0.12 The bush-41 years: 1989-93  (Page 5/8)

Working with Richard Darman, Bromley tried to fashion a series of coherent federal R&D budgets that would visibly manifest a coherent federal science policy. However, the congressional budget process, inwhich various different committees deal with budget requests from different R&D agencies, tends to frustrate attempts at coherence. Bromley lamented this “balkanization” of Congress. Bromley, op. cit ., 84, 87. More than once, he and Darman suggested that joint hearings on the R&D budget be held before several House and, later, Senate appropriations committees. This requestwas granted only once: for hearings on administration proposals for mathematics and science education. Advancing Innovation , op. cit. , 38.

Pcast

Early during his administration, Bush asked Bromley to draw up a list of nominees for a new body that would be called thePresident’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), to distinguish it from the long-defunct PSAC. Ibid., 91-92. PCAST consisted of twelve members who did not require Senate confirmation. The members included six representatives from universities, fourfrom industry, one from a nonprofit organization, and one from the Smithsonian Institution. Ibid., 261-62. There were engineers, two physicists, two chemists, two biologists, one ecologist, onephysician, one mathematician, one geologist, and one economist. Only two were women.

Most PCAST reports were meant for the president and his senior advisors and were therefore not made public. However, in December1992, Bush agreed to make public all PCAST reports completed during that year. These included:

• Achieving the Promise of the Biosciences Revolution: the Role of the Federal Government ;
• High Performance Computing and Communications Report ;
• LEARNING to meet the Science and Technology Challenge ;
• Megaprojects in the Sciences ;
• Science, Technology, and National Security and the American Standard of Living ; and
• Renewing the Promise: Research-Intensive Universities and the Nation. Ibid., 97-98.

Bromley later regretted that a draft PCAST report on world population had never been forwarded to the president because ofpolitical contentiousness on the issue.

Fccset

Bromley recognized that FCCSET needed to become an effective tool of governance if his goal of revitalizing the entirepresidential science advisory system was to be realized. Bromley, op. cit ., 61-62. Accordingly, he insisted that the heads of the relevant federal organizations attend FCCSET meetings in person. In reasonably shortorder, the membership agreed upon a set of cross-agency initiatives for FCCSET to explore in depth:

• Global Change;
• High Performance Computers and Communications;
• Advanced Materials Science and Processing;
• Biotechnology;
• Mathematics and Science Education;
• Advanced Manufacturing.

FCCSET subcommittees were formed to explore these initiatives, several of which—starting with global change research in fiscalyear 1991—resulted in cross-agency budget initiatives.

During a September 2000 panel discussion after he had returned to Yale, despite some skepticism, Bromley maintained that FCCSET hadfunctioned effectively during his tenure. The one federal organization that had failed to take its FCCSET responsibilities seriously, according to Bromley, wasthe Department of State, quite probably because State lacked any significant budget for science and technology and therefore had no stake in any of thecross-agency budget proposals that FCCSET and its subcommittees initiated. The State Department’s failure to recognize what Bromley believed was the vitalimportance of science as a tool for international diplomacy may also have reflected a reluctance of other FCCSET members to follow his lead. Advancing Innovation , op. cit ., 42.