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Pcast

When Bush announced his twenty-two candidates for PCAST membership in December 2001, the list included only one working scientist, with more than half coming from industry and many having served under Bush’s father. “Sciencescope,” Science (December 21, 2001), 2455. According to Marburger, the “dearth of scientific expertise is deliberate…. The goal is to get advice from leadership in higher education and industry and not necessarily at the scientific level.”

During the Bush administration, PCAST issued considerably fewer public reports than its Clinton administration predecessor. These reports were:

  • Maximizing the Contribution of Science and Technology within the Department of Homeland Security
  • Assessing U.S. R&D Investment
  • Building Out Broadband
  • Technology Transfer
  • The S&T of Combating Terrorism
  • IT Manufacturing and Competitiveness
  • Science and Engineering Capabilities
  • S&T Collaboration: Ideas for Enhancing European-American Cooperation
  • Federal State Cooperation: Improving the Likelihood of Success
  • The National Nanotechnology Initiative at Five Years: Assessment and Recommendations of the National Nanotechnology Advisory Panel
  • The Energy Imperative: Technology and the Role of Emerging Companies
  • Federal Networking and Information Technology R&D (NITRD) Program Review
  • The National Nanotechnology Initiative: Second Assessment and Recommendations of the National Nanotechnology Advisory Panel. (External Link) .

Nstc

The National Science and Technology Council continued to meet regularly with the same federal organizations as it had during the Clinton administration, and continued the practice of ignoring Allan Bromley’s wish that only principals attend. Most of the NTSC’s business was conducted by standing committees consisting of lower-level member agency staff. (External Link) . The nine committees under Clinton were reduced to four under Bush: Environment and Natural Resources, Homeland and National Security, Science, and Technology.

Science and international relations

With the exception of a nuclear treaty with India allowing that country to buy civilian nuclear technology from the U.S. and other countries, the Bush administration made scant use of science as an instrument of foreign policy. This appears now to have been part of a general, if unstated, Bush administration policy of downplaying the importance of science in government.

Assessment

Although Bush did try to increase the budgets of the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Department of Energy, few of his requests survived the congressional appropriations process. And outside of these budget initiatives, his administration has been criticized for muzzling administration scientists who opposed administration ideology, and for doctoring official reports. Although specialists have long recognized that science can and should be only one factor that policymakers consider in coming to a decision, the Bush administration was probably the first in American history to distort rather than simply to marginalize science as an instrument of governance. Bush himself, for example, while not openly advocating creationism, did suggest the legitimacy of teaching intelligent design along with evolution in high school biology classes. He forbade the use of federal funds to harvest embryonic stem cells beyond the lines available when he announced his decision. Perhaps most famously, he persistently ignored mounting evidence for human contributions to global warming, and worldwide calls for action to reduce carbon emissions.

Regardless of some R&D budget increases, the Bush administration’s attitudes toward science during its eight years would most likely be regarded as among the darkest in recent memory. Chris Mooney has argued that Bush’s adversarial stance towards science is nothing particularly new, since right-wing Republican attacks on science go back as far as the New Deal, and intensified during the Nixon and Reagan administrations. Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2005). Even so, it appears that Bush was the most eager presidential recruit for the far right’s “war on science.”

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Source:  OpenStax, A history of federal science policy from the new deal to the present. OpenStax CNX. Jun 26, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11210/1.2
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