Last week, the New York Times published a fascinating article on what it is that presidential science advisors actually do. Officially, the hook was that the confirmation hearings for Eric Lander, President Biden’s nominee for science advisor, have finally begun (and have been surprisingly feisty). But the timing seems mainly to have been a prompt for the Times to muse on the relationship between the president’s science advisor and science policy, writ large.
As the story notes and you’ve heard from me before, federal funding levels for science have become somewhat detached from presidential authority. Under Trump, funding for the federal science agencies actually increased, despite the administration’s general hostility toward scientific research. More recently, the Senate and the House are dickering over competing science bills, the Endless Frontier Act and the National Science Foundation for the Future Act, each designed to boost research funding for the NSF. And meanwhile, even without a confirmed science advisor, the Biden administration has already made several key science-related announcements, including the decision to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement. Also: Half the country has been vaccinated.
So, the article asks, if all of this is happening without a science advisor, do science advisors actually matter for science policy?
Of course they do!
First of all, Biden has an active Office of Science and Technology Policy. It just doesn’t have an official, confirmed director—yet. But perhaps more importantly, the focus on funding requests as a proxy for science policy is a category error, because science policy is so much more than research policy. And besides, Congress holds the powers of the purse.
For a “presidential style” of science policy, the real action is in the executive functions—the staffing and rule-making of the various executive agencies that carry out the day-to-day work of government, as well as from the policymaking bodies within the White House that set the agenda for the rest of government. In science and technology policy, you see this particularly in the use of executive orders, in administrative rule-making, and the make-up of science advisory boards. The role of the science advisor is to set the tone.
In part because of the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the public discussion of the Trump administration’s science policies focused on its active rejection of scientific consensus. I would argue the more consistent effect was simply to create a vacuum anywhere that there should have been scientific information. This was more than an issue simply of understaffing OSTP and failing to appoint a science advisor for two years; by the time the pandemic broke, career scientists had left federal agencies in droves. Other policies, like the EPA’s so-called Transparency Rule, made it harder for federal agencies to incorporate independent scientific data or for credentialed scientists to serve on advisory boards. The cumulative effect of all of this wasn’t so much to overrule or interfere with scientific findings—although that did sometimes happen—but rather to eliminate scientific expertise on any number of topics from federal policymaking altogether.
Biden, with his campaign refrain of “Listen to the scientists,” obviously had a different approach in mind. Back in October, I wondered what that meant. Would this be about “trusting science” or “being guided by science”? Three months in, it seems fairly clear that the Biden administration sees scientific expertise as necessary, but not sufficient, for decision-making in a democracy. That’s good!
This approach also may help explain what might otherwise appear to be a lack of urgency about the science advisor confirmation hearings. Generally speaking, an approach that emphasizes taking scientists’ advice into account, rather than as fiat, also recognizes that no one scientist is going to know everything. Lander himself is a geneticist. Alondra Nelson, OSTP’s Deputy Director for Science and Society, is a sociologist. Jane Lubchenko, OSTP’s Deputy Director for Climate and Environment, is an environmental scientist and marine ecologist. None of them can, would, or should pretend to be experts on all scientific and technological disciplines.
And that brings us back to “scientific integrity.” Recall that, back in January, Biden issued an executive memorandum with the unwieldy title of “Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking.” Among other things, the memo outlined procedures to rebuild science advisory boards and established an interagency task force to “conduct a thorough review of the effectiveness of agency scientific-integrity policies.” One of the things that I find most interesting about this process is that it’s not meant to just be a fact-finding operation about what happened with science under the Trump administration, but rather an opportunity to explore what “scientific integrity” means in the first place.
In any case, the task force is now up and running. The letter announcing its establishment, issued in late March, states that the body will focus on four key points:
- Preventing “improper political interference”
- Preventing the “suppression or distortion” of scientific and technological findings
- Supporting researchers of all genders, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds—diversity initiatives
- Ensuring an equitable delivery of federal programs—thinking about the impact, not just intent, of programs involving science
Congress handles the money. If you want to know what science policy looks like under Biden, keep an eye on this task force.