0.10 Resurrection? 1974-76

The government has gone through decades of ad hoc situations, arrangements regarding science and technology that have not been based on any firm policy but have responded merely to current crisis. The result has been a marked inconsistency in utility and effect. In some cases things have worked well; at other times they have worked poorly.

—Legislative History of the OSTP Act, 1977

The ostp act

On May 11, 1976, President Gerald Ford signed into law the National Science and Technology Policy, Organization, and Priorities Act of 1976 (PL 94-282, often referred to as the OSTP or Science Policy Act). Public Law 94-282, 90 Stat. 459. An attempt at major reform, the act articulated guidelines for a national science policy; established the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) within the Executive Office of the President; designated the OSTP director as science advisor to the President; provided for a President’s Council on Science and Technology (PCST) and a federal science and technology survey; and vested, in OSTP, several specific functions intended to ensure a more coherent presidential approach to national science policy.

The act represents the most comprehensive attempt ever undertaken by the federal government to formulate a national science policy. Congress envisioned using science both for the public good and as a tool for governance. Notably, the new law eliminated responsibility for defense-related science policy from the OSTP’s portfolio, although that had been included in an earlier Senate version of the act.

The new law was the culmination of almost three years of congressional and executive attempts to restore the direct access of science to the president that Nixon had terminated in 1973. Congress hoped once and for all to end the ad hoc approach to science policy that had been a consistent feature of federal behavior for nearly all the nation’s history.

Passage of the act came after three years of strenuous effort to undo the damage Nixon had done. In July 1973, thirteen months prior to Nixon’s resignation, the House Committee on Science and Technology, at the initiative of chairman Olin Teague (D-TX) and the strong support of Republican Charles Mosher (R-OH), the ranking minority member, began holding hearings on federal planning, policy, and organization for science. U.S. Senate, Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and the Committee on Human Resources, A Legislative History of the National Science and Technology Policy, Organization, and Priorities Act of 1976 , 95 ^th Congress, 1 ^st session, April 1977, 883-84. Nixon’s elimination of the science advisory system gave the committee license to range more freely over the matter of federal organization, policy, and planning for science.

Witnesses during the first phase of hearings were primarily government or former government officials. They included H. Guyford Stever (NSF director and science advisor to Nixon); his senior staff members; seven members of the National Science Board; Edward David, Jr., the last White House science advisor; and William D. Carey, formerly a presidential-level appointment in the Bureau of the Budget during the Johnson administration and future Executive Officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).