Public Affairs

THE SCI

 

—

 

VOLUME 7, No. 10

‘ THE NEWSPAPER FOR THE SCIENCE PROFESSIONAL

May 17,1993

 

 

Experts Assess Carnegie Commission’ Ss Impact On U.S. Science Policy

While the panel’s work
has been influential,
skeptics question the
feasibility of some
“ofits recommendations

By BARBARA SPECTOR

The Carnegie Commission on Sci-
ence, Technology, and Govern-
ment, created in 1988 by the
Carnegie Corporation of New
York as a five-year-long effort to
assess the way science is taken
into account in the formulation of
United States policy, ends its ten-
ure June 30. The commission, its
advisory council, and its 15 com-
mittees and task forces have in-
cluded’ “the elite of the science

 

policy com
munity in the
country,” in|:
the words of|'
Rep. Georg
E. Brown, Jr. |.
(D-Calif.)— ;
among them ja}
three __Nobel-
ists. (Rocke-
feller Univer- —
sity geneticist Joshua’ Lederbe
‘Oniversity of Chicago physicist
Leon M. Lederman, and Massachu-

 

setts Institute of Technology econo- |

mist Robert M. Solow) and two
former U.S. presidents Jimmy Car-
ter and Gerald R. Ford).

In assessing the success of the
commission, outside observers as
well as those associated with the
group point to several of its recom-

  
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
   
 

ue

A CAPITAL GROUP: Carnegie
Commission executive director
David Robinson, left, with former
Rep. John Brademas of Indiana,
one of the many Beltway
insiders on the panel.

  
    

mendations that were implemented
by the Bush and Clinton administra-
tions and others that have earned a
spot on the national agenda. At the
final meeting of the full commission,

“held on April 1 (Barbara S pec tor, The
Scientist, April 5, 1993, page 3),

Clinton’s science adviser, John H. |
Gibbons, read-a letter from Vice

President Al Gore to ‘the commis-
sioners that stated: “The com-

_ mMission’s highly productive efforts

have already greatly influenced per-

_spectives and actions across federal
- and state governments.”

'. Members of the commission’s
target audience—including congres-
sional representatives and other key
policymakers—praise the panel for
having “made a genuine contribution
to the debate,” according to John C.
Crowley, director of the Massachu-
setts Institute of Technology’s Wash-
ington, D.C., office. They laud the
ability of the commission, which
spent a total of about $12 million to

$15 million, to produce “well-con-

ceived, well-written reports,”
Crowley puts it.

Yet some observers, while
praising the overall quality of the
commission’s work, question the
relevance and feasibility of some
of their recommendations. “In the
net, I'd give them high marks,”
says Bruce L.R. Smith, a science
policy analyst at the Washington,
D.C.-based Brookings Institution.
But, noting that one recommenda-
tion was for the appointment of a
science counselor to the Secretary
of State (in the commission's Jan-
uary 1992 report “Science and
Technology in U.S. International
Affairs”), Smith says, “They pre-
sume there are technological so-
lutions to everything; they always
want to have a scientific adviser

_ (Continued on Page 8)

 

 

 
Oo £4ay OUIBNALOR MAY 17, LYYS

Continued from Page 1)

to everyone and his uncle.

“You don’t come up with simple
answers to complex questions sim-
ply by mobilizing the scientists.”

Focus On Process

The commission has deliberately
focused its attentions on the pro-
cesses of organization and decision-
making in lieu of tying to find
solutions to specific problems.
Lederberg, a commission cochaiy-
man, sa rational rib

proach was that once a proper
decision-making process was estab-

   
 
  
 
        

433 z ¥
TRICKLE-DOWN EFFECT?
Commission staffer Maxine
Rockoff says the recommenda: __
tions could result in more ~
opportunities for scientists, yet
cochairm hua Lederber:
says the commissioners I not
the Scientific community, Oo

lished, “the right_answers_would
come oul of that process; we would
not have to provide them.

Mark Schaefer, senior staff asso-
ciate and director of. the com-
mission’s Washington, D.C., office,
says the approach fills a void. “Or-
ganization and decision-making are
not given a lot of attention,” he says.
“People are more interested in the
policy itself.” But, he notes, com-
mission members “who were very
experienced in government” knew
how unwise structures contributed to
many daunting problems: “They
could see organizational approaches

that work and don’t work.”

The commission's approach can
be frustrating to some readers of the
reports who are trying to formulate
government policy, however. “ma
goal-oriented person,” says US.
Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), chair-
man of the subcommittee on science
of the House Committee on Science,
Space, and Technology. “I'd like to
see more specific recommendations
than I'm getting.”

Ex-Politicians Join Up

On the other hand, commission
member John Brademas, a former
Democratic congress-
man from Indiana, says
the panel's focus on
process was one of the
Mm factors that induced

Paes him to join. “As amem-
5 ber of Congress, [I was]
over and over again
faced with the question

“4 MS of bringing knowledge

together with policy,” he says. “The
idea of helping public policymakers
consider and decide in as rational a
way as possible had great appeal to
me.” . . a

Former President Carter, for his
pan, says his work as chairman of the
commission’s Task Force on Devel-
‘opment Organizations was a logical
extension of his activities as founder

of the Carter Center, an Atlanta--

based nonprofit organization de-
voted to improving health, fighting
hunger, resolving’ conflict, promot-
ing democracy, and . preserving
human rights (see accompanying
story). : oo

“The more that have become
immersed in [the] Third World . . .
since I left the White House, the
more I see that we need some sort of
comprehensive approach to, quote,
foreign aid, unquote,” he says. “The
Carnegie project gave me an oppor-
tunity to concentrate on that. That's

NEWS

  
 

Carnegie Commission: The Voices Of Experience

why I felt it’s worth the investment

of my time,”

   

|

.
Reports’ Relevance :
The commission did not set out to
directly impact the lives of average
working scientists, says Lederberg.
“We didn’t consider ourselves apol-
ogists’ or defenders or lobbyists for
the scientific community,” he says.
“Our first responsibility was to the
citizenry, not to the welfare of scien-
tists.” The ultimate goal, he says,
was for “the average scientist (to) be
part of a system that’s functioning

rr

EXHIBITING PRESTIGE: Com-
mission cochairman William
Golden is chairman of the board
of the American Museum of Natu-
ral History in New York.

neling of [scientific] knowledge into
policy outcomes.” :

However, says Maxine L.
Rockoff, senior administrator of the
commission, if the reports’ recom-
mendations were implemented,
there would be “more channels
available for scientists to have their
ideas and their knowledge brought to
the decision-making process. To the
extent that happens, ‘there will be
invitations and opportunities for sci-
entists with relevant knowledge to
affect the climate in which funding
for research is done.”

Specific commission recommen-
dations could lead to job opportuni-
ties, says commission cochairman
William T. Golden, chairman of the
of the American Mu-

 

seum of Natural History in
New York. “If the attention
paid within our federal and
state governments to sci-
ence and technology issues
increases,” he says,
“there’d be some jobs
available that do not now
exist.”

The Issues .

Of the - commission's
roughly 400 recommenda-
tions, several have already
earned serious consider-
ation by top government
officials and other policy-
makers (see story on page
9). Yet the commission’s
| creator, Carnegie Corpora-

tion president David A.
Hamburg, says he didn’t
originally intend for the
panel to have immediate

"| hit upon the idea of acom-
‘mission, he says, -“I was

term.” But the commis-
1 sioners began to address
more. near-term issues
“partly for their own moti-
vation; they felt they

needed receptor sites, to

 

more efficiently, with better chan- ©

primarily thinking long-_

use a neuroscience anal- za
ogy,” he says. “I used to
complain at meetings that
they not lose sight of the
long term.”

Among the issues the
commission did not ad-
dress are two that are cur-
rently high on the national agenda:
health care and U.S. research univer-
sities. Lede says the panel
opted to stay away from health care
because many other groups were
studying the issue; thus, “access to
expertise [was] not the limiting fac-
tor.” On the matter of research uni-
versities, Lederberg said at the April
1 commission meeting, the group de-
cided that because so many of the
commissioners were academic sci-
entists, a report on the subject—
which of necessity would deal with
research ‘budgets—would appear
self-interested. “We felt we should
downplay that side in order to be
more effective,” he said.

" A Limited Perspective?

Observers say the commission

, could have benefited from being
- more inclusive. “I’m suspicious of

any organization that consists of al-
most exclusively over-50 white
males,” says Daryl Chubin, senior
associate at the Office of Technology
Assessment (OTA). There are three
women on the 22-member commis-
sion and two on the 31-member ad-
visory council.

relevance. When he first . §

    
    

  
 
  
  
 

"SOCIETAL INFLUENCE: Rod-

ney Nichols, CEO of the New

- York Academy of Sciences, is a

member of the Camegie
Commission’s advisory council.

Betsy Fader, executive director
of Student Pugwash USA in Wash-
ington, D.C., a group of young men
and women dedicated to exploring
the interrelationship of science and
society, says she has been especially
concerned about the lack of young
people on the commission. “So
much of the commission's work in-
volves moving away from past pni-
orities and assessing funire ones: [it
should] include those whe will be
affected by the new priorities,” she
says. .

“The people who are students
now will be the managers of technol-
ogy in 20 years’ time. They're still
undertaking the research; they really
know what the challenges are.”

Rodney W. Nichols, a member of
the panel's advisory council and
chief executive officer of the New
York Academy of Sciences, ac-

 
knowledges that such criticism
raises “quite a reasonable point." He
notes that the commission's found-
ers set out to recruit panelists who

had the “highest possible credibility .

by dint of their professional standing
and accomplishment. A younger
group probably would have said
something different.”

Schaefer, who at 38 is one of the
younger people associated with the
commission, notes that while the
commissioners generally tended to
be 50 and older, “in developing our
task forces, we did reach out to youn-
ger people.” In addition to drawing
on the expertise of commissioners,
he explains, the panel recruited task
force members and consultants of

 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
  

DEFENSE MECHANISM: Com-
mission founder David Hamburg,
left, with Witiam Perry, who
chaired a task force on national

security and is now deputy
secretary of defense.

varying ages. “It may appear on the
surface that there were only older
people, but, in fact, it was more
mixed,” he says.

In retrospect, says Hamburg, if he
had the chance todo it over, “I would
have included more young scientists
and more bench scientists in the en-
terprise, and 1 would have involved
more women and minorities. Also, I

might have made it more interna-
tional.”

Mission: Impossible?

The commission has been criti-
cized for its repeated suggestions ad-
vocating a reorganization of

government and nongovernmental,

agencies. Science and Government
Report (SGR), for example, opined
in a review of the commission's Sep-
tember 1992 report “Enabling the
Future: Linking Science and Tech-
nology to Societal Goals” (22[15]:8,
Oct. I, 1992): “Here, as in prior pre-
scriptions, the Commission yearns
to link existing organizations for fur-
ther studies, convene meetings, and

‘add to the capital’s glut of unread

‘reports.”
Congressman
Brown, who has
“a high regard”
for the work of
the commission,
acknowledges
that the “changes
in the structure of
the federal gov-
ernment frequently advocated by
the panel do not “seem too practi-
cal.” He adds that “I've tried to
achieve some of these same objec-
lives without success.”
Commissioners were aware of

the trade-off involved with making — f.

less-than-practical — recommenda-
lions, says Lederberg: “We had quite
a debate about whether we would
say what we thought would be the
best thing or compromise in ad-
vance.”

A question addressed by the task
forces in their deliberations, says
David Z. Robinson, the com-
mission’s executive director, was:

 

 

 

“If you make a recommendation
that’s impractical, does that hurt the
rest of the report?” One detriment of
including an infeasible recommen-
dation, he notes, is that in analyzing
the. final product,
‘That’s that hopelessly naive report,’
without realizing that there's a lot of

good fecommendations i in the rest of |

the report.” There's room for hope
that recommendations currently
viewed as dubious would be taken

seriously if the political winds shift,’

he says: “You hope that you've
planted a seed that will grow years
later.”

Achieving Consensus
Commission members and staff
say the discussions of the

“people say, -

“We had a lot to settle. For example,
can you discuss K-12 education
without [also discussing] social
problems?”

Branscomb, Albert Pratt Public
Service Professor in the Science,
Technology, and Public Policy Pro-
gram at Harvard University’s John F.
Kennedy School of Government,
Says that “at the end,” consensus was
achieved by “getting the key protag-
onists in. a room and locking the

. door,” The goal of such encounters,

he says, was “to figure out why the
differences were occurring and to
address the origins of those differ-
ences.””

The chairperson of each task
force, as well as the commission

staff, have played major roles ii
merging the divergent views into .
consensus report, working togethe -
to draft language that everyone cai _
live with. “Obviously, one doesn’
want to put together a lowest-com
mon-denominator report, becaus:
that tends not to be strong,” say:
Rockoff. “It takes time fora groupt:
get to agreement,” says Robinson
“Tt often takes toning down the lan
guage, bur. you want to get then
signing on.”

Boucher says the fact that Carne |:
gie Commission reports are consen ...
sus documents can be a great help i -

a representative “inundated with re.
ports,” noting that, when he receive: ©
” (Continued on Page 14

 

various. task forces: some-
times became quite heated.
“We had immense argu-
ments,” says Lewis M.
Branscomb, chairman of '
~the commission’s Task

Force on K-12 Mathematics
and Science

Education.

 

AGREEING TO AGREE:
Lewis Branscomb says
that members of some
task forces at times had
difficulty reaching con-
sensus in deliberations.

 
Carnegie Panel Influenced Two Administrations -

(Continued from Page 9)

a commission publication, “I know
that report represents the opinion of
the most esteemed scientific minds.
They've performed a tremendous
service.”

Target Audience Responds
Specific commission recommen-
dations have come into question by
some members of the target audi-
ence for the panel's reports. OTA's
Chubin, for example, says he’s con-
cemed about the suggestion in “En-
abling the Future” that the National
Academy of Sciences be the institu-

tion to administer a national forum
on science and technology goals
(Barton Reppert, The Scientist, Nov.
23, 1992, page !). NAS is “a top-
down, academically oriented institu-
tion,” and thus perhaps not the best
one to host such a forum, says
Chubin. “Ifyou put it in another kind
of organization, you'd geta different
kind of skew.”

SGR (22[15)}:8, Oct. 1, 1992)
commented sardonically about
the recommendation: "As
homebase for this proposed su-
perfluity (the forum], the Com-

mission states its preference for [re (

the. National
Academy of Sci-
‘ ences.,..SGR sug-
gestion: Better yet,
go for broke and put
it in the U.S. Postal
Service.” ~
Boucher, on the
other hand, says that
“Enabling the Fu-
ture’ has been quite
helpful” to his sub-
committee. “The
Carnegie Commis-
sion correctly identi-
fied the problem—
how to closely link
the dollars that we
spend to the goals we
hope to achieve,” he
says, “It' very nicely
phrases the issue in a
way the public can
understand,”
In one of its earli-

  

est efforts, an October 1991 report
entitled “Science, Technology, and
" Congress: Analysis and Advice from
the Congressional Support Agen-
cies,” the commission turned its at-
tention to OTA, the General
Accounting Office, the Congrts-
"sional Research Service, the Library
of'Congress, and the Congressional
—_ Budget Office.

em) “I didn't think —

they captured
what we're
about,” says

‘9@| The res
oe aot | port—which
recommended “that OTA explore
_waysto enhance its interactions with
other outside organizations” —
“seemed to deny that there’s infor-

mal contact” by staff of the agencies
among each other as well as with |

nongovernmental organizations,
Chubin says. “It read as if they’re
tying. to justify a role for them-
selves. Implicitly, what they’re say-
ing is that we need [a
nongovernmental organization] like
the Carnegie Commission, I think a
congressional support agency ‘can
do—and does—quite well what they
say is needed.”

Joining The Power Structure

The commission, which issued
its first report as George Bush was
settling into the White House, “wied
very hard to be nonpartisan,” says

Lederberg. “We knew that this
Would be an ongoing thing, and we

   
 
   
   
    

couldn't tie it to one administration.
We wanted to do work that would
make sense through a political tran-
ition, with nothing we need to
ter.”

The success of the panel at this
endeavor can be measured by the
extent to which members of the Car-
negie Commission are now moving
into the Clinton administration. Sci-
ence adviser Gibbons, for example,
was @ member of several commis-
sion task forces. Commissioner Wil-
liam J. Perry, who chaired the
commission's Ad Hoc Task Force on

“T] PANELISTS: In

 

‘| photo above,
1 trom left,
#4 William Golden,
John Brademas,
Jimmy Carter, and
yoshua Lederbery
‘at a commission
meeting. In photo at
left, Lewis Branscomb,
left, andJohn
Brademas discuss
an issue. In back-
ground is executive
irector David
Robinson.

National Security, is now deputy
secretary of defense. Advisory coun-
cil member Ashton B. Carter, also a
member of that task force, has been
nominated to be assistant secretary
of defense, and commissioner Sheila
E. Widnall has been nominated tobe
the Air Force secretary. At press
time, Carter and Widnall had_not
been confirmed. .

-Quipped Perry at the April i
meeting: “I’m in the awkward posi-
tion of having spent several years
advising myself what I should be
doing.” “OQ