By James Pethokoukis and Tony
Mills

Early
in his presidency, Joe Biden promised to be a leader on science policy with
proposals for new advanced research projects agencies centering on biomedical
and climate research. And now, working their way through Congress are two bills
designed to boost federal support for scientific research, the America COMPETES
Act and US Innovation and Competition Act. To learn more about those bills and
to get a better idea of how federal science programs should be designed, I
invited Tony Mills on Political Economy.

Tony is
a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies the
federal government’s role in scientific research and innovation, as well
as how to integrate scientific expertise into our governing institutions.

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You can read our full discussion here. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.

Pethokoukis: Is
the United States about to embark upon a great period of federal science
research?

Mills:
That’s a good question. To a certain extent, it requires predicting political
events, which is a hazardous game. I think if we back up a little bit, what we
can say is there was this push—it really picked up in 2020, interestingly
before COVID really took off. The best example of this was the Endless Frontier
Act. It was very ambitious, and among its ambitious proposals was a $100
billion investment in the National Science Foundation and a considerable
reorganization of that agency. Fast forward to today, that bill passed the
Senate, but it is currently still being negotiated with the House.

What
happened in the meantime is the House introduced its own version of this bill. That’s
kind of still where we are. It looks like Congress is hoping to pass something
by this summer. It could turn out that a version of this bill will in fact
pass, but it’s a very different kind of bill than what was originally
introduced. It’s also considerably less ambitious in terms of its budgetary
targets.

Other than
increasing funding, how would the current proposals change federal science support?

The
NSF traditionally is the agency that funds basic scientific research. It’s the
only agency in the federal government whose sole mission really is to do that. One
of the issues that was hotly debated in the lead up to the creation of the NSF
was how to allocate federal funding. Should it be allocated meritocratically—give
the federal spending to the best science, the best institutions—or should it be
distributed geographically? The meritocratic view more or less won out in 1950,
and the NSF has essentially operated in some version of that.

What’s
interesting about the Endless Frontier Act is that its two central pillars were
the contradiction of both of those things. It was a geography-based innovation
program in which they proposed a regional tech hub program to try to build up
innovation in areas that are traditionally less competitive in science and
technology. The other was this tech directorate, which would be keyed into
strategic areas of technology. What’s notable about this is that this would be
quite a change for the NSF, right? Not only in terms of its budget, which is
under $10 billion. (The original proposal was $100 billion and it would all go
to this new directorate.)

I often hear things like,
“Well, we should do a super DARPA. That’s how America should do its
science R&D.” Is that how we should do science research in the US?

A
lot of people have asked, “Well, why don’t we imitate DARPA in other
areas?” We actually have done that. There is an ARPA-E in the Department
of Energy, for example, modeled on DARPA. One of the motivations behind the tech
directorate in the Endless Frontier Act was to create a DARPA-like entity
within NSF. There have been proposals for a health ARPA, ARPA-H, which has
recently become reality.

It’s
a successful model in a lot of ways, but it shouldn’t be confused with
scientific research. It’s really more of a way of organizing technology research.
Now, is it applicable to every domain? I think that you have to go case by case.
People like DARPA and they want to imitate it, but DARPA exists, it’s still
doing what it does, right? A lot of the breakthrough technologies that it has
helped give rise to—from GPS to the internet—that wasn’t really the intention.
The intention was to develop technologies that were useful for the military. In
a sense, by trying to imitate DARPA to do a predetermined outcome, you’re kind
of not doing what DARPA does, in a way. I think that there’s a lot of excitement
about that idea, but in practice I’m a little bit more lukewarm about whether
it would actually be effective.

Should we change the incentives or
the way we fund scientific research?

Yes.
The established way of funding science research is to evaluate the merits of a
proposal using a peer review system. You get people in the relevant fields to
look at it and decide, “Does this look promising or not?” I think
peer review is actually very, very important. Whether it’s the most effective
way for the federal government to allocate its research funding is a different
question.

The
Senate bill mentions almost nothing about any of these kinds of metascience
questions. There’s some discussion of replication in the House bill. It’s
pretty limited. It’s mostly in the computer science field. To me, this is very
unfortunate because there are longstanding debates and lots of scholarship on
these questions that we could be drawing on in thinking about ways to reform
our scientific institutions.

Do you think the current push for
expanding federal investment is a singular moment and we’ll be on cruise
control after this moment? Or do you think, because of concerns about long-term
economic growth and geopolitical concerns about China, that this is the
beginning of a period of ramping up science?

I
don’t know. There is kind of a perfect storm of forces that incentivize people
in Congress to want to increase federal R&D spending. Federal R&D
spending always goes up. The question is, where is it going up how much? What I
don’t think is likely is a fundamental shift whereby the federal government
becomes the principal funder of R&D. That was the case in the postwar
decades. The high point was 1964 when I believe it was close to 70 percent of
all US R&D spending was federal government. It’s basically flipped now, with
the private sector taking the lead.

The private sector tends to be more interested in applied research and development by a lot. That has skewed the overall priorities of the US R&D system. Will it flip back the other way? That seems very unlikely because the numbers would be really quite staggering. I think we are in a moment where there is this bipartisan appetite. I don’t know how long it will last, but I’m skeptical that it will fundamentally change the current R&D system.

The post 5 Questions for Tony Mills on Federal Science Policy appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.