Public deserves share of blame

By Fred W. Weingarten
CRA Staff

When the 103rd Congress went home in October it left behind a lot of unfinished business. (It did return in lame-duck session to consider GATT in December.) It was difficult, even for a long-time observer of Congress, to watch the bitter, partisan fighting on the Senate floor and see many important bills consigned to the trash can. The real question seemed to be, "Can these turkeys do anything right?"

Crime, health care reform and two bills of particular interest to the computing research community--telecommunications reform and High-Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) II--did not pass. (The crime bill was resuscitated after a loud public outcry, but the political credibility of Congress and the White House already had been damaged.)

We saw a tiresome and embarrassing display of bitterness, partisanship and stalemate. Now that some time has passed and one can view the proceedings with more objective detachment, it is reasonable to ask if this apparent failure of the process was due to lack of political leadership (or, as important, followership). My conclusion is that, although Congress deserves its share of blame, it also reflected the political confusion, uncertainty and conflict in US society. The enemy probably is us.

Though CRN usually focuses on the narrower issues of R&D and information policy, it is useful to look at broader political events. We need to gain insight into political processes and the larger environment in which science and technology issues are considered.

Compared to the thousands of bills considered and the hundreds passed by Congress each year, few major legislative initiatives capture the public's attention. The ones that do attract widespread debate are covered on the nightly news, divide parties and mobilize large stakeholder groups. They form what we might call the "political agenda."

My theory is that passage of agenda legislation usually depends on three conditions:

1) There is a broad public sense that a problem exists, is critical and needs to be addressed politically. The problem is talked about in political campaigns, by the president and by Congress. People want something done about the issue.

2) A set of alternative policy approaches needs to be on the table, so the general outlines of a solution can be hammered into a consensus. Much of the art of legislation is the search for lines of compromise.

3) There is a general agreement, even if it is grudging or reluctant, among major stakeholders that the bill is acceptable. Changes in important areas of policy can create big winners and losers. For better or worse, these groups have significant interests that cannot be ignored--and they express them loudly.

Let's see how the four bills mentioned earlier measure up against these conditions.

Crime

A public barraged with daily reports of violent crime put crime high on its agenda. The legislation was a mish-mash of preventative and punitive pieces, each intended to buy the support of one side and deeply offend the opposite side. The resulting compromise seemed less a movement toward the middle than an attachment of programmatic pieces on each ideological end--"three strikes" and increased use of the death penalty on one side and midnight basketball and gun control on the other.

There was much in the bill for both sides to hate and, more importantly, to use as a public excuse for opposition. The campaign benefits from attacking the bill's defects began to outweigh the benefits of passing it (or so it seemed to the members).

Finally, although organized groups such as law enforcement, cities and the incarceration industry supported the bill, the National Rifle Association was strongly opposed, and its opposition played a role in the initial collapse.

Bottom line: Public concern and outcry was so strong that the vote was nearly immediately revisited and passed despite members' distaste for parts of the bill and the lobbying opposition.

Health care

This was another obvious agenda item. Recent polls show that, despite the collapse of the president's bill, the public still cares deeply. During the debate, when some senators floated a trial balloon that there was no crisis, public reaction forced them to quickly back off. But I think it's fair to say that there is no social consensus on what should be done. There did not seem to be clear alternatives or much room for compromise among them, possibly because the administration's proposal so dominated the debate.

Most large stakeholders--doctors, hospitals and insurance and drug companies--opposed the legislation.

Bottom line: Strong public concern ran up against a lack of consensus on a solution and strong stakeholder opposition. A positive interpretation of the health care debate was that the public was convinced that a problem existed and forced, for the first time, to debate about what to do. Many questions need to be answered: What should be the scope of reform? How much government control should there be? What are we willing to pay to bring more people into the system? Who should pay? In an area that so closely affects our personal well-being, the lack of a consensus could be deadly.

Telecommunications

Public urgency about telecommunications reform seemed weak. The administration has pushed its vision of the National Information Infrastructure for a few years. But linking that vision to a bill containing more than a hundred pages of competitive "do's and don'ts" and regulatory reform was a Herculean political task. The voters were angry in November, but few seemed angry about the lack of telecommunications reform.

However, there is a reasonably broad consensus for deregulation and removing barriers to investment and innovation. The experts and politicians who watch such things are in general agreement. Some public interest concerns about universal service, access and information policy issues such as privacy and copyright attracted debate. But in the center, most sides are fairly close together. I suspect this year's Republican bill will be similar to last year's Democratic bill. If that is so, there will be room for negotiation and compromise.

It is not clear how committed the communications companies were to this legislation, especially at the end. In fact, Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-SC), the bill's author and the chair of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, accused the Baby Bells of backing off from their support. It is an uncertain technological and market future after all, and a great deal of money is at stake. The status quo can begin to look attractive, even to companies that claim to want to be allowed to compete in new markets.

Bottom line: Despite reasonable consensus on what to do, lack of public interest (and, therefore political benefit from doing something) and stakeholder indifference allowed the bills to sink without a trace.

HPCC

If the public was confused about the NII, most people probably had never heard of HPCC. Except for cold fusion, R&D programs rarely are the topic of Ted Koppel's "Nightline" discussions. But HPCC had been tied by Congress and the administration to things high on the agenda, notably economic growth and industrial policy. (In the Senate, it literally was tied to economic growth by being folded into S 4, a much broader bill focusing on industrial policy.) In some sense, it was interesting that so few people noticed the bill or its failure. The Clinton administration apparently was unable to make the connection in the public's mind between future economic security and investment in education, infrastructure and research.

There was fairly good consensus on what should be done. The HPCC bills that passed each house were reasonably convergent and HPCC always had received bipartisan support. Even when Congress and the White House were controlled by different parties, administration HPCC plans and congressional legislation looked very similar.

However, some industry groups have become more than a little cool to the program, even though they supported it earlier, bought into the NII vision and stood to benefit from the work that was funded. But the groups felt the program was drifting and unresponsive to their concerns. (A recent General Accounting Office report criticized the administration for not making more of an effort to coordinate management and provide opportunities for outside input to program plans and priorities--something industry had been pushing for some time.)

Few tears were shed when the bill went down, but there should have been. The failure does not bode well for the future, and I believe the failure was not necessary.

Bottom line: There was a reasonable consensus on the bill, but lack of strong incentive to move it forward because of strong public or industry support turned this legislation into political road kill in the final partisan days of the legislative session.

One ought to hesitate before drawing fixed conclusions based on one or a few select events. However, there are some general observations we could apply to future strategy.

• R&D itself rarely will be a high-agenda item. But we increasingly will find information technology and R&D a part of other issues that are high on the agenda. That carries potential benefits and significant risks in a volatile political environment.
• Computing research does not always have the choice of whether it wants its profile boosted. HPCC, for example, started as a fairly small internal National Science Foundation initiative focused on supercomputer use by basic researchers, then other forces, political and economic, raised its profile immensely.
• We need to know what arena the issue we care about is in. Is it a high-profile political debate or one of the many quieter, specialized and generally bipartisan issues that get resolved routinely but invisibly in Congress? The answer has a lot to do with our own choice of strategy and expectations.
• We need to be concerned about the following issues:

1) We have to ensure that the public better understands the nature and role of research in our society.

2) We need to direct our expertise at providing alternative policy approaches and developing consensus, at least among our community and those closely allied with us.

3) Industry is a key stakeholder in computing research. We need to foster an open and continuing dialogue between the industrial and academic research communities so that we are all singing out of the same book (if not always on the same page) when an issue arises.