In order to strengthen the National Science Foundation's procedures
for prioritizing, approving, funding, and constructing major research
facilities and equipment, a committee of the National Research Council
recommends that NSF should seek greater involvement of the science community
to develop a clearer, more transparent set of criteria for large facility
projects, prepare a 10-20 year roadmap to guide the funding and construction
of such facilities, and implement external as well as internal oversight
of projects. "Large-research-facility projects have become too
complex, expensive, and numerous to handle with procedures that may
have sufficed in the past," the Committee on Setting Priorities
for NSF-Sponsored Large Research Facility Projects says in its report.
In addition, the committee found that "a number of concerns have
been expressed by policy-makers and researchers about the process used
to rank large-research-facility projects for funding," including
a backlog of approved but unfunded projects, selection criteria that
"have not been clearly and publicly articulated," and a lack
of funding for idea-generation, conceptual development, planning and
design activities.
Such concerns over NSF's ability to manage projects in its Major Research
Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) account prompted Senators
Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Christopher Bond (R-MO), Ernest Hollings (D-SC),
John McCain (R-AZ), Edward Kennedy (D-MA), and Judd Gregg (R-NH) to
call on the National Academies to review NSF's large-facility prioritization
process, a request that was also included in the 2002 NSF Authorization
Act. Based upon its review, the committee "concluded that although
NSF has improved its process for setting priorities among large-facility
projects, further strengthening is needed, if NSF is to meet the demands
that will be made of it in the future."
The committee's primary recommendation is that, with oversight by the
National Science Board (NSB) and substantial input from the science
community, NSF produce a roadmap ranking large facility projects being
considered for construction within 10-20 years, which would be used
in the preparation of annual budget requests and revised every three
to five years. The committee proposes that NSF use a three-tiered bottom-up
system of criteria for project prioritization: scientific and technical
merit criteria should guide project rankings within a field; agency
strategic criteria, such as balance across fields and potential to impact
several fields, should guide rankings across related fields; and national
criteria, such as U.S. leadership in key fields and workforce education
and training, should guide rankings across all fields. At the January
14 release of the report, committee chairman William Brinkman of Princeton
University emphasized that S&T quality must be at the core of all
the criteria, that projects currently under construction must receive
a high priority, and that, as the roadmap would be a dynamic document
and budget projections are likely to change from year to year, a project's
appearance on the roadmap was not a guarantee of funding. He reported
that the committee consulted closely with OSTP Director John Marburger
during its deliberations, and was briefed by DOE Office of Science Director
Ray Orbach on his efforts to develop a 20-year facilities roadmap for
large DOE science projects.
Additionally, the committee recommended that NSF enhance project pre-approval
planning and budgeting; that each project be reviewed by both internal
and external experts; that OSTP have an early role in coordinating roadmaps
across S&T agencies and with other countries, and that, given congressional
interest in this issue, NSF and NSB "give careful attention to
the implementation of reforms in the MREFC account." The committee's
report lays out a six-step process to implement its recommendations.
The report, "Setting Priorities for Large Research Facility
Projects Supported by the National Science Foundation," is
currently available in prepublication form at the following web site:
http://www7.nationalacademies.org/NSF-Priorities/.
The body of the report runs approximately 32 pages.
As the facilities required for many fields of science become increasingly
sophisticated and expensive, policymakers are recognizing a greater
need for prioritization and coordination across disciplines, across
federal agencies, and even internationally. Within OSTP, "we're
asking...how do we start to make sense of this bigger picture?"
reported an OSTP official to a scientific advisory committee last summer.
He warned that, without such coordinated planning, "we are in danger
of saturating our available budgets with low priority, redundant, and
uncoordinated activities" (see FYI
#106, 2003).
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