From the Floor: Selections from House Debate on Science Bill

As explained in FYI #150, the House passed and sent to the Senate H.R. 2405, the Omnibus Civilian Science Authorization Act of 1995. The following remarks by House Science Committee Ranking Minority Member George Brown (D-CA), House Science Chairman Robert Walker (D-PA), and two other representatives, provide a sense of the range of opinions expressed by the bill’s proponents and opponents:

GEORGE BROWN:

”...the policies in this bill will have an impact in every district in this Nation. H.R. 2405 reflects the Republican budget resolution, which reverses the policies of the last 50 years that have made the United States the undisputed world leader in science and technology. H.R. 2405 is another step in the most massive disinvestment of Federal support for research and technology since the end of World War II.”

“The individual members of the committee have little if any input into the fundamental policy decisions, most of which were made prior to any committee consideration. The chairman arbitrarily limited the committee scope of action and merely asked them to ratify decisions already made. Whether the chairman’s increased leverage over the appropriation process will be worth the loss of a collegial and democratic process at the Committee on Science level remains to be judged by history.”

“The distinction between basic and applied research is, of course, convenient for budget cutting purposes but it is meaningless as a public policy and reveals a profound lack of understanding on the part of the Republicans of what basic research really is and how basic and applied research is related.”

“The decisions that have been presented to us by this bill have nothing to do with whether science is good or science is bad, but whether it passes the ideological litmus test of the Republican leadership.”

ROBERT WALKER:

“To suggest that somehow this bill is diminishing the work of science I think does not reflect reality. In fact, it gets almost humorous when you look at the fact that we are dealing with the broad base of science for the first time. For the first time in the history of the House, we are dealing with the broad base of science as a comprehensive kind of program.”

“The chairman of the Committee on Science cannot act without a majority of the members of the committee being with him, unlike the old days, when the gentleman’s [Brown] party ran the Committee on Science and ran the Congress, we operated with a proxy system where the chairman would sit there and vote other people’s votes along the way, and would determine the course of policy by the use of an abhorrent system called proxy voting.”

“By eliminating corporate subsidies and low-priority programs, and streamlining the bureaucracy, we have been able to increase funding for life sciences research, basic energy sciences, and high energy and nuclear physics.... In the area of technology, we have reasserted our strong commitment to the priority of the core scientific work of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, yet another example of where we have been able to refocus an agency to its primary mission.”

”...it is high time that we stop the Fortune 500 companies from coming in here and getting the Government to do the things that they could spend their own money on.... We support basic research; that is what needs to be done.”

JOHN TANNER (D-TN):

“This bill provides no authorization and no funding for the Advanced Technology Program and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership at NIST. The elimination of these two programs sends the strongest signal possible to our business community that we simply do not care about the harsh realities they face today. It is a matter of fact that corporate research focus today is short-term and risk-averse and our small and medium-sized manufacturers in this country face international competition on every street corner in America.”

STEVEN SCHIFF (R-NM):

“It is important to state here that the science community needs to recognize that the majority in both the House and the Senate, are supportive of basic research. Members understand that basic research is essential, that it is an appropriate Federal activity, and that it is an economic driver. The Science Committee is acutely aware of the importance of basic research, and so worked to preserve funding even as other Federal programs have been cut to meet aggregate budget requirements.”