By Scott Burris
Here’s where some in Congress would like us to go:
ScienceInsider reports:
The new chair of the House of Representatives science committee has drafted a bill that, in effect, would replace peer review at the National Science Foundation (NSF) with a set of funding criteria chosen by Congress. For good measure, it would also set in motion a process to determine whether the same criteria should be adopted by every other federal science agency.
Whether or not you think of this as a partisan attack on science, it challenges the idea of science as an independent way of pursuing knowledge. The fact that this is even on the table, and could be taken seriously, shows how effective the attack on science has been. It seems to reflect a terrible paradox: on the one hand, social scientists are pissing some people off in a big way, which is a good sign we are doing something right in the inconvenient truth department; but on the other hand, I don’t see a lot of people rising to our defense, which suggest we matter to fewer people than we should.
This bill may or may not go anywhere, but anyone who cares about evidence-informed governance and the ability of the US to solve its problems ought to be concerned.