation Act of 1950 implied that
Congress preferred all such research to be conducted and supported by the
National Institutes of Health.
The Bush report laid down the boundaries for
most subsequent debates about the relations between science and government. As
such, it remains one of the cornerstones of U.S. science policy. It made four
enduring contributions to the conceptualization of science policy in the United
States: it asserted that, except for national defense, the proper concern of
science policy ought to be the support, as opposed to the utilization, of
science; it advanced the proposition that basic research should be the principal
focus of federal support for science, again with the exception of national
defense; it argued that mechanisms for the support of research must be
consistent with the norms of the practitioners of that research; and it
suggested that universities, as the principal sites for the conduct of basic
research and the exclusive sites for advanced education, literally defined
whatever national research system could be said to exist in the United
States.
Although the arguments underlying those
propositions have more often been honored in the breach than in the observation,
the propositions themselves have achieved the status of an unassailable ideal
against which actual and proposed policies can be measured.
Science—the
Endless Frontier assigned to its proposed National Research
Foundation the responsibility to “coordinate where possible research programs on
matters of utmost importance to the national welfare.” However, it made no
recommendations about how government ought to identify relevant goals, assign
scientific priorities that might contribute toward their achievement, or support
or otherwise facilitate the conduct of research intended to benefit the national
welfare. The report was reasonably specific about coordinating defense-related
research, but it did not consider how, or even whether, strategies could be
devised to link research with non-defense objectives.
Thus the report defined the central problem
for science policy as assuring that the available pool of new knowledge would
remain adequate to the needs of those in the best position to use it
effectively, as well as to train new generations of scientists and engineers to
identify and make use of it. Government had a legitimate role in aiding the
quest for new scientific results, but attempts either to direct research toward
specific ends or to facilitate the utilization of existing research for non-
defense purposes would be counterproductive.
By 1944, the U.S. science establishment realized
that the private sources of support sustaining university research prior to 1940
would be inadequate in the postwar era, particularly since destruction of the
great pre-war scientific centers of Europe would require the United States to
generate much of the world’s new scientific knowledge. Bush and his colleagues
seized the opportunity to advance the proposition that the best way for
government to assure that science would benefit the public interest would be to
leave scientists free to pursue their own
interests. Central to that vision was the idea that universities defined
science’s center of gravity in the United States; the politically conservative
Bush and most of his establishment colleagues were philosophically opposed to
government support or control of non-defense-related science in industry, as
that would constitute unacceptable government intervention in the
marketplace.
Academia, according to Bush and his
colleagues, was therefore the sole non-defense sector where federal research
support could legitimately be contemplated. Yet any arrangement that made
federal support for university research contingent upon proof of relevance to
social or economic objectives was anathema. Moreover, government support carried
the risk of federal intrusion on traditional scientific norms, the most critical
being university autonomy. In the words of the report to Bush by the Committee
on Science and the Public Welfare chaired by President Isaiah Bowman of Johns
Hopkins University, “We do not believe that any program [of government support]
is better than no program—that an ill-advised distribution of funds will aid the
growth of science.” In order to be fruitful, “scientific research must be free—
free from the influence of pressure groups, free from the necessity of producing
immediate practical results, free from the dictation of any central board.”
At least since the time of Francis Bacon in
the sixteenth century, it has been an article of faith that the advancement of
science depends upon self-governance by peer communities. The 1935 proposal of
Karl Compton’s Science Advisory Board had foundered in part because it sought to
insulate government support for university research from government control by
channeling funds through the privately controlled National Research Council. The
more politically astute Bush embedded the Baconian norm into the charter of a
government agency that would be virtually free from government control. Fiscal
and administrative authority was to be vested in a part-time, presidentially
appointed group of approximately nine private citizens. In the 1950 legislation,
the size of this group was increased to twenty-four and designated as the
National Science Board, to be composed primarily of eminent scientists and other
individuals with “distinguished records of public service.”
According to the original Bush formulation, this part-time board was to have had
complete authority to appoint and discharge the director of the foundation and
the heads of its operating divisions. The principal responsibility of those
divisions, also to be comprised of eminent scientists, was to be dispersal of
research funds according to their own (and the board’s) interpretation of
scientific merit. The board itself was to have additional responsibilities for
coordination and oversight of the entire federal research establishment so that
the foundation would serve as the “focal point within the Government for a
concerted program of assisting scientific research conducted outside of
government.”
On July 19, 1945, two weeks after Science—the Endless Frontier had been transmitted to
Truman and the same day it was released to the public, Senator Warren Magnuson
(D-WA), by prior arrangement with Bush, introduced legislation to create a
National Research Foundation essentially along the lines envisioned by the Bush
report. Wilbur Mills (D-AK)
introduced simultaneous legislation into the House of Representatives. Four days
later, Harley Kilgore, angry that he had not been privy either to the
centerpiece recommendation of Science—the Endless
Frontier or to Bush’s arrangement with Magnuson, reintroduced into
the Senate his legislation creating a National Science Foundation. To a
remarkable extent, the National Science Foundation Act that President Truman
signed into law on May 10, 1950, accepted the original concept in Science—the Endless Frontier of an independent,
self-governing agency with the authority to allocate public funds for research
priorities and directions determined by the governors themselves. But two
provisions of the act departed significantly from Bush’s original formulation.
First, an amendment introduced by Congressman Oren Harris (D-AK) limited annual
appropriations for the National Science Foundation to $500,000 during the first
year and $15 million thereafter. Second, the act specified that the
president, rather than a presidentially appointed National Science Board, would
appoint (and therefore have the authority to discharge) the foundation’s
director. A proposed amendment to protect the prerogative of the National
Institutes of Health to support all biomedical research in the United States by
prohibiting the newly created NSF from doing so failed to pass the Senate.
However, the legislative history of the act would be interpreted so as to
preclude the NSF from supporting biomedical research.
Harris’ motion to place a ceiling on the
foundation’s annual appropriations is notable as one of the few proposed
amendments incorporated into the final Act of Congress. Other amendments
proposed and defeated during the five-year debate included provisions that would
have compelled the National Science Foundation to direct a specific portion of
its research funds to finding cures for specific diseases or to reserve up to 25
percent of those funds for geographical distribution rather than for
disbursement on the basis of scientific merit.
By the time the legislation was being
considered by the eighty-first Congress, elected in November 1948, anti-
communist hysteria was mounting, resulting in proposed amendments to require
loyalty oaths and even prior investigation by the FBI for all prospective
recipients of federal research funds. Both of these amendments were
defeated.
A sticking point in the debate over the Bush
and Kilgore plans for the NSF was the degree of direct presidential control of
the foundation. Twice before May 1950, creation of the agency floundered on this
issue. In June 1946, the Senate passed a bill that would have vested
administrative authority in a presidentially appointed administrator advised by
an external board. That bill expired in July when the more conservative House of
Representatives declined to take up the measure. In July 1947, the Republican-
controlled eightieth Congress enacted legislation that would have vested
ultimate administrative authority and fiscal responsibility in a part-time,
presidentially appointed National Science Board, but the act was pocket vetoed
by Truman on the grounds that no president could delegate his constitutional
responsibility for the expenditure of public funds to a part-time board that
would have a direct interest in the dispersion of those funds. The act that was
finally signed into law defined the foundation as consisting of a twenty-four–
member National Science Board and a Director. The president retained the right
to appoint the director, subject to the advice and consent of the Senate. But
the board retained policy guidance over the foundation, including the authority
to approve the disbursement of all research funds. Additionally, the act gave
the board various broad oversight responsibilities, including a mandate to
periodically evaluate science and engineering in the United States.
The protracted debate over the NSF brought to
the fore deep ideological and political divisions within the scientific
community. In November 1945, the group of scientists
who had been closely associated with Bush’s wartime activities formed a
Committee Supporting the Bush Report under the chairmanship of Isaiah Bowman,
President of Johns Hopkins University, who had also chaired the Bush committee
on Science and the Public Welfare. Politically
conservative in its orientation, this group steadfastly opposed presidential
appointment of the NSF director. One month later, Harold Urey and Harlow
Shapley, both liberals, established the more broadly based Committee for a
National Science Foundation, many of whose members were openly sympathetic to
the Kilgore proposition that science ought to be directed to explicit national
goals. In 1946, following the failure of the House to take up the Senate-
approved NSF bill, the two groups proceeded to attack each other bitterly and
often publicly. Following Truman’s veto of the NSF Act of 1947, a third group,
the Intersociety Committee for a National Science Foundation, succeeded in
calming the divisive political passions and negotiating with the Bureau of the
Budget and Congress the compromise that paved the way for the bill’s
passage.
By the time the National Science Foundation
was created in May 1950, three federal agencies—the Office of Naval Research
(ONR), the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and the National Institutes of Health
(NIH)—were already providing substantial support for university research. The
$15 million appropriations ceiling attached to the NSF Act by Congressman Harris
has been interpreted as an effort to save the legislation from defeat by
assuring congressmen who remained unconvinced about the need for yet another
agency to support basic research that the new foundation would not inordinately
burden the federal budget.
Shortly after its creation in 1946, the
AEC began supporting university basic research in
nuclear science even though it had been envisioned primarily as assuming control
of military nuclear resources. Similarly, the ONR began supporting basic
research in universities with no obvious short-term military applications.
Several important precedents for project selection established by the ONR were
carried over as operating procedures of the NSF after 1950, in large measure
because the first NSF director, Alan Waterman, had previously been chief
scientist at ONR.
The case of the NIH was—and remains—unique.
At the end or World War II, it was still a relatively small agency, most of
whose research focused on problems with obvious applications. Along with most of
the Public Health Service, it was viewed with suspicion if not hostility by many
non-government medical scientists, including W.W. Palmer of Columbia University,
Chairman of the Bush’s Medical Advisory Committee.
In 1948, the National Institute of Health was
renamed the National Institutes of Health,
and reorganized in subdivisions corresponding to major human disorders. By that
time it was reconciling many of its differences with the non-governmental
medical establishment and had initiated a substantial extramural program to
support research in university medical schools through an innovative contracts
system. Much of that research, conducted to obtain knowledge of
fundamental biological and physiological processes that might conceivably have
eventual medical applications, qualified as basic research according to criteria
set forth by Science—the Endless Frontier.
In 1950, during final House debate on the
National Science Foundation Act, an amendment was introduced that would have
preempted the NSF from any assaults on the NIH’s turf. Although defeated, the
debate over it highlights the favor with which the NIH’s basic research programs
were regarded. The NIH rarely distinguished, at least publicly, between its
legislated mandate to improve the health of the American public and its
aspirations to be the principal supporter of basic medical research. Just as
significant, it required no national defense rationale to justify its
support.
Bush tended to define the sciences in terms of
the mathematical, physical, engineering, and medical disciplines that had been
an integral part of his wartime system and for which he could lay some
justifiable claim to being a spokesman. Nathan Reingold has remarked on Bush’s
curious blind spot regarding the non-medically–oriented biological
sciences. Representatives of those
disciplines were conspicuously absent from the four committees whose
deliberations and reports provided the basis for Science—the Endless Frontier. Because the non-
medical biologists had played virtually no part in Bush’s wartime system, they
felt little or no obligation to support his version of a National Research
Foundation; in particular, they were much less adamant about the question of
presidential control.
If Bush’s neglect of the biological sciences
was an unfortunate oversight, exclusion of the social sciences was deliberate.
Bush’s letter transmitting Science—the Endless
Frontier to President Truman stated that “in speaking of science he
[President Roosevelt] clearly had in mind the natural sciences, including
biology and medicine, and I have so interpreted his questions. Progress in other
fields, such as the social sciences and the humanities, is likewise important;
but the program for science presented in my report warrants immediate
attention.” The question of whether the social sciences
should be explicitly mentioned as qualifying for federal research support in
legislation creating the foundation was debated over the next five years, and
they were excluded from the National Science Foundation Act of 1950.
Bush and his senior colleagues believed that
inclusion of the social sciences would complicate and delay formulation of a
relatively straightforward compact between science and government. But their
antipathy may also have been rooted in their distrust of government
bureaucracies and New Deal-style planning and management. The social sciences
had been instrumental in the proliferation of new agencies during the early New
Deal and had legitimized the concept of planning and control at the presidential
level. Since social scientists were identified with what many conservatives
viewed as alarming controls on private activity, Bush and his colleagues might
well have regarded their explicit inclusion in the National Research Foundation
as inconsistent with the insulation of that new agency from the federal
bureaucracy. A number of conservative congressmen also opposed inclusion of the
social sciences on the grounds that it could lead to centralized planning by
government, if not to Soviet-style regimentation.
The markedly different approach to science
policy of practicing scientists and those few social scientists with any
interest in that topic was also a perennial ground for distrust. Social
scientists on Frederic Delano’s Science Committee of the National Resources
Committee had been responsible for torpedoing the 1934 proposal of Karl
Compton’s Science Advisory Committee (on one of whose committees Bush—then Dean
of Engineering at MIT—had served) to support scientific research in
universities. Thereafter, the social science-dominated Science Committee of that
body had produced, beginning in 1938, the successive volumes of Research—a National Resource, which gave co-equal
status to the social and natural sciences. The landmark Delano committee report
had been the first official government document to recognize the symbiotic
relationship between the federal and non-federal research enterprises and to
argue that federal responsibility for science extended beyond the government’s
own scientific bureaus. However, to the non-government scientific establishment,
the solutions it proposed for a more coherent national science policy were
overly bureaucratized and threatening to the autonomy of academic
science.
During the years of debate over the National
Science Foundation, a second federal science-promotion effort was under way. In
October 1946, Truman issued an executive order establishing the President’s
Scientific Research Board and charged it to prepare an overview of current and
proposed research and development within and outside of government. The prime
mover behind the executive order was probably James R. Newman, formerly of the
Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, who had been in the vanguard of the
successful battle to assure civilian control of atomic energy.
Chaired by John R. Steelman, Director of the Office
of War Mobilization and Reconversion, the Scientific Research Board was
comprised of the heads of all cabinet departments and other federal units with
substantial research and development responsibilities. Steelman was directed to
submit a report:
setting forth (1) his findings with respect to the Federal
research programs and his recommendations for providing coordination and
improved efficiency therein; and (2) his findings with respect to non-Federal
research and development activities and training facilities, a statement of the
inter-relationship of Federal and non-Federal research and development, and his
recommendations for planning, administering and staffing Federal research
programs to insure that the scientific personnel, training, and research
facilities of the Nation are used most effectively in the national
interest.
Bush was a statutory member of the board in his
capacity as OSRD Director, but took little or no part in
its deliberations and dismissed its efforts will ill-concealed contempt on the
grounds that Steelman (who had a Ph.D. in economics and had been a university
professor prior to joining the government as a labor relations specialist during
the late Roosevelt years) had no understanding of science. No doubt Bush, who
had enjoyed easy access to Roosevelt, was also piqued by his exclusion from the
inner circles of the Truman White House. Steelman, in contrast, was becoming
increasingly influential. With the liquidation of the emergency Office of War
Mobilization and Reconversion in December 1946, he was designated The Assistant
to the President, in effect the first White House chief of staff.
But more than personal pique was involved. The
thrust of Bush’s Science—the Endless
Frontier was that support for basic research in universities ought to
be the central focus of science policy; the Steelman board regarded university
research support as just one aspect of a more complex situation. Science—the Endless Frontier was based on the
reports from four committees of non-government scientists; the Steelman board
was composed entirely of government officials. Bush and the scientific
establishment also suspected that the Steelman board wanted to preempt military
domination of post-war science policy, and that it was expected “to promote the
right kind of science foundation.”
Despite the distaste of scientific elders for
the Steelman exercise, the resulting five-volume report, entitled Science and Public Policy and commonly referred to
as the Steelman report, ranks as a seminal achievement. A Program for the Nation, its first volume, was
transmitted to the president on August 27, 1947, exactly three weeks after his
pocket veto of the National Science Foundation Act of 1947. Its
principal recommendation was to nearly double the national (federal, plus
industry and other sources) R&D budget to approximately $2.1 billion
annually by 1957 through a “planned program of expansion” that would require
greater increases in public than in private spending. Thenceforth, federal
R&D expenditures should be equal to at least one percent of Gross National
Product (GNP).
In contrast to the Bush report, which based its
few cost estimates on prewar basic research expenditures, the Steelman report
explicitly recognized a link between R&D expenditures and national
income. It also set explicit 1957 distribution targets
by sector: 20 percent for basic research, 14 percent for health and medicine, 44
percent for non-military development, and 22 percent for military development.
The report included charts which extrapolated desired federal R&D
expenditures through 1957 and the desired numbers of scientists through that
same year.
The Bush report had recommended strengthening
federal non-defense applied research programs, but paid little attention to the
entire government system. In contrast, the Steelman report recognized the
growing complexity and influence of the federal scientific enterprise on the
entire national effort: “The Federal program for scientific research and
development exerts its influence in many major areas, and it is a direct
influence not only upon the scientific activities of the country as a whole, but
upon the national economy. Its very scope makes the formulation of policy and
administration difficult, and its operation within the structure of the Federal
Government raises questions of balance in its programs.”
In order to increase the effectiveness of the
federal effort, the report recommended that: “A central point of liaison among
the major research agencies to assure the maximum interchange of
information...must be provided…. There must be a single point close to the
President at which the most significant problems created in the research and
development program of the Nation as a whole can be brought into policy
discussions.”
Science—the Endless
Frontier and A Program for the
Nation were in accord in singling out basic research as the principal
area for concerted federal action. Indeed, the latter report recommended that
the largest percentage increases in federal expenditures during the next decade
should be in that area. (In contrast, it recommended that expenditures for
military development ought to increase more slowly than for other sectors.) Much
of its rhetorical justification for government research support was reminiscent
of Science—the Endless Frontier, and no
doubt drew upon it for inspiration. More concretely, A Program for the Nation proposed creation of a
National Science Foundation that would have been more munificently endowed than
Bush proposed. It was also considerably
bolder in recommending “a program of Federal assistance to universities and
colleges...in the matters of laboratory facilities and scientific
equipment," and by
asserting the need “to assist in the reconstruction of European laboratories “as
a part of our program of aid to peace-loving countries.”
Despite its unequivocal endorsement of
government support for basic research and its broader concept of the scope and
authority of a National Science Foundation, the report drew the ire of the
scientific establishment by recommending that the foundation be headed by a
presidentially appointed director “assisted by a part-time advisory board of
distinguished scientists and educators similarly appointed.” Half the members of the advisory
board would have been drawn from within government and half from outside.
Moreover, it recommended that the foundation be established within the Executive
Office of the President (EoP) rather than as an independent agency. Indeed,
there was some sentiment on the Steelman board that the president should simply
establish a National Science Foundation within the executive office by means of
an executive order rather than having to rely on the congress to create the
organization. Since the report’s
recommendations were also opposed by the military and by conservative
congressmen opposed to central planning, it went nowhere. (It is interesting to
note, however, that actual R&D expenditures through the 1950s far exceeded
the report’s targets.)
On September 13, 1948, President Truman
addressed the centennial anniversary meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS). In history’s first public presidential speech calling
for a national science policy, Truman suggested that it be based on five key
Steelman recommendations:
First, we should
double our total public and private allocations of funds to the sciences….
Second, greater
emphasis should be placed on basic research and on medical research.
Third, a National
Science Foundation should be established.
Fourth, more aid
should be granted to the universities, both for student scholarships and for
research.
Fifth, the work of the
research agencies of the Federal Government should be better financed and
coordinated.
Scientists have long regarded international
communication and cooperation as essential to the advancement of science. In the
immediate aftermath of World War I, several international scientific unions were
created, including the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP)
and the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Almost always, national
academies of sciences became the adhering bodies to these organizations. In the
early 1930s, the existing scientific unions created an umbrella organization,
the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). By the end of the
twentieth century, approximately forty disciplinary scientific unions had been
created under the umbrella of what had come to be called the International
Council of Science.
Since the end of late 1940s, the U.S.
government, along with Europe, Japan, China, and India, has regarded science as
a significant part of international relations. Even prior to World War II, there
was some advocacy for federal support for international scientific activities.
Relation of the Federal Government to Research
recommended: “International cooperation in scientific research now
exists on a large scale. It could be encouraged to the great advantage of the
Nation if the Federal Government would adopt the practice which is common among
the Governments of other nations of according official recognition and, wherever
necessary, financial support to international gatherings of scientists.”
Science—the Endless
Frontier also provided a rationale for federal support of
international science:
International exchange of scientific information is of growing
importance. Increasing specialization of science will make it more important
than ever that scientists in this country keep continually abreast of
developments abroad. In addition, a flow of scientific information constitutes
one facet of general international accord which should be cultivated.
The Government can
accomplish significant results in several ways: by adding in the arrangement of
scientific congresses, in the official accrediting of American scientists to
such gatherings, in the official reception of foreign scientists of standing in
this country, in making possible a rapid flow of technical information,
including translation service, and possibly in the provision of international
fellowships. Private foundations and other groups partially fulfill some of
these functions at present, but their scope is incomplete and
inadequate.
The most significant attempt at international
scientific cooperation was the Baruch Plan, presented to the United National
Atomic Energy Commission on June 14, 1946, by Bernard Baruch, a New York
financier and informal advisor to the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. The
plan was drafted under the auspices of a committee headed by David Lilienthal,
Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and a small group of scientists
headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer. It proposed worldwide sharing of nuclear
technologies and strict sanctions against uncooperative nations.
Specifically:
The [International Atomic
Energy] Commission
shall proceed with the utmost despatch and enquire into all phases of the
problem, and make such recommendations from time to time with respect to them as
it finds possible. In particular the Commission shall make specific proposals:
-
For extending between all nations the exchange of basic scientific
information for peaceful ends;
-
For control of atomic energy to the extent necessary to ensure its use
only for peaceful purposes;
-
For the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of
all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction;
-
For effective safeguards by way of inspection and other means to
protect complying States against the hazards of violations and evasions.
With the Soviet Union’s rejection, the Baruch
Plan died.
Relation of the
Federal Government to Research and Science
—the Endless Frontier both recommended that the federal government
support US scientists’ travel to scientific meetings abroad. The Steelman report
went considerably further, suggesting that science could be an effective tool of
diplomacy, and recommending:
US scientists should be supported by the federal government to
travel to European research facilities to assist in restoring the viability of
those facilities which had been devastated by World War II;
The federal government
should support foreign students to study science and engineering in US
universities;
The federal government
should assign competent scientists to its principal foreign embassies;
and
The United States be
prepared to cooperate in scientific research with non-European countries,
including specifically Japan, China, and India as the developed their scientific
resources and talent—and also be cognizant of the competition that this would
entail.
The Steelman report was transmitted to
President Truman two months after announcement of the Marshall Plan, and thus
was consistent with the administration’s vision of international cooperation.
The Steelman Report’s premise that formulation
of national science policy ought to proceed from an analysis of national
resources and objectives also reflected the perspective of the Bureau of the
Budget (BoB), whose influence on science policy became more pronounced during
the five-year National Science Foundation debate. Harold Smith, who served as
BoB Director from May 1939 to June 1946, regarded the agency as the principal
institutional guardian of policy. Accordingly, he sought to provide the president
with sound advice on pending legislative proposals based on careful and
objective staff work. As a result, Smith succeeded in building within the BoB
the capability of analyzing executive and congressional proposals for their
consistency both with administrative policies and the long-term, constitutional
and institutional prerogatives of the presidency.
By late 1943, it was becoming clear to Smith
that the federal government would be more extensively involved with science
during the postwar era. The role of the BoB would be to assure that any expanded
scientific responsibilities would be integrated into the federal structure in
accordance with sound principles of administrative management, including the
preservation of presidential authority. Transformation of wartime government
research installations to peacetime uses would obviously require advanced
planning. Accordingly, Don K. Price, a protégé of Louis Brownlow’s who was
detailed to the BoB from the Coast Guard and who was dispatched in 1944 to
familiarize himself with the Manhattan Project installations, became the
principal advocate within the BoB for civilian control of atomic
energy.
In 1944, Smith grew wary of the Research Board
for National Security (RBNS) on the grounds that it would be too far removed
from presidential control. He therefore took steps to assure that it would be quietly
starved of funds. Later, he convinced Truman to withhold support for a measure
introduced by Senator Harry S. Byrd (D-VA) to establish the RBNS as an
independent agency on the grounds that federal science policy ought to be
implemented coherently rather than piecemeal. In 1945 testimony before a Senate committee, Smith said, “The
President, and the Bureau of the Budget in his Executive Office, need scientific
advice… The proposed foundation can fulfill a valuable function in supplying
such advice. It will need to be given…authority to call on the scientific
bureaus of the Government for information, and the duty of making
recommendations to the department heads and the president on their
programs.”
He also asserted, with respect to the
organization and management of the foundation, “I feel it is my duty to keep the
scientists from making a mistake in the field of public administration… An
agency which is to control the spending of public funds in a great national
program must be part of the regular machinery of government. If the Government
is to support scientific research, it should do so through its own responsible
agencies, not be delegating the control of the program and turning over the
funds to any non-governmental organization.”
The tension between the BoB’s desire to
establish a National Science Foundation as an essential component of the federal
scientific enterprise and its concern for administrative conformity and
presidential prerogatives persisted. Because of those concerns, the BoB remained
closely involved in attempting to shape successive versions of NSF legislation
to meet the demands of the scientific establishment, the shifting congressional
leadership, and the administration itself. William D. Carey, who had come to the
BoB in 1942 from Harvard’s Littauer School of Government and had been assigned
to help organize the Atomic Energy Commission in 1946, emerged as the principal
advocate, within the BoB, for a National Science Foundation. Possibly because of
his closer association with senior scientists such as Bush and Conant on the
matter of the AEC, Carey did not share his colleagues’ concern over the
presidential control issue. Rather, he considered the NSF Act of 1947 workable
from BoB’s perspective, despite the fact that control was to be vested in a
part-time, presidentially-appointed board rather than the president himself. For
that reason, he vigorously (though privately) dissented from BoB’s advice that
President Truman veto the National Science Foundation Act of 1947.
Despite its decisive intervention in killing
the 1947 legislation, the BoB remained committed to establishing a National
Science Foundation. Over the next three years, Carey and Elmer Staats, among
others, played important roles in negotiating successive compromises that
ultimately paved the way for the National Science Foundation Act of 1950. During
those years, close and enduring relations were established between the BoB and
the broadly based scientific communities, particularly through the Intersociety
Committee for a National Science Foundation.
By 1950, largely through the efforts of Staats
and Carey, BoB had become the principal advocate for science within government,
as well as guardian of such scientific prerogatives as autonomy and open
communication, and such constitutional imperatives as presidential and
congressional responsibility and accountability. The BoB assumed that role
largely by default. In 1947, the Steelman report had recommended, “The Bureau
should…continue to take initiative in the allocation of research functions among
Executive agencies. The organization of the Bureau should be strengthened for a
more effective performance of this function and to provide the Bureau with a
means of taking an overall view of the research and development
programs.”
However, the report also noted, “The Bureau of
the Budget is not and should not be charged with the task of developing a broad
scientific research program for the nation.” That task, presumably, would fall
within the purview of a National Science Foundation. But two years later there
still was no National Science Foundation, and the BoB was reluctantly filling
the resulting void.
BoB did not assume an activist role on behalf
of science and government solely to achieve a workable arrangement through which
government could support research in universities. From the outset, it sought to
incorporate into the NSF responsibility for other functions envisioned by
Science—the Endless Frontier, particularly
coordination of “research programs on matters of utmost importance to the
national welfare,” and formulation of “a national policy for the Government
toward science.”
As President Truman recognized explicitly when
he created the Steelman board, it was becoming clear as early as 1946 that
government would be involved with science through a multiplicity of agencies,
including such new ones as the ONR and AEC, expanded programs in old-line
agencies such as the Department of Agriculture and National Bureau of Standards,
the rapidly expanding National Institutes of Health, and a National Science
Foundation.
By that time, the BoB had also become
sufficiently converted to the principal arguments of Science—the Endless Frontier to concede that
relations between science and government could prosper only if it sought advice
and guidance from non-governmental scientific leadership on how to effect
discipline within the de facto federal
R&D budget and coherence within the
federal research establishment. In the opinion of Carey and his colleagues, the
twenty-four–member National Science Board would be the obvious entity to help in
the promised formulation of a “national policy of the Government toward science”
as envisioned by Science—the Endless
Frontier.
The BoB may have assumed that, having taken a
strong initiative to create a foundation that would support scientific research
in a manner that would preserve a large measure of scientific autonomy, the
National Science Foundation (particularly the National Science Board) would in
turn provide direct, continuous assistance in helping coordinate the
proliferating federal science and technology enterprise. But it was destined for
disappointment, in part because the outbreak of the Korean War six weeks after
presidential approval of the National Science Foundation Act radically changed
the science policy environment in the United States. Even after 1953, when a
truce had been established in Korea, Alan T. Waterman, the first NSF Director,
declined to have the National Science Board exercise its congressionally
mandated authority to oversee and evaluate R&D programs in agencies other
than the NSF. A skillful Washington bureaucrat, Waterman feared that
the still-small agency he headed would be crushed by the larger, more
established federal R&D organizations. On March 17, 1954, President Dwight
Eisenhower issued an executive order, drafted by Carey, directing the National
Science Board to carry out its congressionally mandated oversight and evaluation
responsibilities. Waterman and the board managed to ignore this as well.
