a leaf warbler's gleanings

Yeah! That video is now up on the website of the Republican whip and incoming Majority-Leader-Elect of the US Congress.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for oversight and review of government agencies to eliminate wasteful spending, and there is no doubt plenty of wasteful spending of our tax dollars which we all should know about! It is easy to argue that you and I must be allowed to review and comment upon all kinds of government projects that you/I may not agree with. More sunshine on the whole process can only be good, right?

Isn't it interesting—and telling—then, that the very first agency this newly resurgent incoming Republican majority picks for review by the general public is the one agency that has, embedded in its very core, one of the most severe forms of review of any proposal before awarding those tax dollars: the National Science Foundation?

It is called peer review, where the term "peer" itself is employed in a much more rigorous sense than in the case of a "jury of your peers" in the legal system. My peers who will review the proposal I am about to resubmit next week to NSF will all have Ph.D. degrees earned after spending years and years in scholarship relevant to the subject of my grant proposal. They will also all be well aware of the limited tax dollars available, given that NSF's budgets haven't really seen much growth in the past decade even as the ranks of Ph.D.s have continued to swell and compete for every tiny slice of that shrinking pie. They will therefore have to not only very carefully critique and analyze the scientific worth of our proposal, but also rank it in terms of how deserving of funding it is compared to all the other proposals submitted to that particular program. Lab Spaces recently had a good post about rates of funding by NSF, if you want to try and guess what my odds might be of getting this grant (which is a revision and resubmission of a proposal that wasn't funded last year). I'm not making any guesses - but I know that there is a high probability that we will not get funded even if the reviewers really like our proposal and don't find any flaws in it! Such is the reality of the competition for grants at NSF, and I am confident that my peer reviewers will make their most honest effort to make sure that our tax dollars are not spent on some project that has no scientific merit or has a low likelihood of success. And they will let me know exactly why they think my proposal does not deserve funding - or why it does (as I hope!). The same applies to the National Institutes of Health, although that agency does have more money available because it is focused on research applied to human health.

Can you tell me, Congressman Smith (and Cantor), how many other federal government agencies (other than those involved in funding science) conduct anywhere near this level of critical review of any project that gets funded with our tax dollars? You want to put NSF grants—funded out of a budget which will amount to a mere $7.4 billion in 2011 (if approved) out of a total proposed federal budget of $3.69 trillion—under the public microscopic by your constituents? After they have already been put through the wringer by the most critical—and qualified—bunch of reviewers you can find in this country? All so you can save us... what? a tiny fraction of a penny from my taxes? After all, the entire NSF budget is not far from constituting the proverbial drop (or few) in the bucket compared to the entire federal budget (and I'm sure the average reader of this blog can figure out exactly how the proportional volume of a single drop of water in a 5 gallon bucket compares with the proportional NSF slice of the total federal budget; not so sure about your average constituent's ability to do so however—especially if you slash the budget of the NSF which is spending an increasing portion of its budget on STEM education these days).

How about opening up the much bigger areas of the federal budget to public scrutiny, if you are really serious about it? Might I suggest, for example, the Defense Department? After all, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone cost us taxpayers about 10 times the entire NSF budget - each! According to the numbers on that website, in Iraq alone, the total budget we are requesting for a 5-year project in our grant proposal is spent, on average, in a mere 3 minutes!! Yet how much time and effort went into proposing that project in the middle east, and how much time/effort did you, in congress, spend reviewing it?! How about letting me and my fellow taxpayers search through that list so we can tell you where you are wasting our money? I guarantee we can save us all a heck of a lot more money and lives there, congressman, and with far less effort.

So how about it? Show us how serious you folks really are about cutting wasteful spending, why don't you? Or is this, as I suspect, really not about cutting wasteful spending per se, but part of a rather different agenda, to squelch the very thing that has made this country the great technological superpower it is—basic science? Or are you kidding me, congressman?