How will election affect R&D community

By Fred W. Weingarten
CRA Staff

A wave of concern swept across the R&D community immediately after the November election. The concern was, in part, a normal reaction to an unexpected and traumatic upset of the existing conditions for science policy. It was not so much that Democrats were being replaced by Republicans, but that an entirely new and unknown batch of players will be setting the rules and deciding budgets.

A natural and immediate question when political control changes hands, even within the same party, is "How will this affect me and the programs I care about?" Couple that with the magnitude of the change and the underlying sense of a deeper change in voter attitudes, and the question becomes even more urgent.

In the absence of good tea leaves to read and clear astrological indicators, the scientific community was left to dig for signs in the Republican "Contract With America," a document signed a few weeks before the election by most Republican candidates for House seats. Because the contract said nothing about R&D directly, particular attention was given to an addendum prepared by Republican House Budget Committee staff members listing possible budget cuts, many of which would affect higher education and research.

For example, the addendum proposed to eliminate the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Advanced Technology Program (ATP). It also proposed about a 20% cut in the High-Performance Computer and Communications (HPCC) program and a 1% cut in the National Science Foundation's growth.

Judging from some of the early reaction of the scientific community, one might conclude that the Republicans already had declared war on science and higher education. It is foolish to make these kinds of political judgments now. An overly hasty call to arms could create an unnecessary and destructive backlash.

As a political prescription, the contract and its addendum present their own problems. When the contract was announced, it was not clear how seriously it would be taken. The national press did not give it much attention because it seemed to be a rehash of old proposals, and because the promise of tax cuts and budget balancing did not seem to add up. Also, the possibility of a Republican takeover of the House became apparent only in the last week before the election.

After the election, the contract became a principal focus of the press, pointed to by victorious Republicans and by Republican leadership as their action agenda. Many House members feel compelled to take it seriously as their legislative mission.

Republicans are by no means as unified as they may have appeared to the president when they were in the minority. Cracks have already begun to appear. But Republicans as a party need to respond quickly to what could be an brief opportunity given by an impatient electorate and show that they can govern in Congress. Developing an action agenda from scratch that all could agree on would have been difficult. The contract gave them a start.

However, all the contract promises is a vote in the House within 100 days. It did not promise to pass legislation, or that the Senate would pass it or that the president would sign it. Because of the structure and culture of the House of Representatives, which stresses majority control and discipline, the promise does have some chance of being met. Even in the House, not all parts of the contract are being cheered by Republicans. For example, now that Republicans are the majority party, term limits look less interesting. What good does it do to finally win a long fight for control if the first thing you do is vote yourself out of office?

Senate Republicans were not part of the contract and do not feel any compulsion to follow its dictates. The Senate is a different type of institution, no matter which party runs it. And few elected politicians in Congress officially signed on to the list of proposed cuts.

Science traditionally has fared well under Republicans, who always have supported civilian and military research. They have shown more skepticism toward applied technology programs and so may be expected to push programs back to longer-term and basic research. (That does not mean they do not share in the general sense that R&D needs to be linked to specific social goals and purposes.)

Some Republicans did join in the anti-university rhetoric that accompanied the Defense research cuts, but it is not clear that research is a partisan issue in Defense policy.

A key problem will be that some computer- and communications-related programs have been politicized by being identified with administration initiatives such as the National Information Infrastructure, HPCC and various technology initiatives. How that will affect their support in a Republican Congress remains to be seen. We are, however, unlikely to see any new initiatives or major expansion of existing ones.

If the campaign suggests anything, it is that Republicans may be more sensitive to the potential of the Internet and new electronic information technologies than their liberal counterparts. The conservative community actively used computer networking and the panoply of electronic communication systems for organization and to energize their constituencies. The contract is a case in point. It has been posted widely on the network. It is a brief, text-oriented format that is amenable to public electronic access. At the Computing Research Association, which made the contract available on our World Wide Web home page, we tried--in the name of bipartisanship--to add some Democratic response. We could not find any on the network.

When we finally found something on paper, it was long, rambling and filled with tables. It was not amenable to getting it online quickly in a form that would be usable to anyone without high-capacity access to the Internet.

Some predictions

* There will be severe pressures on R&D budgets, but they are likely to be structural, not partisan. Lawmakers were going to be much tougher this year, even under a Democratic Congress. If taxes are cut, the pressures will be even greater.

• It serves no constructive purpose, as some on the network have done, to identify either party as the devil. We will have friends and contacts on the Hill, just as we did before. We need to nurture them. Republican anti-technology ire is likely to be focused on shorter-term, industrially focused programs such as NIST's ATP, some of which also have raised broader concerns and objections among some Democrats and technology policy experts.
• HPCC is in trouble. It was in trouble in the Democratic Congress. The recent General Accounting Office report that repeats several industry objections to the program simply will add fuel to the fire. Whether the pressure from the Republicans will be greater or not is an unanswerable (and unimportant) question.
• Educating Congress is critical. Over 50% of the members of the House are new since January 1993. Few, if any, have science and technology backgrounds, and even fewer have any experience with science and technology issues. We are not aware that any of them raised S&T policy as a major issue in their campaigns. Similarly, entire committee staffs will be replaced, with a significant loss of institutional memory.