Section 101. (a) The Congress, recognizing the profound impact of science and technology on society, and the interrelations of scientific, technological, economic, social, political, and institutional factors, hereby finds and declares that—

1. (1) the general welfare, the security, the economic health and stability of the Nation, the conservation and efficient utilization of its natural and human resources, and the effective functioning of government and society require vigorous, perceptive support and employment of science and technology in achieving national objectives;
2. (2) the many large and complex scientific and technological factors which increasingly influence the course of national and international events require appropriate provision, involving long-range, inclusive planning as well as more immediate program development, to incorporate scientific and technological knowledge in the national decision-making process;
3. (3) the scientific and technological capabilities of the United States, when properly fostered, applied, and directed, can effectively assist in improving the quality of life, in anticipating and resolving critical and emerging international, national, and local problems, in strengthening the Nation's international economic position, and in furthering its foreign policy objectives;
4. (4) Federal funding for science and technology represents an investment in the future which is indispensable to sustained national progress and human betterment, and there should be a continuing national investment in science, engineering, and technology which is commensurate with national needs and opportunities and the prevalent economic situation;
5. (5) the manpower pool of scientists, engineers, and technicians, constitutes an invaluable national resource which should be utilized to the fullest extent possible; and
6. (6) the Nation's capabilities for technology assessment and for technological planning and policy formulation must be strengthened at both Federal and State levels.
   1. (b) As a consequence, the Congress finds and declares that science and technology should contribute to the following priority goals without being limited thereto:
7. (1) fostering leadership in the quest for international peace and progress toward human freedom, dignity, and well-being by enlarging the contributions of American scientists and engineers to the knowledge of man and his universe, by making discoveries of basic science widely available at home and abroad, and by utilizing technology in support of United States national and foreign policy goals;
8. (2) increasing the efficient use of essential materials and products, and generally contributing to economic opportunity, stability, and appropriate growth
9. (3) assuring an adequate supply of food, materials, and energy for the Nation's needs
10. (4) contributing to the national security
11. (5) improving the quality of health care available to all residents of the United States
12. (6) preserving, fostering, and restoring a healthful and esthetic natural environment;
13. (7) providing for the protection of the oceans and coastal zones, and the polar regions, and the efficient utilization of their resources;
14. (8) strengthening the economy and promoting full employment through useful scientific and technological innovations;
15. (9) increasing the quality of educational opportunities available to all residents of the United States;
16. (10) promoting the conservation and efficient utilization of the Nation's natural and human resources;
17. (11) improving the Nation's housing, transportation, and communication systems, and assuring the provision of effective public services throughout urban, suburban, and rural areas;
18. (12) eliminating air and water pollution, and unnecessary, unhealthful, or ineffective drugs and food additives; an
19. (13) advancing the exploration and peaceful uses of outer space.

Declaration of Policy

Section 102. (a) PRINCIPLES.—In view of the foregoing, the Congress declares that the United States shall adhere to a national policy for science and technology which includes the following principles:

1. (1) The continuing development and implementation of strategies for determining and achieving the appropriate scope, level, direction, and extent of scientific and technological efforts based upon a continuous appraisal of the role of science and technology in achieving goals and formulating policies of the United States, and reflecting the views of State and local governments and representative public groups.
2. (2) The enlistment of science and technology to foster a healthy economy in which the directions of growth and innovation are compatible with the prudent and frugal use of resources and with the preservation of a benign environment.
3. (3) The conduct of science and technology operations so as to serve domestic needs while promoting foreign policy objectives.
4. (4) The recruitment, education, training, retraining, and beneficial use of adequate numbers of scientists, engineers, and technologists, and the promotion by the Federal Government of the effective and efficient utilization in the national interest of the Nation's human resources in science, engineering, and technology.
5. (5) The development and maintenance of a solid base for science and technology in the United States, including: (A) strong participation of and cooperative relationships with State and local governments and the private sector; (B) the maintenance and strengthening of diversified scientific and technological capabilities in government industry, and the universities, and the encouragement of independent initiatives based on such capabilities, together with elimination of needless barriers to scientific and technological innovation; (C) effective management and dissemination of scientific and technological information; (D) establishment of essential scientific, technical and industrial standards and measurement and test methods; and (E) promotion of increased public understanding of science and technology.
6. (6) The recognition that, as changing circumstances require periodic revision and adaptation of title I of this Act, the Federal Government is responsible for identifying and interpreting the changes in those circumstances as they occur, and for effecting subsequent changes in title I as appropriate.

(b) IMPLEMENTATION.—To implement the policy enunciated in subsection (a) of this section, the Congress declares that:

1. (1) The Federal Government should maintain central policy planning elements in the executive branch which assist Federal agencies in (A) identifying public problems and objectives, (B) mobilizing scientific and technological resources for essential national programs, (C) securing appropriate funding for programs so identified, (D) anticipating future concerns to which science and technology can contribute and devising strategies for the conduct of science and technology for such purposes, (E) reviewing systematically Federal science policy and programs and recommending legislative amendment thereof when needed. Such elements should include an advisory mechanism within the Executive Office of the President so that the Chief Executive may have available independent, expert judgment and assistance on policy matters which require accurate assessments of the complex scientific and technological features involved…

The three succeeding titles created Executive Branch machinery intended to implement the legislative goals. The following excerpts from the 1976 act capture the essence of the three components: The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the President’s Committee on Science and Technology, and the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (FCCSET).

Section 201. This title may be cited as the “Presidential Science and Technology Advisory Organization Act of 1976.”

Establishment

Section 202. There is established in the Executive Office of the President an Office of Science and Technology Policy (hereinafter referred to in this title as the “Office”).

Director: Associate Directors

Section 203. There shall be at the head of the Office a Director who shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate… The President is authorized to appoint not more than four Associate Directors, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate… Associate Directors shall perform such functions as the Director may prescribe.

Functions

Section 204. (a) The primary function of the Director is to provide, within the Executive Office of the President, advice on the scientific, engineering, and technological aspects of issues that require attention at the highest levels of Government…

Section 301. The President shall establish within the Executive Office of the President a President's Committee on Science and Technology (hereinafter referred to as the “Committee”).

Membership

Section 302. (a) The Committee shall consist of—

1. (1) the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy established under title II of this Act; and
2. (2) not less than eight nor more than fourteen other members appointed by the President…

Federal Science, Engineering, and Technology Survey

Section 303. (a) The Committee shall survey, examine, and analyze the overall context of the Federal science, engineering, and technology effort including missions, goals, personnel, funding, organization, facilities, and activities in general, taking adequate account of the interests of individuals and groups that may be affected by Federal scientific, engineering, and technical programs, including, as appropriate, consultation with such individuals and groups…

Section 401. (a) There is established the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering, and Technology (hereinafter referred to as the “Council”).

(b) The Council shall be composed of the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and one representative of each of the following Federal agencies: Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of the Interior, Department of State, Department of Transportation, Veterans' Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, and Energy Research and Development Administration…

(c) The Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy shall serve as Chairman of the Council…

(e) The Council shall consider problems and developments in the fields of science, engineering, and technology and related activities affecting more than one Federal agency, and shall recommend policies and other measures designed to—

1. (1) provide more effective planning and administration of Federal scientific, engineering, and technological programs,
2. (2) identify research needs including areas requiring additional emphasis,
3. (3) achieve more effective utilization of the scientific, engineering, and technological resources and facilities of Federal agencies, including the elimination of unwarranted duplication, and
4. (4) further international cooperation in science, engineering, and technology…

The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has played the role envisioned for it in the 1976 legislation, essentially unchanged, although its prominence and effectiveness have waxed and waned dramatically with different administrations.⁴ It had little, if any, influence during the Reagan years, and it largely flew under the radar during George W. Bush’s first term. However, its lack of clout during those periods pales by comparison with its phantom profile during the beginning of Donald Trump’s administration. It took more than 18 months from the time he took office for Trump to name a science advisor who would serve as OSTP’s director. Its skeleton staff virtually guaranteed that OSTP would be consigned to obscurity, presumably consistent with the low esteem in which Trump held science.

It really does take a president who values science and technology, elevates its place in the policy arena, and vests his science advisor with enough authority to make OSTP a serious Washington player. That happened during George H.W. Bush’s presidency and in the final 3 years of Bill Clinton’s second term. But without question, Barack Obama gave OSTP its greatest visibility. In addition to valuing science and technology for the benefits they delivered to society, Obama loved science as an intellectual pursuit. He was, in the truest sense of the word, a science geek.

By contrast with OSTP, two committees specified in the 1976 act—the President’s Committee on Science and Technology and the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (FCCSET)—have undergone name changes, alterations in structure, and for periods of time, complete suspensions of activity. Carter began the mischief with an executive order⁵ in 1977, abolishing the President’s Committee, he said, not because he harbored a distaste for science and technology—after all, he had studied nuclear physics and reactor technology—but rather because he thought there were simply too many standing presidential committees. Four years later, George (“Jay”) Keyworth, Reagan’s science advisor, persuaded his boss to take a less draconian approach, recasting the committee as the White House Science Council, but with a much smaller membership than the 1976 act had authorized, and with the stipulation that it report to Keyworth rather than the president, as the original legislation had envisioned.

The Federal Coordinating Council fared no better. The 1976 legislation gave OSTP responsibility for FCCSET, enabling Congress to scrutinize its operations, and as a consequence, giving the Council much-needed teeth. But Carter’s 1977 executive order removed OSTP from the picture entirely, relegating FCCSET to a White House committee chaired by Frank Press, his science advisor, thereby shielding it from congressional oversight. During Reagan’s first term, FCCSET was completely missing in action. It reemerged in 1985 at the start of his second term, but it was not at all effective.

Four years later, George H.W. Bush entered the Oval Office, and appointed as his science advisor D. Allan Bromley, a Yale nuclear physicist with a personality big enough to grab anyone’s attention, even in a city like Washington, where outsized egos are common calling cards. Bush gave Bromley top billing, authorizing him to raise the profile of science technology within the Administration, as well as in the nation. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)^6,7 emerged as one of the enduring Bush-Bromley White House creations. Since its initiation in 1990, every succeeding president⁸ has rechartered it. Bromley also succeeded in reinvigorating FCCSET, and it, too, has remained a White House fixture, although since 1993, under a different name—the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC).⁹

Jimmy Carter was one of the most improbable of American presidents. Although his graduate education had a technology focus, his campaign-trail persona belied any interest in science. He was the home-spun peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia.

Little known to the public outside his native state before he began his presidential run, it is quite likely Carter would not have won the 1976 race against incumbent Gerald Ford, if Ford had not pardoned Richard Nixon for his Watergate crimes just a month after Nixon resigned. The nation was tired of the Watergate scandal, tired of Washington muck, and tired of the political establishment. Ford had attempted to clear the air of the Watergate miasma with his pardon, but voters wanted to clean house entirely. It was far from a rout, but Carter’s unlikely coalition of Southern and Northeastern Democrats and his reformist message carried him into the White House.

Watergate and impeachment might have vanished the from the front pages of newspapers, but not so for energy. In 1977, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), led by Saudi Arabia, still had the world’s consuming nations in a stranglehold. And the United States was one of the most vulnerable. That year, America imported nearly half the oil it used—9 million barrels out of a total of 19 million—of which OPEC nations supplied 70%.¹⁰ Carter and the newly elected Congress were determined to do something about the threat those numbers conveyed. The result was the creation of the Department of Energy with full Cabinet status. The Findings section of the 1977 “Department of Energy Organization Act”¹¹ capture the sense of urgency:

Findings

Section 101. The Congress of the United States finds that—

1. (1) the United States faces an increasing shortage of nonrenewable energy resources;
2. (2) this energy shortage and our increasing dependence on foreign energy supplies present a serious threat to the national security of the United States and to the health, safety and welfare of its citizens;
3. (3) a strong national energy program is needed to meet the present and future energy needs of the Nation consistent with overall national economic, environmental and social goals;
4. (4) responsibility for energy policy, regulation, and research, development and demonstration is fragmented in many departments and agencies and thus does not allow for the comprehensive, centralized focus necessary for effective coordination of energy supply and conservation programs; and
5. (5) formulation and implementation of a national energy program require the integration of major Federal energy functions into a single department in the executive branch.

The legislation, which Carter signed on August 4, 1977, placed energy activities throughout the federal government under a new Department of Energy (DOE) umbrella. It subsumed the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA)—which had been created only 3 years before—and it transferred programs from departments as diverse as Commerce, Defense, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, and Transportation. It also established three new federal offices within the DOE: The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the Energy Information Administration (EIA), and the Economic Regulatory Administration (ERA). Finally, it mandated that “The President prepare and submit to Congress a proposed National Energy Policy Plan” every 2 years.

What emerged was more a messy assortment of individual federal programs and activities than a smoothly functioning energy policy engine. Years later, despite some extraordinary successes—especially in scientific research—the DOE still had the reputation in many quarters of being the most unwieldy, disjointed, and dysfunctional bureaucracy in the federal government. Without question, though, it lost that distinction in 2002 when Congress, operating in crisis mode following the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001, created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In both cases, Congress used a blunt legislative tool to simply marry federal programs that had very diverse rationales and cultures and hope for the best. The outcomes were similar.

Today, the public and many elected officials don’t recognize the extent to which the DOE and DHS are intertwined with science and technology. The Energy Department not only manages the nation’s high-tech nuclear arsenal, it is the steward of the national laboratory system and the $5-billion portfolio of fundamental research in the physical sciences. Yet, prior to being nominated for the department’s top position, two Secretaries of Energy, Spencer Abraham¹² and Rick Perry,¹³ publicly espoused eliminating the department. They changed their minds after learning—mostly on the job—what DOE’s responsibilities actually were.

In the case of DHS, even cognoscenti are often in the dark about its science and technology nexus. But it is a department whose mission relies extraordinarily on those capabilities. Here’s how it describes its “S&T” ties: “Technology and threats evolve rapidly in today’s ever-changing environment. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) monitors those threats and capitalizes on technological advancements at a rapid pace, developing solutions and bridging capability gaps at a pace that mirrors the speed of life. S&T’s mission is to deliver effective and innovative insight, methods, and solutions for the critical needs of the Homeland Security Enterprise.”¹⁴

The DOE and DHS chronicles illustrate a major science and technology conundrum. Policymakers often look to science for help in responding to major security crises, but they rarely feature science in their public utterances. The names DOE and DHS, appropriately conveyed the essence of the crises—energy vulnerability in 1977 and homeland vulnerability in 2002—but did nothing to convey the crucial connection of the departments’ missions to science and technology. Once a crisis passes, as it invariably must, public interest wanes, the names lose much of their emotional impact, and science, to the extent that it was ever part of the public’s consciousness, is all but forgotten—until the next crisis comes along.

Jimmy Carter’s term in office was plagued by rising inflation, natural gas and oil shortages, and soaring energy prices. Anyone who watched his first televised address, delivered two weeks after he was elected president, cannot help but remember it.¹⁵ Wearing a sweater and seated next to a roaring fireplace in the White House library, he grimly laid out his vision for the future.

Large parts of the country had been in a deep freeze since the beginning of winter, and energy supplies were dangerously low when Carter entered the Oval Office. His was a somber speech delivered by a president with a demeanor to match. He called for common sacrifice and conservation, painting a decidedly pessimistic picture of the nation’s condition. His assessment was bleak, as the following excerpt from his February 2, 1977 address illustrates:¹⁶

Only the last sentence from the excerpt offers any hope. And his final words ended on a similarly dour note:

Carter was genuinely concerned about energy, and he knew that science and technology held the keys to solving the problem.¹⁷ But he had difficulty conveying such a message to a public that was, in the main, scientifically illiterate. Although he spoke about energy with great regularity, his tone and choice of words didn’t help him cut through the fog of public ignorance and distrust, as his “Energy Address to the Nation”¹⁸ on April 5, 1979 illustrates.

The balance of the address was no better in suggesting a plausibly optimistic path forward.

A poll taken not long after the speech showed how little trust the American people had in him and how poorly his message resonated with them. According to the NBC/Associated Press survey, more than half the public considered the entire energy crisis a hoax.¹⁹ Carter’s communication skills were part of the problem, but his difficulty also illustrated how hard it is to craft public policies when the public doesn’t have the technical background to understand their rationale.

Carter’s hope of a winning reelection to a second term was rapidly vanishing. The Iran hostage crisis, which began on November 4, 1979, pretty well killed it. Students in Teheran, who supported the Iranian Islamic revolution, stormed the American Embassy and captured 52 U.S. citizens. With negotiations for their release stalled, Carter approved a risky a helicopter rescue attempt that April. It failed spectacularly, and as voters went to the polls in November 1980, there was still no sign the crisis would soon be resolved. Between the energy and Iran fiascos, Carter’s days in the White House would end in a blowout. He carried only six states plus the District of Columbia, capturing a scant 49 out of 538 electoral votes and receiving only 41% of the popular vote. [Ironically, negotiations finally led to the release of the hostages on January 20, 1981, the same day Carter departed Washington.²⁰]

Ronald Reagan took the oath of office on January 20, 1981 as the 40th president of the United States. He had built his campaign around a promise to rejuvenate the American economy that had been suffering from a combination of low growth and high inflation—a condition called “stagflation”—since the 1973 Arab oil embargo. In contrast to Carter, Reagan exuded optimism, and he had built his campaign around the slogan, “Let’s Make America Great Again.” It harkened back to the days before Nixon, Ford, and Carter; before the Watergate scandal, the Arab oil embargo and the Iran hostage crisis; before a looming impeachment; a policy of price controls and a plea for self-sacrifice. [Unlike Donald Trump’s use of the phrase, “Make America Great Again,” was not rooted in racist or ethnic politics.]

During his two terms in the White House, Reagan championed policies that became the blueprint for conservative Republicans until Donald Trump’s election in 2016. His prescriptions for science and technology can be summed up in relatively few words. The federal government should support research that either advances military objectives or lies outside the domain of industry. Defense research and development and long-term basic research should be in the federal portmanteau. Applied research and development should not. It’s that simple.

Ronald Reagan was fond of using the radio to communicate with the American people. In the spring of 1988, he took to the airways to speak about the federal role in scientific research—not exactly a subject that would compete for ratings with his addresses on the Persian Gulf conflict, the war on drugs, or the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. But, as his presidency was winding down, he finally affirmed his commitment to basic research and his faith in scientific progress, issues he had largely ignored during the prior 7 years.

Whether he had gotten religion on science, himself, or whether his science advisor at the time, William Graham, a physicist with a background in national security, had sparked the epiphany, is not clear, but Reagan used his bully pulpit to deliver a science sermon. His address allowed him to identify the tangible benefits of research and to express support for two extremely costly projects, the Superconducting Supercollider and the Space Station Freedom—neither of which, as the future unfolded, would make it to the finish line. But above of all, it provided him with the opportunity in his opening and closing words to frame science as a vessel of hope. In that regard, he was far ahead of his time.

Scientists, politicians, and policymakers traditionally have held science in high esteem because of its contributions to the public good—for advancing defense, medicine, economic growth, energy, and the environment, all demonstrably true. But in 2016, the first comprehensive studies²¹ of public attitudes toward science revealed that Reagan’s view of science as hope for the future is really how the public thinks about it in positive terms. These are his words:²²

Reagan campaigned for election in 1980 as a hardline Cold Warrior, and during his first term, he hewed to that philosophy, rarely abandoning it and constantly stressing the need for strength against a Soviet enemy whom he characterized as “an evil empire.”²³ But his anti-Soviet rhetoric masked his great fear of a nuclear mistake. He saw that risk as an unavoidable weakness in the doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD), which had underpinned U.S. nuclear strategy for more than a quarter of a century.

The MAD premise was simple. Both the United States and the Soviet Union would stockpile so many nuclear weapons that a first strike by one nation could be met with an unacceptably devastating response by the other. It had worked up to that point, but it was decidedly dangerous. In the words of Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s defense secretary, it was essentially a “mutual suicide pact.”²⁴ On March 23, 1983, in an address to the nation, Reagan unveiled his alternative with these words:²⁵

Many foreign policy and arms control experts immediately attacked the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), as the program was known, asserting that it violated the ABM Treaty, which the United States and the Soviet Union had signed in 1972.²⁶ (The treaty originally limited each party to two ground-based missile defense sites, one near its capital and the other near an intercontinental ballistic missile launching site. Two years later, both nations agreed to an amendment that reduced the number of sites to one.) The Reagan Administration pushed back strongly, maintaining that SDI conformed to the treaty because it was not a deployment program, but rather a scientific and technological research initiative.

As research programs go, it was a huge one, receiving annual funding of $3 billion by 1987. Known derisively by its critics as “Star Wars” because a large part of its program focused on space-based systems, SDI was one of the star attractions in Reagan’s defense research and development budget. It might have weathered the criticism from the arms control community, but it couldn’t withstand the technological scrutiny of the scientific community.

The congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) weighed in just a year after Reagan released his plan, giving it an unequivocal thumbs-down. And in July 1987, the American Physical Society, responding to a request by the Defense Department, released a comprehensive technical report, which contained the following assessment: “We estimate that even in the best of circumstances, a decade or more of intensive research would be required to provide the technical knowledge needed for an informed decision about the potential effectiveness and survivability of directed energy weapon systems. In addition, the important issues of overall system integration and effectiveness depend critically upon information that, to our knowledge, does not yet exist.”²⁷

The blunt wording left no doubt that SDI faced extraordinarily difficult—if not insurmountable—challenges, and that any hope of producing the required military hardware anytime soon was little more than a pipe dream. In the face of such a judgment by some of the nation’s most respected physicists, SDI began to lose support in Congress. Its budget withered, and by 1993, it ceased to exist.

But in spite of its ignominious end, SDI is credited by some historians as accelerating the collapse of the Soviet Union. They contend that it showcased America’s advanced technical capabilities, which was no match for the Soviet’s. Whether that stratagem was in the back of Reagan’s mind when he first proposed the program remains a matter of debate. But if it was, it demonstrates how science and technology can be used to achieve national policy goals, even before they are ready for prime time.

Reagan was focused more on national security than on health issues. But 6 months after he took the oath of office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported five cases of an unusual lung infection in five gay Los Angeles men. Their immune systems were failing, and within a week of their diagnoses, two had died. It was the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.²⁸

The Reagan White House was seemingly detached from the issue. But on Capitol Hill, there were early signs of action. Henry Waxman, a Democratic representative from Los Angeles and chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, convened the first hearing on HIV/AIDS on April 13, 1982. Later that summer, Waxman and his fellow House member from San Francisco, Philip Burton, introduced legislation to fund AIDS research at the National Institutes of Health. The following year, Congress finally put some money on the table, appropriating $12 million for AIDS research. The bet paid off quickly: On April 23, 1984, NIH announced that Dr. Robert Gallo and his colleagues at the National Cancer Institute had definitively identified the virus that caused AIDS.

By 1985, AIDS funding had climbed to $70 million, and on September 15 that year, Ronald Reagan finally pledged to make AIDS one of his priorities. The National Institutes of Health was now fully engaged, but more importantly, the Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, issued a report in October 1986 calling for schools and parents to counsel children about the dangers of unprotected sex.

Almost 6 years had passed since the CDC had reported the first AIDS cases, and Ronald Reagan had yet to address the epidemic publicly. That changed on May 31, 1987, when he spoke at the American Foundation for AIDS Research awards dinner. His remarks are worth reading because they reveal how important it is for a president to be fully engaged if science policy is to deliver public benefits:²⁹

Budgets are important, but so too is the bully pulpit. It took Reagan time to get on board, but once he did, his words were sincere, resonant, and compelling. Although AIDS would continue to be a national health problem long after he left office, his 1987 speech must be regarded as a turning point. The HIV/AIDS story drives home a significant point: Putting teeth into federal science and technology policies often requires getting a presidential imprimatur. Without it, policies can languish for years with few tangible outcomes.

George H.W. Bush entered the White House on January 20, 1989 as the 41st president of the United States, having served as Ronald Reagan’s vice president for 8 years. In late April, he nominated D. Allan Bromley to be the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Bromley, a Yale nuclear physicist, had first met Bush while he was serving on Reagan’s White House Science Council, and in the summer of 1987, he had invited the vice president to speak at the dedication of Yale’s new 20-million-volt electrostatic accelerator.³⁰

It was a somewhat unusual request: It’s not often that a university, even a prominent one, invites the vice-president of the United States to the dedication of a physics research facility—let alone with any expectation of an acceptance. But Bush had been a Yalie, and Bromley was a dogged political animal, who exuded confidence and could turn on the charm when he had to. Bush came, and during his brief visit, as Bromley recounts it, “I volunteered to be of as much assistance as I could during his continuing election campaign” for president.

Bromley was able to deliver on his promise 18 months later. While the nation was consumed with the 1988 election, rumors had begun to circulate in the science community that two electrochemists, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, had made a preliminary observation of a nuclear reaction in a test tube. They were seeking major support from the Department of Energy for their “cold fusion” studies, which, if successful, would transform the world. There would be cheap, abundant, clean energy essentially forever.

By the time Bush had taken his oath of office, cold fusion had become an incredibly hot topic—for science, as well as public policy. Was it real, or was it a hoax? The Bush team needed to know. A lot was riding on it. Billions of dollars were at stake. And Bromley, who had Bush’s trust, was in the right place to provide the answer.

From the perspective of nuclear physicists, the Pons-Fleischmann work was almost certainly flawed. But it was not so much a hoax as really bad science. Bromley’s scientific pedigree gave him the credibility to render that judgment. He was, quintessentially, the right person at the right time to secure his future in the Bush Administration.

In late April 1989, the president nominated him to be Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and on August 4, 1989, the Senate unanimously confirmed him. Bush also conferred on him an additional title that did not require Senate confirmation, but would prove invaluable to his influence within the White House.

Bromley had acquired considerable Washington experience as a member of Reagan’s White House Science Council and as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which is based in the nation’s capital. He knew that power in the Executive Branch depended on two things: budget authority and proximity to the president. The first would require negotiations with the Office of Management and Budget; the second would hinge on his persuasiveness and his rapport with Bush.

Bromley made his case for presidential access and visibility within the administration, and Bush agreed to his request, naming him Assistant to the President for Science, and giving him a seat at the Cabinet table, as well as a small but highly prized office in the West Wing of the White House. Even with such unusual access and a powerful perch, Bromley could see that he would face major challenges. Ford had worked hard to reinvigorate the science and technology policy apparatus in the White House, after Nixon had eviscerated it. But Carter had failed to pursue Ford’s course with any enthusiasm, and Reagan had ignored it entirely.

By the time Bromley arrived, he found OSTP atrophied, exiled by the former administration to a location away from the White House complex, pilloried by Congress for failing to respond to committee requests, and extraordinarily ill-equipped to tackle any significant problems. It needed to be restructured, relocated, reinvigorated, and expanded to meet the needs of the modern era. Bromley moved swiftly to accomplish those goals, and by the time Bush left office in 1993, OSTP had become the policy hub Congress intended in the 1975 legislation.

In most nations around the world, science and technology activities are concentrated in just a few ministries or departments. In the United States, there are more than twenty major players. Harmonizing science and technology portfolios across federal departments and agencies is a daunting task, one that the 1976 policy legislation recognized when it established the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (FCCSET). But neither Carter nor Reagan empowered FCCSET to carry out the mission Congress had envisioned.

Bromley saw things differently, and with Bush’s backing, he reprised FCCSET’s original role. To address the interdisciplinary nature of science in the modern era, he created a robust framework for integrating science and technology activities across the federal government at the highest levels. In so doing, he laid the foundation for future administrations, at least until the Trump presidency.

Bromley worked hard to make science a prominent feature in the Bush White House, and found a willing adherent in the president, who frequently attended the meetings of the reconstituted President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Bromley was the antithesis of Jay Keyworth and Bill Graham, who had maintained relatively low profiles during the years they had served as Reagan’s science advisors. Bromley was assertive and unafraid of breaking new ground. Technology policy and international scientific affairs offered him the opportunity to do so.

Despite his academic background, Bromley had long believed that industry’s role in research and development was crucial to American leadership in science and technology, and that his White House predecessors had focused too strongly—almost exclusively, in his eyes—on the “S” (science) and far too little, if at all, on the “T” (technology) in crafting federal S&T policy. He was determined to remedy the imbalance, at the risk of incurring the wrath of Republicans who viscerally saw—and continue to see—technology policy as encroaching on the prerogatives of the free market. He developed a set of guiding principles that gained Bush’s support and remain largely accepted today. (More about them in a later discussion of Pasteur’s Quadrant in Chapter 12.)

Bromley was a true science globalist, demonstrably exceeding all of his predecessors in that regard. As he wrote in his reminiscences about his time in the White House, “Science and technology have always been among the most international of human activities, with individuals frequently having closer ties to colleagues on the other side of the world than with those on the other side of the hall. I have long been convinced, however, that we have an enormous amount to gain by internationalizing both science and technology to a much greater degree. During my years in Washington I devoted substantial effort to building bridges between the United States and the rest of the world.”

Bromley orchestrated bilateral science agreements with a number of nations during his tenure in the Bush Administration, but more significantly, with Bush’s strong backing, he brought a bold proposal to the 1992 ministerial meeting of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to deal with large science projects. Shaped by his experience with the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC)—the massive and hugely expensive high-energy physics accelerator project in Waxahachie, Texas—Bromley became convinced that such major science ventures were becoming too expensive for any one nation to handle on its own. He proposed establishing an international Megascience Forum, under OECD auspices, which would convene meetings of leading scientists from around the world to plan future big projects. Unlike the SSC, which had American fingerprints all over it, and had only sought international financial support late in the game, approved Megascience projects would have an international imprimatur and an international buy-in from the outset.

Bromley had an exceptionally strong motivation to sell his plan to the OECD ministers at their March 1992 Paris meeting. Two months earlier, he had been in Tokyo with President Bush for a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa. Japanese support for the SSC was one of the items on the agenda.

Unlike the Reagan years, when physical science support had benefited from the spillover effects of strong military spending, the early 1990s were marked by severe constraints on discretionary federal budgets. The cost of the SSC had continued to spiral upward, and other projects were competing for scarce dollars in the Energy Department’s spending plan. By the end of 1991, it was becoming increasingly clear that the SSC needed a financial lifeline from another country to avoid drowning. The amount was not trivial: at the minimum, a billion dollars was needed. With Europeans pursuing their own high-energy mega-project at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, Japan was the only hope.

The story that unfolded illustrates, once more, the serendipitous nature of science and technology policy. In this case it didn’t end well.

As Bush’s third year in White House was coming to a close, all SSC eyes were on Bromley. He had a personal bond with the president, and an excellent rapport with John Sununu, a mechanical engineer with a Ph.D. from MIT, who was White House chief of staff when Bromley arrived on the scene in 1989. Despite his sometimes fraught relationship with Richard Darman, the prickly director of the Office of Management and Budget, Bromley had generally navigated the West Wing with great success. To get Japan on board with a $1.5 billion commitment to the SSC, the Science Council of Japan had told Bromley in October 1991, all Bush had to do was make a formal request of Miyazawa during the upcoming summit between the two nations.³¹ Bromley delivered the message to Sununu, who was a strong supporter of research and had Bromley’s back. Sununu promised that the SSC would be high on the priority list for the planned December meeting in Tokyo.

And then, the unraveling began. With Bush’s approval rating tanking, Sununu submitted his resignation in early December, and Bush replaced him with Samuel Skinner, who had been serving as Secretary of Transportation. Skinner had little interest in science, and even less in the SSC. His background was law, accounting, and business. Commerce and trade policy were the issues that got his juices flowing.

With Skinner in the driver’s seat, the agenda for the summit was thoroughly reworked to focus almost exclusively on trade, especially quotas on auto parts. But the date of the summit slipped from December to January, buying Bromley a little time for securing Bush’s agreement to keep the SSC on the table, even if it came at the end of the Tokyo meeting. The president finally gave his approval and invited Bromley to accompany him on Air Force One in anticipation of successfully securing Japan’s billion-dollar commitment to the SSC.

Everything seemed in order until the fateful evening of January 8, 1992. Bush’s Japanese hosts had arranged a lavish state banquet at the prime minister’s residence to celebrate the close bonds between the two countries, and, following protocol, seated the president next to the prime minister on the dais. Bush was in the middle of a 12-day swing through Asia and was feeling the effects of the grueling and stressful trip. This is how Newsweek reported on the unfortunate events that unfolded:³²

Bush might have been smiling, but the awkward episode left SSC supporters weeping. The president never managed to get to the remaining items on the summit’s agenda, and without the commitment of Japanese funds, the accelerator project began a slow slide to its demise. There was a glimmer of hope in 1993 that Japan might opt in, but discussions between the Clinton and Miyazawa administrations failed to materialize,³³ and on June 24 of that year, as the cost of the SSC was on track to exceed $10 billion,³⁴ the House of Representatives voted 280 to 150 to kill the project.³⁵ The Senate gave it a reprieve, as it had the previous year, voting 57 to 42 on September 30 to keep the dollars flowing.³⁶ But less than a month later, after considerable rancor and parliamentary maneuvering, SSC House opponents succeeded in flexing their muscle and eliminated continued SSC funding from the appropriations conference report. On October 26, the House voted 332 to 81 to terminate the SSC, and a day later, the Senate followed suit by a vote of 89 to 11.³⁷

Shortly before the House prevailed on the conference report, I received a phone call from Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), a longtime friend, who had been carrying water for Yale high-energy physicists since 1988, when he had won his first Connecticut Senate election. Seeking to avoid an embarrassing negative vote on the SSC, Lieberman offered a plan—which he said had the backing of the Senate leadership—to add $150 million to the high-energy physics annual operating budget if high-energy physicists would cease lobbying for the SSC, which he saw as totally futile at that juncture.

I passed the information on to leaders of the high-energy community, who rejected the proposal, hoping the Senate could still find a way to block the House action. But Lieberman’s prediction of how the Senate would vote was right on the mark. In the end, the high-energy physics community lost not only the SSC, but also the consolation prize of an additional $150 million in annual federal research funding.

The Lieberman-SSC episode illustrates a failing among scientists. They often get so caught up in their own world, they cannot see the political landscape shifting. Whether it’s arrogance, lack of sophistication, or simply having blinders on, matters little. The takeaway is the same: Knowledge isn’t the same as political savvy. To be successful in the policy arena, both are necessary.

Allan Bromley had the good fortune to serve a president with whom he had a personal relationship, someone who respected and trusted him, and consequently supported his efforts to inject new life into an atrophied White House science and technology policy apparatus. Historians lionize Vannevar Bush, who served Franklin Roosevelt during World War II, as the architect of the of the American science and technology policy edifice we see today. His vision was inspirational, but as we have seen, the policy path the nation traveled in the subsequent years had far more bumps and twists than Bush could have imagined.

Bromley might not have been in the same class with Vannevar Bush as a visionary, but his scientific stature, keen political savvy, and tenacious nature produced a policy legacy that has endured for more than a quarter of a century. White House science advisors, who followed him—Jack Gibbons and Neal Lane during the Clinton years, Jack Marburger during the George W. Bush Administration, and John Holdren during Obama’s tenure—all benefited tremendously from the policy structures he revived, expanded, or created. The George H.W. Bush-D. Allan Bromley era, even though it lasted only one presidential term,³⁸ was an appropriate capstone to the two-hundred-year history of science and technology policy that preceded it. It set the stage for Part Two of our narrative: “Science and Technology Policy in the Modern Age.”