Congress should create a new Science and Technology (S&T) Hub within the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics (STAA) team to support an understaffed and overwhelmed Congress in addressing pressing science and technology policy questions. A new hub would connect Congress with technical experts and maintain a repository of research and information as well as translate this material to members and staff. There is already momentum building in Congress with several recent reforms to strengthen capacity, and the reversal of the Chevron doctrine infuses the issue with a new sense of urgency. The time is now for Congress to invest in itself. 

Challenge and Opportunity

Congress does not have the tools it needs to contend with pressing scientific and technical questions. In the last few decades, Congress grappled with increasingly complex science and technology policy questions, such as social media regulation, artificial intelligence, and climate change. At the same time, its staff capacity has diminished; between 1994 to 2015, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Congressional Research Service (CRS), key congressional support agencies, lost about a third of their employees. Staff on key science related committees like the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology fell by nearly half.

As a result, members frequently lack the resources they need to understand science and technology. “[T]hey will resort to Google searches, reading Wikipedia, news articles, and yes, even social media reports. Then they will make a flurry of cold calls and e-mails to whichever expert they can get on the phone,” one former science staffer noted. “You’d be surprised how much time I spend explaining to my colleagues that the chief dangers of AI will not come from evil robots with red lasers coming out of their eyes,” representative Jay Obernolte (R-CA), who holds a master’s degree in AI, told  The New York Times. And AI is just one example of a pressing science need Congress must handle, but does not have the tools to grapple with.

Moreover, reliance on external information can intensify polarization, because each side depends on a different set of facts and it is harder to find common ground. Without high-quality, nonpartisan science and technology resources, billions of dollars in funding may be allocated to technologies that do not work or policy solutions at odds with the latest science. 

Additional science support could help Congress navigate complex policy questions related to emerging research,  understand science and technologies’ impacts on legislative issues, and grapple with the public benefits or negative consequences of various science and technology issues. 

The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo instills a new sense of urgency. The reversal of the decades old “Chevron deference,” which directed courts to defer to agency interpretations in instances where statutes were unclear or silent, means Congress will now have to legislate with more specificity. To do so, it will need the best possible experts and technical guidance. 

There is momentum building for Congress to invest in itself. For the past several years, the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress (which became a permanent subcommittee of the Committee on House Administration) advocated for increases to staff pay and resources to improve recruitment and retention. Additionally, the GAO Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics (STAA) team has expanded to meet the moment. From 2019 to 2022, STAA’s staff grew from 49 to 129 and produced 46 technology assessments and short-form explainers. These investments are promising but not sufficient. Congress can draw on this energy and the urgency of a post-Chevron environment to invest in a Science and Technology Hub. 

Plan of Action

Congress should create a new Science and Technology Hub in GAO STAA

Congress should create a Science and Technology Hub within the GAO’s STAA. While most of the STAA’s current work responds to specific requests from members, a new hub within the STAA would build out more proactive and exploratory work by 1) brokering long-term relationships between experts and lawmakers and 2) translating research for Congress. The new hub would maintain relationships with rank-and-file members, not just committees or leadership. The hub could start by advising Congress on emerging issues where the partisan battle lines have not been drawn, such as AI, and over time it will build institutional trust and advise on more partisan issues. 

Research shows that both parties respect and use congressional support agencies, such as GAO, so they are a good place to house the necessary expertise. Housing the new hub within STAA would also build on the existing resources and support STAA already provides and capitalizes on the recent push to expand this team. The Hub could have a small staff of approximately 100 employees. The success of recently created small offices such as the Office of Whistleblower Ombuds proves that a modest staff can be effective. In a post-Chevron world, this hub could also play an important role liaising with federal agencies about how different statutory formulations will change implementation of science related legislation and helping members and staff understand the ins and outs of the passage to implementation process. 

The Hub should connect Congress with a wider range of subject matter experts.

Studies show that researcher-policymaker interactions are most effective when they are long-term working relationships rather than ad hoc interactions. The hub could set up advisory councils of experts to guide Congress on different key areas. Though ad hoc groups of experts have advised Congress over the years, Congress does not have institutionalized avenues for soliciting information. The hub’s nonpartisan staff should also screen for potential conflicts of interest. As a starting point, these advisory councils would support committee and caucus staff as they learn about emerging issues, and over time it could build more capacity to manage requests from individual member officers. Agencies like the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine already employ the advisory council model; however, they do not serve Congress exclusively nor do they meet staff needs for quick turnaround or consultative support. The advisory councils would build on the advisory council model of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), an agency that advised Congress on science between the 1970s and 1990s. The new hub could take proactive steps to center representation in its advisory councils, learning from the example of the United Kingdom Parliament’s Knowledge Exchange Unit and its efforts to increase the number of women and people of color Parliament hears from. 

The Hub should help compile and translate information for Congress.

The hub could maintain a one-stop shop to help Congress find and understand data and research on different policy-relevant topics.  The hub could maintain this repository and draw on it to distill large amounts of information into memos that members could digest. It could also hold regular briefings for members and staff on emerging issues. Over time, the Hub could build out a “living evidence” approach in which a body of research is maintained and updated with the best possible evidence at a regular cadence. Such a resource would help counteract the effects of understaffing and staff turnover and provide critical assistance in legislating and oversight, particularly important in a post-Chevron world. 

Conclusion

Taking straightforward steps like creating an S&T hub, which brokers relationships between Congress and experts and houses a repository of research on different policy topics, could help Congress to understand and stay up-to-date on urgent science issues in order to ensure more effective decision making in the public interest.

This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.

Frequently Asked Questions

What other investments can Congress make in itself at this time?

There are a number of additional investments Congress can make that would complement the work of the proposed Science and Technology Hub, including additional capacity for other Congressional support agencies and entities beyond GAO. For example, Congress could lift the cap on the number of staff each member can hire (currently set at 18), and invest in pipelines for recruitment and retention of personal and committee staff with science expertise. Additionally, Congress could advance digital technologies available to Congress for evidence access and networking with the expert community.

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Why should the Hub be placed at GAO and how can the GAO adapt to meet this need?

The Hub should be placed in GAO to build on the momentum of recent investments in the STAA team. GAO has recently invested in building human capital with expertise in science and technology that can support the development of the Hub. The GAO should seize the moment to reimagine how it supports Congress as a modern institution. The new hub in the STAA should be part of an overall evolution, and other GAO departments should also capitalize on the momentum and build more responsive and member-focused processes to support Congress.

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The Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission called for input from diverse stakeholders and FAS, along with partners Conservation X Labs (CXL), COMPASS, and the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST), answered the call.

Recruiting participants from academia, the private sector, national labs, and other nonprofits, the Wildland Fire Policy Accelerator produced 24 ideas for improving the way the country lives with wildland fire.

‘Cultural Burning’ is a phrase that is cropping up more and more in wildland fire policy discussions, but it’s still not widely understood or even consistently defined.

Liam Torpy of Conservation X Labs sat down with FAS to discuss why ‘cultural burning’ is garnering more attention in the world of wildfire mitigation and management.

FAS: Liam – thanks for joining us. To start, just give us a quick introduction to Conservation X Labs and its mission.

LT: The founders of Conservation X Labs [Paul Bunje and Alex Dehgan] wanted to create a conservation technology organization that, you know, isn’t just doing the same traditional conservation methods of protected areas and command and control. CXL wants to find innovative solutions to these problems that can harness market forces or that develop new technologies that will allow for breakthroughs–because the problems have been increasing exponentially in the conservation field, but the solutions haven’t kept pace. We’re not, in a lot of these critical ecosystems like in the American West with wildfire, or the Amazon, were simply not doing enough. And the problem is getting worse as global forces, like climate change, worsen the problem. 

FAS: CXL has been convening what you call “Little Think” events – roundtable discussions aimed at surfacing new ideas in the area of wildfire management – when you decided to partner with FAS on this Wildland Fire Policy Accelerator. Cultural burning became one of the big areas of focus for the recommendations coming out of this process. Some people may be familiar with the idea of “prescribed burning” – using fire to reduce the risk of uncontrolled megafires down the road – but ‘cultural burning’ is something quite different.  Can you explain what’s different and why it’s important?

LT: You can read a lot of reports, or see some statutes on the books, legally, that will oftentimes not reference cultural burning at all. Some do – but it’s kind of a footnote that’s put under ‘prescribed burning’ – many publications treat it the same way. But prescribed burning, which can have real ecological benefits, is often only measured by the government using acreage: how much land can we burn?

With cultural burning, there’s not a single definition, because each Tribe has their own version of it. But it’s often to cultivate natural resources or encourage new growth of a particularly important plant. So it’s much more targeted than prescribed burning – it’s suited to the land and the resources a Tribe has. It’s deeply rooted in place-based knowledge.

It’s also a very important method of intergenerational knowledge transfer as well. [Cultural fire practitioners] say sometimes that ‘when you burn together and you learn together’. It’s a way to teach the rest of your group of what resources there are, how to steward them, and how everybody is coming together to manage the land and take care of it.

FAS: So why is there a tension between traditional federal and state fire management methods and cultural burning?

A lot of people I think don’t really recognize this: you think that because a lot of Tribes have reservations, or Tribal trust land or some of their own free land, they can just go and burn as they wish. But the people on the ground that we’ve talked to, including some participants in this accelerator, say Tribal trust land is some of the hardest land to burn on. It’s pretty much considered federal land, administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). That means pretty much every time you want to burn on the land, you have to have a burn plan and submit that to the BIA, which is generally very understaffed. Only one person may be looking over those documents. Then a BIA ‘burn boss’ is considered the only person qualified to actually lead the burn – and that is already kind of infringing on the sovereignty of the tribe itself: having their own burn led by this outsider within the federal government. And oftentimes you have to go through a NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) permitting process which is a very long and expensive process that requires public comments. There are local air districts that regulate smoke. Then you have to have an approved burn window where they say, okay, the conditions are good. And that often happens very rarely. And so a lot of tribes don’t even attempt to go through this whole process. It’s simply too much administrative burden on them.

FAS: And it’s not just the administrative burden, right? There seems to be some real hesitancy to allowing more cultural burning from the agencies who manage this land, and from communities nearby. Why is that?

LT: The public is often skeptical of both prescribed and cultural burning. They’re scared of fire because of all the megafires. So it’s can be hard to get the public support sometimes. And because of that a lot of these federal agencies that by their nature are very risk averse. They’re unwilling to move forward with some of these plans that can be perceived as risky when it’s easier just to do nothing. Their approach is just when a fire comes through, try to fight it. Say you did the best you could even though it burns down half the forest and becomes a high severity fire. 

FAS: Tell us about the Accelerator participants you worked with.

LT: We talked with Nina Fontana, Chris Adlam, Ray Guttierez, and then [FAS’] Jessica Blackband worked with Kyle Trefny and Ryan Reed. Ryan and Ray are both members of Tribes, and the others non-Indigenous, but working in that sphere and trying to support cultural fire. These are already busy people, trying to kind of reestablish some of these traditions and fighting against these institutional barriers. Their first priority may not be to fly out to Washington to talk with federal policymakers or sit down at their computer and develop and research these recommendations. But they have a really deep on-the-ground perspective that a lot of people in Washington that don’t have, and that a lot of people the Commission don’t have.

FAS: Can you give us an example of what kinds of recommendations emerged from the process?

LT: One thing that’s important to understand is that these recommendations are not the be all and end all of this issue. These are steps – often the most basic steps we can take to start to give cultural fire the respect and the place it deserves with fire management. Fire has been functionally banned from the land for over a century – over a century of extreme fire suppression tactics in the American West. A lot of these tribes that previously had been burning for centuries, or sometimes even millennia, weren’t allowed to continue that cycle. It was illegal – it was criminalized. And so that knowledge is just lost. And so some tribes are seeking to regain that knowledge.

There’s a Tribal Ranger Program recommended by Chris Adlam – which is modeled after Canada and Australia – creating permanent long term opportunities for Tribal members to exercise their traditions, to put fire on the land to build up that intergenerational knowledge. These would not be just short-term, one-summer, internship opportunities, but real employment opportunities that allow them to put fire on the land.

Another important recommendation, from Raymond Guttierez, is establishing a federal definition of ‘cultural fire’ and ‘cultural fire practitioner’.  Right now, there’s not even really a legally recognized definition for the very practice itself – only for prescribed burning. And it wouldn’t just be one definition, it’d be regionally specific. And Tribes would help develop that in each area.

FAS: What part of the process was most rewarding for you, personally?

LT:  I think one of the things that was rewarding is that these participants, in the beginning, were a little skeptical that what they had to say would actually be important, or would be more useful than the information that decision makers in Washington already had at their disposal. But they really did have a lot to say and a lot to contribute to this national conversation. And so I think it was really cool to see just how, by the end, they got validation that they have really useful information and experience that needs to be heard by people in power. 

FAS: The Biden Administration has made a point of incorporating Indigenous knowledge into federal decision-making. But guidance from the Executive Branch is one thing – real impact on the ground is another. Do you think Indigenous practices, like cultural burning, are actually gaining support in the communities affected by wildfire?

LT: I think there’s also a broader movement within our society focused on diversity and equity and inclusion. Looking at the historical injustices that Tribes have faced, and trying to give them compensation when they do participate in these processes, and give their input and share their traditional knowledge – we need to make sure we are adequately valuing that. And so I think that’s also another element that’s giving this a boost. Hopefully, we see more and more people in power incorporating these ideas. And really, it’s not just about them incorporating the ideas – it’s about allowing Tribes to lead this movement, and to lead these burns. Some of it is just getting out of their way. Some of it is giving them more of a platform. But what we don’t want is just for the system in place to kind of co-opt the Tribal practices and leave the cultural fire practitioners in the dust.

But I also think having the White House make that statement about Indigenous knowledge is really significant. By getting encouragement from the top that [agencies] should look into cultural burning, or look into place-based knowledge and traditional ecological management, that kind of gives them more of a push to go and form these partnerships. And I think there’s been, there’s more and more attention on these issues. As we look at the wildland fire crisis right now, it’s going out of control. The amount of money that we’re spending on it – asking questions about whatever we’ve been doing for the last century or so is warranted. Before that century of suppression, tribes were getting more fire on the ground. People are looking at this more and more, trying to learn, and giving it the respect that it really deserves, and the attention that it deserves.

What actions should the federal government take “to ensure that our nation can continue to harness the full power of science and technology on behalf of the American people”?

President Biden posed that question and five more specific ones to his Science Advisor Dr. Eric S. Lander.

“My hope is that you, working broadly and transparently with the diverse scientific leadership of American society and engaging the broader American public, will make recommendations to our administration” on how best to structure the American scientific enterprise, then-President-elect Biden wrote on January 15.

Taking that as an invitation, the Federation of American Scientists’ Day One Project responded last week with a detailed set of actionable proposals for applying science and technology to current social, economic, and environmental challenges.

So, for example, the President asked what policy lessons could be derived from the current pandemic. The Day One Project suggested that a new Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (HARPA) modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA). . . could leverage existing federal research programs, as well as the efforts of the private sector, to develop new capabilities for disease prevention, detection, and treatment.”

An Open Source Approach to Pharmaceutical R&D could “tap into the totality of knowledge and scientific expertise that our nation has to offer . . . and enable the nation to work quickly and cooperatively to generate low-cost advances in areas of great health need.”

And there’s much more.

Day One Project Director Daniel Correa is the Acting President of the Federation of American Scientists.

Foreign scientists working in the U.S. are a vital part of the U.S. scientific research enterprise, a new report from the JASON scientific advisory panel said, and this country could hardly do without them. Yet in some cases they pose a challenge to the integrity of U.S. research programs.

“In 2019, eight Americans were awarded Nobel Prizes – half were foreign born,” the JASON report said. “Today, foreign nationals account for the majority of graduate students in many technology fields, including electrical, civil, mechanical, industrial, chemical, and petroleum engineering. They also dominate in fields including computer science and economics, and some universities’ graduate programs likely could not maintain their high level of excellence without foreign students.”

But some foreign scientists — often, but not only, from China — violate U.S. norms of scientific ethics by improperly sharing sensitive research information and technology without authorization.

“Anecdotes abound of foreign scholars in research groups passing on sensitive information, and some JASON members had experienced this in their own research groups,” the report said. On the other hand, “some examples of what has been interpreted by the intelligence community and law enforcement as theft by foreign researchers actually appears to be the collegial sharing of academic work.”

Although the magnitude of unambiguously unethical activity is not clearly known, “there are enough verified instances to warrant concern. . . These actions pose a threat to the U.S. fundamental research enterprise,” the JASONs said. See Fundamental Research Security, December 2019.

In this case, however, the proper response is not greater secrecy but greater transparency, the JASON report said.

“It is neither feasible nor desirable to control areas of fundamental research beyond the mechanisms put in place by [the 1985 National Security Decision Directive] NSDD-189” which held that unclassified basic scientific research should be otherwise unrestricted. “It is not possible to draw boundaries around broad fields of fundamental research and define what is included and what is excluded (government controlled) in that discipline of inquiry,” the JASONs said.

Instead, they recommended, the concept of research integrity needs to be expanded to require full disclosure of all affiliations and personal commitments — such as ties to foreign military or security organizations.

“A failure to make the proper disclosure must then be treated as a violation of research integrity and should be investigated and adjudicated” just like plagiarism or falsification of data. Increased clarity and explicitness regarding the boundaries of permissible sharing of unpublished research information is also needed.

Actual theft or espionage is of course punishable by law. But as a general principle, foreign scientists who immigrate to the United States should be treated like any other citizen, the JASONs wrote, and they “should be judged on their personal actions and not by profiling based on the actions of the government and political institutions of their home country.”

A common understanding of the foreign threat to fundamental research has been hampered by secrecy and miscommunication between academic institutions and U.S. intelligence officials, the JASONs found.

Intelligence briefings “have been met with disbelief and derision” by some academic audiences who doubted the legitimacy of classification barriers to full disclosure. The IC briefers in turn “may feel distrusted and dismissed by those they believe they are trying to help.”

The JASONs recommended that the National Science Foundation facilitate more effective communications between the academic community and intelligence and law enforcement agencies, “including encouraging the declassification of information related to foreign influence in fundamental research.” (More from NSF, Science, Nature, C&EN)

*    *    *

Unlike the JASONs, a recent Senate staff report suggested that more secrecy might be the answer to foreign misappropriation of U.S. research activities. “The administration should consider updating NSDD-189 and implement additional, limited restrictions on U.S. government funded fundamental research.” See Threats to the U.S. Research Enterprise: China’s Talent Recruitment Plans, staff report, Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, November 22, 2019.

The JASONs specifically rejected this approach, arguing that it was not at all practical and would in fact be counterproductive.

*    *    *

The congressional intelligence committees have recognized the disconnect between the IC and academia that was described by the JASONs.

The committees are “aware that academia is not always kept apprised by the interagency of a complete picture of potential activities and threats in the research community, such as improper technology transfer, intellectual property theft, and cyber-attacks directly attributed to nation-state governments,” said a new statement on the FY 2018, 2019 and 2020 intelligence authorization act which was recently adopted in the FY2020 defense authorization bill.

The new intelligence legislation therefore “include measures to promote increased information sharing across the interagency and with academia,” the committee statement said.

Among those measures is a requirement for a new unclassified “report listing Chinese and Russian academic institutions that have a history of improper technology transfer, intellectual property theft, cyber espionage, or operate under the direction of their respective armed forces or intelligence agencies.”

In July, the Planetary Society’s Lightsail 2 spacecraft demonstrated the viability of “solar sailing,” becoming “the first spacecraft in Earth orbit propelled solely by sunlight.”

But the practicality of solar sailing was first described six decades earlier by physicist Richard L. Garwin.

“It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of solar radiation pressure for the propulsion of satellites or space ships within the solar system,” he wrote in the Journal of the American Rocket Society in March 1958, when he was 30 years old. “Although the acceleration is numerically small, the velocity changes in reasonable times by significant amounts.”

This week, Garwin reflected on this and other episodes in his lifetime of problem solving and technical innovation. He spoke to post-doctoral researchers from the Harvard Physics Department. See Serendipities from Long Ago by Richard L. Garwin, keynote address, September 11, 2019.

How did he come up with solar sailing?

“As physicists do, I had been thinking about how things worked or could work and learned about radiation pressure, as did everybody in high school,” he said.

Not everyone grasped the concept immediately, Garwin noted.

“I recall that when the Chief Scientist of the U.S. Air Force was asked about this proposal at a press conference, he explained that even if it would work, it could only be used for going outward beyond Earth orbit around the Sun and not for going inward, because radiation pressure was radially outward from the Sun.”

“What he missed, of course, was that the fact that the sail was in Earth orbit or, for that matter solar orbit, meant that a reflective sail could be angled so as to provide a force perpendicular to the sail, that would have a component either along the velocity vector or in the opposite direction, so that the orbital velocity component could be increased or reduced; thus, the SS could either gain or lose energy and so spiral in or out from the Sun, or in Earth orbit.”

A new White House budget memo presents science and technology as a distinctly American-led enterprise in which U.S. dominance is to be maintained and reinforced. The document is silent on the possibility or the necessity of international scientific cooperation.

“The five R&D budgetary priorities in this memorandum ensure that America remains at the forefront of scientific progress, national and economic security, and personal wellbeing, while continuing to serve as the standard-bearer for today’s emerging technologies and Industries of the Future,” wrote Acting OMB Director Russell T. Vought and White House science advisor Dr. Kelvin K. Droegemeier in the August 30 memo.

The document, which is intended to inform executive branch budget planning for fiscal year 2021, contains no acknowledgment that many scientific challenges are global in scope, that foreign countries lead the U.S. in some areas of science and technology, or that the U.S. could actually benefit from international collaboration.

*    *    *

The White House memo begins by designating the entire post-World War II period until now as America’s “First Bold Era in S&T [Science & Technology].” It goes on to proclaim that the “Second Bold Era in S&T” has now begun under President Trump.

“The Trump Administration continues to prioritize the technologies that power Industries of the Future (IotF),” the memo declares.

Many of the proposed technology priorities are already in progress — including artificial intelligence, robotics, and gene therapy. Some are controversial or disputed — such as the purported need to invest in protection against electromagnetic pulse attacks.

Meanwhile, the memo takes pains to avoid even mentioning the term “climate change,” which is disfavored by this White House. Instead, it speaks of “Earth system predictability” and “knowing the extent to which components of the Earth system are practically predictable.”

Today’s Second Bold Era is “characterized by unprecedented knowledge, access to data and computing resources, ubiquitous and instant communication,” and so on. “Unfortunately, this Second Bold Era also features new and extraordinary threats which must be confronted thoughtfully and effectively.”

The White House guidance suggests vaguely that the Second Bold Era could require a recalibration of secrecy policy in science and technology. “[Success] will depend upon striking a balance between the openness of our research ecosystem and the protection of our ideas and research outcomes.”

This may or may not augur a change in the longstanding policy of openness in basic research that was formally adopted in President Reagan’s 1985 National Security Decision Directive 189. That directive stated that “It is the policy of this Administration that, to the maximum extent possible, the products of fundamental research remain unrestricted.”

*    *    *

The context for the concern about protecting U.S. ideas and research outcomes is an assessment that U.S. intellectual property is being aggressively targeted and illicitly acquired by China, among other countries.

“China has expansive efforts in place to acquire U.S. technology to include sensitive trade secrets and proprietary information,” according to a 2018 report from the National Counterintelligence and Security Center. “Chinese companies and individuals often acquire U.S. technology for commercial and scientific purposes.”

Perceived Chinese theft of U.S. intellectual property is one of the factors that led to imposition of U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports. See U.S.-China Relations, Congressional Research Service, August 29, 2019.

*    *    *

At an August 30 briefing on artificial intelligence in the Department of Defense, Air Force Lt. General Jack Shanahan discussed the need to protect military data in the context of AI.

But unlike the new White House memo, Gen. Shanahan recognized the need for international cooperation even (or especially) in national security matters:

“We’re very interested in actively engaging a number of international partners,” he said, “because if you envision a future of which the United States is employing A.I. in its military capabilities and other nations are not, what does that future look like? Does the commander trust one and not the other?”

By analogy, however, the same need for international collaboration arises in many other areas of science and technology which cannot be effectively addressed solely on a national basis, from mitigating climate change to combating disease. In such cases, everyone needs to be “at the forefront” together.

*    *    *

One way to bolster U.S. scientific and intellectual leadership that the White House memo does not contemplate is to encourage foreign students at American universities to remain in this country. Too often, they are discouraged from doing so, wrote Columbia University Lee C. Bollinger in the Washington Post.

“Many of these international scholars, especially in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, would, if permitted, prefer to remain in the United States and work for U.S.-based companies after graduation, where they could also contribute to the United States’ economic growth and prosperity. But under the present rules, when their academic studies are completed, we make it difficult for them to stay. They return to their countries with the extraordinary knowledge they acquired here, which can inform future commercial strategies deployed against U.S. competitors,” Bollinger wrote on August 30.

*    *    *

As for the Trump Administration’s pending FY2020 budget request for research and development, it does not convey much in the way of boldness (or Boldness).

“Under the President’s FY2020 budget request, most federal agencies would see their R&D funding decline. The primary exception is the Department of Defense,” according to the Congressional Research Service.

“The President’s FY2020 budget request would reduce funding for basic research by $1.5 billion (4.0%), applied research by $4.3 billion (10.5%), and facilities and equipment by $0.5 billion (12.8%), while increasing funding for development by $4.5 billion (8.3%).” See Federal Research and Development (R&D) Funding: FY2020, updated August 13, 2019.

The Department of Defense decision not to renew the underlying contract for the independent JASON scientific advisory panel drew criticism from a bipartisan, bicameral group of congressmen and senators.

“We believe that cancelling the JASON contract could damage our national security by depriving not only the Pentagon, but also other national security agencies, of sober and sound advice in confronting some of the Nation’s most complex threats,” the members wrote on May 3.

They noted that the National Nuclear Security Administration had recently intervened to sustain the JASONs for the coming year.

“However,” they wrote, “given the national security interests involved in cancellation of the JASON contract, a permanent solution must be found. We encourage you to work with NNSA and the other agencies that utilize JASON to find an appropriate long-term home for JASON, whether it be Research and Engineering, another office, such as Acquisition and Sustainment, or NNSA.”

If the JASONs’ current sponsor at Defense Research and Engineering is indifferent to or uninterested in the work of JASON, it would be pointless to compel continued sponsorship of the group there. But other agencies such as NNSA have an interest in preserving JASON, as does Congress itself.

“Members of Congress have long counted on their nonpartisan, independent, science-based advice to inform our decisions on a range of national security issues facing our nation, such as nuclear weapons, space, and emerging technologies,” the members wrote. They posed a series of questions about the Pentagon’s handling of the JASON contract and they asked the Acting Secretary of Defense to cooperate in resolving the issue.

Last week a Freedom of Information Act request for a copy of a 2016 JASON report entitled “Counterspace” was denied on appeal by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The unclassified JASON report is exempt from FOIA as deliberative material and because it contains arms export control information, DARPA said.

Updated below

In a startling blow to the system of independent science and technology advice, the Department of Defense decided not to renew its support for the JASON defense science advisory panel, it was disclosed yesterday.

“Were you aware that [the JASON contract] has been summarily terminated by the Pentagon?”

That was one of the first questions asked by Rep. Jim Cooper, chair of the House Armed Services Committee Strategic Forces Subcommittee, at a hearing yesterday (at about 40’20”).

NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty replied that she was aware that the Pentagon had taken some action, and said that she had asked her staff to find out more. She noted that NNSA has an interest in maintaining the viability of the JASON panel, particularly since “We do have some ongoing studies with JASON.”

In fact, JASON performs technical studies for many agencies inside and outside of the national security bureaucracy and it is highly regarded for the quality of its work.

So why is the Pentagon threatening its future?

Even to insiders, the DoD’s thought process is obscure and uncertain.

“To understand it you first have to understand the existing contract structure,” one official said. “This is a bit arcane, but MITRE currently has an Indefinite Delivery / Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract with the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), the purpose of which is to manage and operate the JASON effort. However, you don’t actually do anything with an IDIQ contract; rather, the purpose of the IDIQ contract [is to] have Task Orders (TO’s) placed on it. These TO’s are essentially mini-contracts in and of themselves, and all the actual work is performed according to the TO’s. This structure allows any government agency to commission a JASON study; conceptually, all you need to do is just open another TO for that study. (The reality is slightly more complicated, but that’s the basic idea).”

“The underlying IDIQ contract has a 5-year period of performance, which just expired on March 31. Last November, OSD started the process of letting a new 5-year IDIQ contract with essentially the same structure so that the cycle could continue. They decided to compete the contract, solicited bids, and were going to announce the contract award in mid-March. Instead, what happened is that about two weeks ago (March 28, two days before the expiration of the existing IDIQ contract) they announced that they were canceling the solicitation and would not be awarding another contract at all. Instead, they offered to award a single contract for a single study without the IDIQ structure that allows other agencies to commission studies.”

But “I do not know the reason” for the cancellation, the official said.

And so far, those who do know are not talking. The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Research and Engineering) “would not answer any questions or discuss the matter in any way whatsoever.”

The news was first reported in “Storied Jason science advisory group loses contract with Pentagon” by Jeffrey Mervis and Ann Finkbeiner in Science magazine, and was first noticed by Stephen Young.

The JASON panel has performed studies (many of which are classified) for federal agencies including the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, as well as the Census Bureau and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Lately, the Department of Agriculture denied a Freedom of Information Act request for a copy of a 2016 JASON report that it had sponsored entitled “New Techniques for Evaluating Crop Production.” The unclassified report is exempt from disclosure under the deliberative process privilege, USDA lawyers said. That denial is under appeal.

The Pentagon move to cancel the JASON contract appears to be part of a larger trend by federal agencies to limit independent scientific and technical advice. As noted by Rep. Cooper at yesterday’s hearing, the Navy also lately terminated its longstanding Naval Research Advisory Committee.

Update, 4/25/19: National Public Radio and Defense News reported that the National Nuclear Security Administration has posted a solicitation to take over the JASON contract from the Department of Defense.

This week the U.S. Navy abruptly terminated its own scientific advisory group, depriving the service of a source of internal critique and evaluation.

The Naval Research Advisory Committee (NRAC) was established by legislation in 1946 and provided science and technology advice to the Navy for the past 73 years. Now it’s gone.

The decision to disestablish the Committee was announced in a March 29 Federal Register notice, which did not provide any justification for eliminating it. Phone and email messages to the office of the Secretary of the Navy seeking more information were not returned.

“I think it’s a shortsighted move,” said one Navy official, who was not part of the decisionmaking process.

This official said that the Committee had been made vulnerable by an earlier effort to reduce the number of Navy advisory committees. Instead of remaining an independent entity, the NRAC was redesignated as a sub-committee of the Secretary of the Navy Advisory Panel, which provides policy advice to the Secretary. It was a poor fit for the NRAC technologists, the official said, since they don’t do policy and were thus “misaligned.” When the Secretary decided to eliminate the Panel, the NRAC was swept away with it.

Did the NRAC do or say something in particular to trigger the Navy’s wrath? If so, it’s unclear what that might have been. “This is the most highly professional crew I’ve seen,” the Navy official said. “They stay between the lines.”

The NRAC was the Navy counterpart to the Army Science Board and the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. It has no obvious replacement.

“This will leave the Navy without an independent and objective technical advisory body, which is not in the best interests of the Navy or the nation,” said a Navy scientist.

According to the NRAC website (which is still online for now), “The Naval Research Advisory Committee (NRAC) is an independent civilian scientific advisory group dedicated to providing objective analyses in the areas of science, research and development. By its recommendations, the NRAC calls attention to important issues and presents Navy management with alternative courses of action.”

Its mission was “To know the problems of the Navy and Marine Corps, keep abreast of the current research and development programs, and provide an independent, objective assessment capability through investigative studies.”

A 2017 report on Autonomous and Unmanned Systems in the Department of the Navy appears to be the NRAC’s most recent unclassified published report.

Under Secretary of the Navy Thomas B. Modly ordered disestablishment of the NRAC in a 21 February 2019 memo.

“This was a sudden and unexpected move according to people I know,” said the Navy scientist.  “I have not yet seen an explanation for its termination.”

The JASON scientific advisory panel cautiously endorsed further research into what is known as Magneto-Inertial Fusion (MIF) as a step towards achieving fusion-generated electricity.

“Magneto-Inertial Fusion (MIF) is a physically plausible approach to studying controlled thermonuclear fusion in a region of parameter space that is less explored than Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) or Magnetic Confinement Fusion (MCF).”

“Despite having received ~1% the funding of MCF and ICF, MIF experiments have made rapid progress in recent years toward break-even conditions,” the JASONs said in a report to the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) late last year.

Even so, “Given the immaturity of the technologies, the future ability of fusion-generated electricity to meet commercial constraints cannot be usefully assessed. Rapidly developing infrastructures for natural gas and renewable energy sources and storage will compete with any future commercial fusion efforts.”

See Prospects for Low Cost Fusion Development, JASON Report JSR-18-011, November 2018.

The fusion report is one of two unclassified reports prepared by the JASONs in 2018. (Release of the second is pending.) The other twelve reports from last year are classified.

The New York Times recently provided an overview of fusion research in Clean, Abundant Energy: Fusion Dreams Never End by C. Claiborne Ray, January 11, 2019.

Meanwhile, the Federation of American Scientists warned that the current shutdown of federal agencies threatens many aspects of U.S. science and technology.

“The partial government shutdown is compromising the very research that is important to the health and security of our nation. Important scientific breakthroughs could be compromised or lost with each and every day that the shutdown continues,” FAS said in a January 16 letter to the White House and Congress.

“We therefore urge you to open the federal government, send researchers back to work at their agencies, and allow science to flourish throughout the United States.”

“It is DoD policy to support a culture of scientific and engineering integrity,” according to a Department of Defense directive that was reissued last week.

This is in large part a matter of self-interest, since the Department depends upon the availability of competent and credible scientists and engineers.

“Science and engineering play a vital role in the DoD’s mission, providing one of several critical inputs to policy and systems acquisition decision making. The DoD recognizes the importance of scientific and engineering information, and science and engineering as methods for maintaining and enhancing its effectiveness and its credibility with the public.  The DoD is dedicated to preserving the integrity of the scientific and engineering activities it conducts.”

Several practical consequences flow from this policy that are spelled out in the directive, including:

–Permitting publication of fundamental research results

–Making scientific and engineering information available on the Internet

–Making articulate and knowledgeable spokespersons available to the media upon request for interviews on science and engineering

The policy further states that:

–Federal scientists and engineers may speak to the media and to the public about scientific and technical matters based on their official work with appropriate coordination with the scientists’ or engineers’ organizations.

–DoD approval to speak to the media or the public shall not be unreasonably delayed or withheld.

–In no circumstance may DoD personnel ask or direct scientists or engineers to alter or suppress their professional findings, although they may suggest that factual errors be corrected.

The reaffirmation of such principles, which were originally adopted in 2012, does not guarantee their consistent application in practice. But it does provide a point of reference and a foothold for defending scientific integrity in the Department.

See Scientific and Engineering Integrity, DoD Instruction 3200.20, July 26, 2012, Incorporating Change 1, December 5, 2017.

The US and China have successfully carried out a wide range of cooperative science and technology projects in recent years, the State Department told Congress last year in a newly released report.

Joint programs between government agencies on topics ranging from pest control to elephant conservation to clean energy evidently worked to the benefit of both countries.

“Science and technology engagement with the United States continues to be highly valued by the Chinese government,” the report said.

At the same time, “Cooperative activities also accelerated scientific progress in the United States and provided significant direct benefit to a range of U.S. technical agencies.”

The 2016 biennial report to Congress, released last week under the Freedom of Information Act, describes programs that were ongoing in 2014-2015.

See Implementation of Agreement between the United States and China on Science and Technology, report to Congress, US Department of State, April 2016.