While the YouCut program from House Republicans appeared to stall out once they came to power, the general thrust of line-item scrutiny has continued. This is a reasonable thing to do, if the scrutiny is handled in a thoughtful, thorough manner. YouCut seemed more geared toward easy political points than recommendations for change, and that target proves difficult to resist.
Senator Coburn of Oklahoma failed to resist when he released a report yesterday outlining a host of issues he has with various accounting, oversight and grant choices made by the National Science Foundation (NSF). There have been reports before about waste and abuse at NSF, typically in two categories: reports of bad behavior by employees and/or grant recipients; and the sound-bite ready descriptions of research programs that focus on what is done rather than what it means. Coburn managed to smush it all together into a sloppy mess. In an effort to acknowledge the valuable contributions of basic research while arguing for a much more limited focus for the Foundation, the report fails to present a coherent argument or feasible recommendations for change. Arguably, it’s for a lack of trying.
Coburn last waded into this area in 2009, when he introduced an amendment to strip any funding for political science research, which he saw as unnecessary since pollsters, news networks, and political parties provide all the political science research that’s needed.
The report conducts the traditional practice of taking aim at research projects that don’t address the value of the research in the abstract. The absence of the explanation is taken as an absence of the value. Researchers and research administrators continue to fail to provide these explanations to the public before complaints are lodged. Alan Boyle manages to collect several of these explanations, but why is it always done after criticism is levied?
