Following the 9/11 attack on the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, George W. Bush’s presidential popularity soared. Several polls pegged his approval rating at an astounding 92%.¹ But by the beginning of April 2008, with the international banking system practically frozen and the American economy on the verge of total collapse due to Wall Street excesses, his job approval had sunk to 30%.² It continued to drop during the following months, bottoming out at about 25% a few weeks before the November 2008 presidential election.

The majority of the public had not only turned against Bush, but also against Republicans in general. It was obvious that Barack Obama would be the next White House occupant and that Democrats would extend their majorities in the House and Senate. It was less obvious what impact the election would have on science.

What occurred during the first 2 months after the Democrats swept to victory highlights the relevance of the aphorism, carpe diem. Scientists generally shun politics. But there are exceptions. Donald Q. Lamb is one of them. At the time, he was the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. More notably, for this story, he had worked on Obama’s presidential campaign, and following the election, he joined the president-elect’s transition team as a member of the Innovation and Science Subgroup of the Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform Policy Working Group.

As another physicist with an extracurricular passion for politics, I had gotten to know Don some years earlier. Still, I was surprised when he called me just days after the election with an enticing proposition. The context was Obama’s desire to move quickly on stimulus spending to avoid a complete economic meltdown.

What did I think about making science part of the stimulus? That was Don’s question. It was rhetorical, because he knew I would readily say it was a terrific idea. Despite the ACI and the COMPETES Act blueprint, American science was still in deep trouble. Major projects had been awaiting support for years, and the opportunity to have them included in a significant economic initiative was too good to pass up.

In fact, Burton Richter, a Nobelist and former director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and I had tried once before. It was 8 years earlier, when the country was in a mild recession caused by the bursting of the dot-com bubble. But the Bush Administration had expressed little interest, and we shelved the concept. With Obama, perhaps the outcome would be different.

I called Burt and another colleague, Mike Telson, an electrical engineer who had spent two decades on Capitol Hill as a staff member of the House Budget Committee, and then 4 years as the chief financial officer of the Department of Energy during Clinton’s second term. If we were to move ahead, there was one caveat: we had to put together a list of “shovel-ready” projects that could be started within 3 months and completed within 18 months. That, we were told, was when the money would run out. Tom Kalil, an economist and technology policy expert who had served 8 years in the Clinton White House and would become Obama’s deputy director for technology and innovation at OSTP, would call the shots.

Generating a list of projects proved to be far more difficult than any of us imagined at the outset. Members of the Bush Administration who had already begun to pack up their files offered no assistance,³ forcing us to play the role of private investigators. Jodi Lieberman, who helped staff the effort, spent hours on the telephone doggedly pursuing national laboratory directors, scientific project leaders, and anyone she could find who had useful information. It all came together at the end of November. We had assembled a list that met the transition team’s timetable. It’s $1.5 billion figure was significant, but not unreasonable, given what we had learned about the backlog of approved projects.

While we were coordinating with the Obama transition team, Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, was building support for a science initiative with her Democratic colleagues, among them, Rush Holt, Jr., from Princeton, New Jersey with a pedigree in physics, and Anna Eshoo, who represented a northern high-tech California district covering a major part of Silicon Valley. At the time we were unaware of Pelosi’s discussions, and she was unaware of our detailed list. All that changed at the end of January. But before then, we were forced to go back and modify our list.

Transitions are rarely cake-walks, and while Obama’s was smoother than some, major glitches occurred. Our work was caught up in one of them. It’s important to remember that at the time many economists were warning that the country—and the world—risked entering a depression, perhaps rivaling the one in the 1930s, unless governments stepped in with massive spending. But the American political landscape was riven by ideological disagreements. The far right wasn’t buying the doomsday scenario, and many conservatives were still fighting the war against Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society programs. Against this backdrop, Obama’s advisers kept adjusting the size, scope, and timeline for an economic bailout.

What began with money out the door in 90 days and completion deadlines of 180 days became spending within 180 days and completion within 2 years, and finally money out the door in 1 year with a time horizon of 3 years. Our science list grew from $1.5 billion at Thanksgiving to $3.5 billion at Christmas, and finally to $5 billion by mid-January. That was when our work converged with Pelosi’s efforts, but it happened somewhat fortuitously.

I was attending a Wednesday evening dinner at the Washington home of Rosa DeLauro, a member of the House Democratic leadership from Connecticut, whom I had known for many years. Anna Eshoo, a dinner regular and a good friend of Burt Richter, was also there. Having spent almost 10 weeks poring over projects, programs, and numbers, I was eager to share our information and suggestions with Anna. I had just finished describing the scope of the plan to her, when Nancy Pelosi walked up and joined the conversation.

“Nancy,” Anna said, “you need to hear about this.”

I was almost finished recapping what I had just told Eshoo, when Pelosi interrupted, “How much money do you want?’

“Five billion,” I told her.

“Why don’t you make it 10? Science has critical needs,⁴ and this is a perfect time to address them. I’ll get the money if you get me the list.”

“When do you need it?” I asked.

“Today is Wednesday. By Friday evening.” she said. “The House is going to take up a stimulus bill next week, and I want to make science part of it. Can you do it?”

Without thinking through what I was actually committing to, I replied, “Of course.”

By the time I left the dinner, the magnitude of the task hit me. We had less than 48 hours to add $5 billion to our proposal. Could we manage it and maintain our credibility? In reality, we had no choice. The stakes were too high.

By Friday evening, our list was complete. In addition to shovel-ready projects, we expanded it to programs of finite (two-three year) duration in the major federal agencies supporting physical science, math, and engineering research and education. It deliberately did not include biomedicine, because we did not have enough knowledge to address it, and we were operating under a time gun. We assumed someone else would step in at the right moment, and as events would soon prove, we were right.

True to Pelosi’s promise, Democrats introduced the America Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)⁵—the actual name of the economic stimulus bill—the following Wednesday. And 2 days later, on January 28, the House sent the bill to the Senate with 244 Democrats’ votes and no Republican having voted in favor of it.⁶ The science component of the 3-year emergency spending plan was not very large, $10 billion out of almost $475 billion, and the average House member probably never even noticed it. But it would become more visible in the Senate.

Unlike the House, which operates under a simple majority rule and limited time for discussion, the Senate imposes no time restriction on debate, unless three-fifths (60) of the members vote to terminate it. Known as cloture, the rule allows the minority party to influence and often modify legislation.

In 2009, at the start of the 111th Congress, there were only 99 members seated because the Minnesota election was still unresolved. The total included 56 Democrats and two independents who generally voted with them. For AARA to pass, both independents and at least two Republicans would have to vote for cloture. But there was an added uncertainty: Massachusetts Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy was suffering from brain cancer and might not be available to vote. That brought the Republican must-haves to three.

Maine’s two senators, Susan Collins and Olympia Snow, both Republicans, were likely to do so. The only other Republican who might was Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, another moderate known for parting ways with his party from time to time. But Specter had been one of the principal proponents of the appropriations bills that had doubled the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) between 1998 and 2003. If the science stimulus didn’t include NIH, he said he would not support cloture. The price tag he put on his vote was $10 billion, exactly matching what Pelosi had earmarked for the rest of science.

Specter’s demand was not arbitrary. That year, NIH funding was on track to account for about half of all federal spending on research. What was on the table was a big boost for American science, and Specter’s support was essential to closing the deal.

The new total for the science stimulus would be $20 billion. And even spread over 3 years, it represented a major surge for non-defense research and development (R&D),⁷ which totaled $60.3 billion in 2009—exclusive of the ARRA add-on.

On February 10, with Kennedy still able to vote, the Senate passed the amended recovery bill 61 to 37. Three days later, on February 13, the House voted 246 to 183 in favor of the conference report, again without any Republican support. And late that afternoon, with Kennedy now incapacitated, the Senate cleared the legislation with no room for error, 60 to 38.

The surge in research funding was designed to be limited to 3 years. And for the most part, federal agencies used the money that way. Approved projects that had already been engineered got jump starts, among them Brookhaven National Laboratory’s synchrotron X-ray light source upgrade, known as NSLS II, and SLAC National Laboratory’s X-ray laser facility, known by its acronym, LCLS. The money that flowed to NIH as a result of Specter’s intervention provided 2-year seed money for new university initiatives and specialized equipment. Only the National Science Foundation (NSF) broke the legislative trust by allocating the stimulus money to its general grant programs. The misstep would come back to bite the agency 3 years down the road, when the stimulus money ran out, and NSF had to ratchet back acceptances of new grant proposals.

In the end, the science stimulus was a windfall for American research programs. Its story illustrates the importance of seizing the day when unforeseen opportunities present themselves. And it demonstrates the importance of laying the groundwork for new policies well in advance of any opportunities. Without the prior focus on competitiveness and innovation, it is unlikely the science stimulus would have materialized.

The story is not without a significant portent. Although the overall recovery bill was guaranteed to split many lawmakers along ideological lines—dividing Keynesian pro-government interventionists from libertarian acolytes of Ayn Rand—the rift between Democrats and Republicans proved to be a yawning chasm. That not a single GOP House member voted for ARRA, and only three GOP senators supported the legislation, foreshadowed the rapidly growing hyper-partisanship that would plague Barack Obama’s 8 years in office. Not even science—which, Jack Marburger had properly noted, should be bipartisan—would escape the rancor.

The path of the 2010 reauthorization of the America COMPETES Act⁸ underscored the change in the political terrain. As he did in 2007, Vern Ehlers worked tirelessly to generate support for the COMPETES legislation from his Republican colleagues, but on May 28, only seventeen of them broke ranks and joined the full complement of 245 Democrats in sending the House bill on to the Senate.⁹

In an election year, the usually torpid upper chamber becomes even more so, and the COMPETES bill languished well past Election Day. For Democrats, the outcome at the polls was bad news. They lost control of the House by a wide margin, and their advantage in the Senate narrowed substantially. If the COMPETES reauthorization were to pass, it had to happen before the new Congress was seated.

Bipartisanship on science was still intact in the Senate, and after agreeing to one amendment, the upper chamber approved the bill by unanimous consent. The amended bill returned to the House floor for a final vote on December 17. This time only sixteen Republicans supported it. Clearly, Ehlers had not been able to find an antidote for the partisan venom that was poisoning science, and for the balance of Obama’s two terms, no one else would be able to either.

There is little in Barack Obama’s brief public record prior to his run for the presidency to suggest he would become one of the staunchest defenders of science of anyone to occupy the Oval Office. He didn’t wait long to elevate its importance in his Administration, naming Harvard physicist John Holdren as his science advisor a month before taking office. He also moved with alacrity to fill high-level science and technology policy positions in the White House and across the federal agencies, selecting two physics Nobel Laureates for key posts: Steven Chu as Energy Secretary and Carl Wieman as OSTP Associate Director of Science.

It is too early to assess which of Obama’s policies will endure, but his record is as long as it is broad. It is far too rich to capture in just a few pages, as the Administration’s OSTP “Exit Memo”¹⁰ illustrates. But there are two policy areas that deserve special mention: nuclear nonproliferation, bookended by the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START)¹¹ and the 2015 Iran Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)¹²—the Iran nuclear deal—and climate change, culminating in the Paris Agreement,¹³ signed by 195 nations in December 2015. All three illustrate the outsized role science and technology play the in 21st century global arena. All three also illustrate the importance of compromise.

New START traces its lineage to START (I), a treaty that seemed completely implausible just a few years before Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev struck a deal¹⁴ to begin dismantling the massive nuclear weapons stockpiles each nation possessed. The date was December 8, 1987. Hardliners in both nations lined up against it, but Gorbachev held sway in the USSR, and Reagan—whom conservatives venerated as the Republican counterpart to the liberal icon, Franklin Delano Roosevelt—sold it to his GOP colleagues.

Work on the treaty language began in earnest shortly after the 1987 White House summit, but it took almost 4 years before it was ready for prime time. George H.W. Bush signed it on July 31, 1991, and sent it to the Senate for ratification that November, just as the Soviet Union was on the brink of final collapse. When the Russian tricolor flag replaced the hammer and sickle symbol of the USSR on December 26, 1991, Western democracies celebrated, but non-proliferation experts saw their tasks magnified substantially.

The Soviet nuclear arsenal was spread across a number of the socialist republics—among them, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan—which were being cut free of Russian control. The treaty Bush had just signed now needed buy-ins from those newly independent states. It also needed a plan to address the nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons stockpiles in countries that did not have the technical expertise to deal with them. Physicists, especially, who had previously been bomb builders during the Cold War, and the weapons labs (principally Los Alamos, Sandia and Livermore) where they worked, would have a new mission: dismantling weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and disposing of the fissile material they used.

With the dissolution of the USSR clearly on the horizon, Congress passed the “Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 1991” on November 25. It established the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program, also known as Nunn-Lugar,^15,16 named for Democratic Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia and Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana. It was Nunn’s second attempt at passing such a bill. The first one, co-sponsored by Democratic Representative Les Aspin of Wisconsin, failed to garner broad support and never received a vote. But with Lugar solidly behind the legislation, the Senate reversed course and voted 86 to 4 for its passage.

The bipartisan legislation had four primary objectives: (1) Dismantling WMDs and all associated infrastructure in former Soviet states; (2) Securing WMD materials; (3) Increasing transparency and compliance with non-proliferation agreements; and (4) Enhancing military cooperation with the former Soviet states to accomplish the nonproliferation goals. Achieving those objectives represented a significant challenge, not only for diplomats in the State Department and military planners in the Defense Department, but also for scientists and technologists in the Energy Department, which had sole responsibility for nuclear weaponry.

Against this backdrop, ratification of START I was delayed for almost a year. When the treaty finally reached the floor of the Senate for a vote on October 1, 1992, the outcome was overwhelming: 93 in favor and only 6 opposed.¹⁷ Work on a treaty supplement was already under way. Known as START II, it called for banning the use of multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, called MIRVs, on intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs in defense speak. Again, the Senate ratified it overwhelmingly, 87 to 4, when it came up for a vote on January 26, 1996.¹⁸

But the bipartisan agreement on nuclear arms and disarmament would soon begin to fray. There was little disagreement about U.S. technical capabilities, but trust between the United States and Russia was starting to wane. In Moscow, the Duma delayed ratification of START II until April 14, 2000. But the effect of the vote was short lived. Spurred on by “neo-cons” who had his ear, George W. Bush gave Russia notice that the United States was going to withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.¹⁹ In a tit-for-tat response, Russia announced its withdrawal from START II, although it remained committed to the terms of START I until the treaty was scheduled to expire in 2009.

By the time Barack Obama took office on January 20, 2009, the road to non-proliferation had become somewhat rocky. The overwhelming bipartisan support that START I and START II had enjoyed was no longer assured for a replacement treaty. With ratification requiring a two-thirds vote in the Senate, losing a handful of votes would not be not a problem. But if the projected losses approached 30, momentum away from the 67 votes needed could easily build.

That was the circumstance Obama faced when New START made its way to the Senate in 2010. Russia and the United States had signed the treaty in Prague on April 8, and after more than twenty hearings and extended debate, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid put the treaty up for a vote just before the Christmas recess. Democrats had lost six Senate seats in the November midterm election, and delaying action until a new Congress was seated carried too much of a risk. Obama needed the vote sooner, rather than later, and he was prepared to cut a deal to assure ratification.

The months preceding consideration of the treaty revealed how much the non-proliferation winds had shifted. Even though Russia still retained a strong nuclear capability, America’s scientific and technological superiority in the post-Soviet era was undeniable. Nonetheless, Jon Kyl, the Republican whip, and Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, leveled withering attacks on New START, arguing that ratification would prohibit the United States from maintaining the safety, security, and reliability of its nuclear arsenal. McConnell, who had pledged to keep Obama’s presidency to one term, saw defeating the treaty as a way of denying the president a major foreign policy victory.

Kyl, an arch-conservative from Arizona was already on record of opposing non-proliferation agreements, having helped block ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty²⁰ a decade before. Obama, who considered New START a signature achievement of his young presidency, was well aware of Kyl’s ability to whip votes among his Senate Republican colleagues, and was on the lookout for something he could offer him. As summer was winding down, Kyl let it be known that he might be willing to negotiate. His price: $10 billion more for modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal—each year for the next 10 years. Kyl never promised to drop his opposition, but Obama blinked. He badly wanted the win, and he pledged to substantially boost his already massive modernization budget proposal of $80 billion over the next decade.

Having gone on record publicly advocating a larger figure, Obama couldn’t back down, even after Kyl—and McConnell—voted against ratification. The final vote on December 22 was 71 in favor (four more than needed) and 26 opposed.²¹ Had Obama rolled the dice, he probably would have won.

Obama’s commitment to modernization of nuclear weapons was a boon to the three weapons laboratories. Fifteen years earlier, they were searching for missions that would justify their sizes and budgets. In 1995, a task force chaired by Robert Galvin, chairman of the Executive Committee of Motorola, issued a report on “Alternative Futures for the Department of Energy National Laboratories.”²² The “Galvin Report,” as it was known inside the Washington Beltway, used an uncompromising lens to examine the national laboratory system in an era of dramatic geopolitical changes and significant technological advances. The following excerpt captures the tone of the report:

                    The National Security Role

                    Configuration of the Nuclear Weapons Laboratories

Details aside, the report’s assessment of the DOE’s weapons laboratories conveyed a simple message: There was unnecessary redundancy in weapons design, and one of the laboratories—LLNL—should focus its activities on nuclear non-proliferation and verification technologies. Galvin made that even clearer during his congressional testimony. The report was less critical of DOE’s non-defense mission, summarizing its recommendations as follows:

                    The Science-Engineering Role

                    Summary of Recommendations

The Galvin Committee also examined the governance of the DOE’s laboratories and summed up its findings with a single recommendation: “Over a period of one to 2 years, the Department and Congress should develop and implement a new modus operandi of Federal support for the national laboratories, based on a private sector style—“corporatized”—laboratory system.” Ultimately, the governance recommendation had the largest impact on the way the laboratories conducted their business. But the transformation didn’t occur until Los Alamos National Laboratory suffered a security breach 5 years later. The violation never resulted in the loss of classified information, but it wrecked the life of one of its employees, diminished the role of universities in managing the laboratories, and dramatically increased the costs of administering them.

The bizarre case of nuclear physicist Wen Ho Lee, which led to the administrative unraveling, was the subject of a lengthy Vanity Fair exposé²³ in 2000. Edward Klein’s story documented Lee’s security violations and highlighted his strange and still unexplained behavior in 1999, when he downloaded and transferred classified files to personal tapes. It also focused attention on the FBI’s highly questionable treatment of him, which included a 59-count indictment—including espionage—and more than 9 months in solitary confinement, before he was finally freed on a $1 million bond in September 2000. (In 2006, Lee pleaded guilty to improper handling of classified information and received a $1.6 million settlement from the federal government and several media organizations for his prison treatment and public disclosure of his name before any charges had been filed.) But it did not predict, nor could it have been able to predict, the ultimate fallout—the change in the way DOE laboratories were managed and where the weapons labs stood in the department’s organization chart.

A legacy of World War II, the DOE laboratories were generally government owned, but contractor operated (GOCO). And many of the operators were universities. That was true of the weapons labs, as well as the multi-purpose labs. The University of California, for example, ran Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, and the University of Chicago managed Argonne National Laboratory and, in partnership with the Universities Research Association (URA), Fermi National Laboratory. The Galvin Report had implicitly questioned the role of the universities, but it had generated little more than an annoying buzz.

The Wen Ho Lee affair was different: it was a matter that grabbed the attention of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. When members of Congress catch a whiff of a federal scandal, especially one involving national security, their juices begin to flow. It was true during the Cold War. It remained true after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it’s still a guiding principle. Among elected officials, Wen Ho Lee’s activities—quirky at best, dangerous at worst—stimulated far more than an olfactory response.

Lee might have been a culprit who willfully violated the law by downloading and removing classified material, or he might have been a victim of overzealous investigators. But as lawmakers saw it, Lee wasn’t the real problem; the DOE was. The department’s inability to read the tea leaves well before Lee downloaded classified materials and intervene before he committed his crime demonstrated administrative negligence. A legislative remedy was needed to prevent a repetition that could have more serious consequences.

Especially when a matter is urgent, Capitol Hill’s policy tool is rarely a scalpel. It’s a sledge hammer, and the Los Alamos security breach brought out a particularly large one. Momentum quickly developed to pull the weapons programs out of the DOE’s portfolio, but more than a half century of precedent argued against giving the military direct control over the entire nuclear enterprise. The rationale for establishing the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) under civilian control in 1946—to minimize the potential for using weapons of mass destruction—remained unchanged in 2000.

If the Department of Defense was off limits, was a 21st century carefully circumscribed analog to the AEC the answer? Isolating the weapons programs from the DOE’s civilian responsibilities would have the virtue of closer control over classified nuclear research and development. But it would create several problems.

As Los Alamos and Livermore evolved, they expanded into the non-weapons research space, in part to make themselves more attractive to scientists of the highest caliber, and in part to make some of their expensive, one-of-a-kind facilities available for cutting-edge civilian research. Assigning the laboratories to a new, single-purpose agency would turn the clock back to the earliest days of the AEC. It would likely diminish the quality of the laboratory workforce and complicate civilian access to the lab’s unique facilities. And, by constricting the lines of communication between lab scientists and the outside research community, it could hinder progress on such crucial issues as non-proliferation and counter-measures.

For months, the debate swirled across Washington: on Capitol Hill, inside the White House, and throughout the DOE. Finally, on July 22, 1999, the Senate acted,²⁴ adopting language 96 to 1 to establish a semi-autonomous agency within the DOE that would oversee all aspects of the department’s nuclear programs. It would have a dedicated Undersecretary of Energy reporting directly to the Secretary of Energy. The language made it into the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000,²⁵ which President Clinton signed into law on October 5, 1999. Acceding to the Senate’s desires, the act created the National Nuclear Security Administration. No one was completely happy with the outcome, but in truth, no one had proposed a viable alternative.

In 1999, the weapons labs were the focus of the DOE’s critics. But the academic culture of openness and freedom of inquiry, which critics believed contributed to the Los Alamos security breach, permeated the entire system. With some degree of regularity, detractors of the labs’ modus operandi would raise their voices, but invariably the labs pushed back, arguing that their way of doing business was critical to the extraordinary scientific successes they achieved. And they had strong evidence to back up their responses: reams of patents and scores of Nobel prizes.

In 1995—the same year Galvin’s Committee issued its findings—the Government Accountability Office (GAO), as it is now known, delivered a particularly harsh assessment, with its report carrying the unambiguous title, “National Laboratories Need Clearer Missions and Better Management.”^26,27 The summary of the 1995 report is pithy and cutting:

As stinging as the report was, change came slowly. There is no doubt the labs could have been managed more effectively, but in addition to the extremely high-quality research they generated, the major facilities they built and operated were among the best in the world.

There was one problem plaguing the non-weapons labs, but it was one not easily solved. The bridge that allowed discoveries to be transformed into application was either weak or non-existent: the connections between the bench scientists and the industrial innovator were tenuous, at best. The impediments epitomized “The Valley of Death,” a term Representative Vern Ehlers popularized in the 1998 House Science Committee policy report, Unlocking Our Future.²⁸

Policymakers had long been aware of the failing, but solutions at the DOE had remained elusive. Hazel O’Leary, who was Secretary of Energy at the time the GAO leveled its 1995 broadside, concluded that encouraging industry to utilize lab facilities provided the most promising path forward. The Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986,²⁹ she believed, contained the best available mechanism, the cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA). It addressed two significant industrial needs: commercializing research quickly and protecting intellectual property rights. O’Leary, whose background was in the legal profession and the utilities industry, moved quickly to expand its use, encouraging the multi-purpose laboratories, especially, to promote its virtues. Although its track record has been mixed, it has remained part of the DOE policy portfolio ever since.

Against the backdrop of the Galvin and GAO reports and the Wen Ho Lee affair at Los Alamos, the DOE moved to a more corporate laboratory governance model, with stricter controls over classified research and greater emphasis on productivity. Although universities retained some of their management responsibilities, they were now frequently paired with non-academic partners, such as Battelle and Northrup-Grumman. Even though almost two decades have passed since the DOE began “corporatizing” the national laboratories, it remains a matter of debate whether improvements in performance, to the extent they are discernible, justify the extraordinary increases in management costs that, in some cases, rose almost 10-fold.

In 2014, seeking an answer to that question, and desiring an evaluation of the overall structure and performance of the laboratory system, Congress directed the Secretary of Energy to establish a Commission to Review the Effectiveness of the National Energy Laboratories (CRENEL). Using an appropriations bill³⁰ as the vehicle to make its directive stick—as Frank Wolf had with the Innovation Summit a decade earlier—it charged the commission with examining all seventeen DOE laboratories “in terms of their alignment with the Department’s strategic priorities, duplication, ability to meet current and future energy and national security challenges, size, and support of other Federal agencies…[and] to review the efficiency and effectiveness of the laboratories, including assessing overhead costs and the impact of DOE’s oversight and management approach.” Unlike DOE evaluations of the 1990s, the CRENEL report was reasonably positive.³¹ In addressing why the DOE system was needed, for example, the report observed:

It was less generous in its observations about management issues. But instead of training its criticism on administrative laxity—as the Galvin and GAO reports had—it suggested the DOE had overreacted in responding to past criticisms:

In contrast to the 1995 Galvin Report, which had suggested the laboratory system suffered from under-utilization and duplication of effort, the 2015 CRENEL Report reached the opposite conclusion:

In his State of the Union Address on January 29, 2002, George W. Bush labeled Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the “axis of evil.” One common thread linked them—nuclear weapons. The Bush Administration believed Iraq had them, at least in some form, and Iran and North Korea were well on their way to developing them. Although they were never found,³² weapons of mass destruction, WMDs in defense lingo, were the pretext for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. By the time Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009, Iraq was still an extraordinary Middle East quagmire, but its WMD potential was no longer an issue. Iran, by contrast, posed a continuing a threat to the stability of the region, and its nuclear capabilities were progressing rapidly.

Economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations had taken a toll, but hardliners in Teheran refused to dial back their ambitions as they continued to expand their uranium enrichment program. Finally, in the spring of 2015, negotiators met in Lausanne, Switzerland. Seated around the table were representatives of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—plus Germany and the European Union. The stakes couldn’t have been higher. At that point, according to intelligence estimates, Iran was within 3 months of having enough highly enriched uranium to produce at least one nuclear weapon.

Neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia was willing to stand idly by and allow their primary enemy cross the nuclear finish line. The potential for a preemptive strike on Iran’s uranium enrichment and plutonium facilities was growing by the day. A failure in Lausanne could not have more profound consequences.

Seven issues dominated the negotiations, and they all involved technology: (1) An accurate accounting of Iran’s uranium stockpile; (2) The enrichment levels of fissile material on hand; (3) The number and operating parameters of advanced centrifuges Iran was using for uranium enrichment; (4) The final status of the Arak heavy-water facility, which had the ability to produce and reprocess plutonium; (5) The disposal plans for existing fissile material; (6) The inspection regime needed to verify Iran’s compliance with an agreement; and (7) How much time—called the “breakout time”—Iran would need to reconstitute its nuclear program and produce its first nuclear weapon if and when any agreement terminated.

Negotiating international agreements with adversaries is rarely easy, but when technical issues are paramount, the difficulties multiply. Secretary of State John Kerry was leading the American delegation, and if he had been following previous scripts, he would have had a team of nuclear experts assisting him. But in this instance, he really needed only one, his fellow Cabinet member, Secretary of Energy Ernest J. Moniz.

Ernie, known for his unusual coif, had cut his scientific teeth in theoretical nuclear physics at Stanford University and MIT. He had also accumulated significant policy experience, first as Bill Clinton’s Associate Director for Science at OSTP, and then as his Under Secretary of Energy. Ernie’s work on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the Iran nuclear deal is more properly known, is one of the best examples of science diplomacy in the modern era.

In The Guardian article, “Ernest Moniz and the Physics of Diplomacy,”³³ published in the spring of 2015, Roger Pielke, Jr. captured the essence of his contribution:

Historians will debate the efficacy of JCPOA³⁴ years from now, weighing whether more restrictions on Iran’s belligerent Middle East behavior could have been achieved; but however they judge it, they will almost certainly conclude that Moniz lent extraordinary credibility to the terms of the agreement. The disposition of fissile material; the dismantling and moth-balling of advanced centrifuges; the conversion of the heavy-water Arak reactor to a light-water facility, dedicated to medical isotope rather than plutonium production; and the extremely intrusive inspection regime all bore Ernie’s stamp of approval.

On July 14, 2015, all eight parties to the agreement signed off on the final terms. Iran agreed to suspend its nuclear weapons activities, dismantle three quarters of its centrifuges, ship its partially enriched uranium abroad, terminate its plutonium production, and commit to monthly inspections of its facilities. In return, United Nations sanctions were to be lifted, and Iranian assets held by foreign banks were to be released. “Adoption Day,”³⁵ as the State Department labeled it, occurred 3 months later on October 18.

But Barack Obama, facing stiff opposition from congressional Republicans, never asked the Senate to ratify the agreement. Two years and seven months later, the absence of treaty approval allowed President Donald J. Trump to announce his intention to withdraw the United States from JCPOA.³⁶ Unlike Obama, Trump had neither a science advisor nor a science savvy Cabinet member to advise him. Unlike Obama, who insisted on detailed technical briefing papers, Trump seemed content to rely on his gut. If you’re lucky, sometimes that can work. But, more often than not, successfully navigating the science and technology policy maze in the 21st century requires trustworthy information, fact-based analysis, sound political judgment, impeccable timing, and considerable wisdom.

By the time Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, global temperatures had resumed their upward climb,³⁷ polar icecaps were receding,³⁸ ocean levels were rising³⁹, and extreme weather events—severe storms with devastating floods and extended droughts with damaging wildfires—were occurring with increasing frequency.⁴⁰ Atmospheric carbon dioxide had reached highs never seen before in the past 800,000 years, and the trend was ever upward.⁴¹

These were facts, not speculations, and they led the overwhelming majority—more than 97%—of scientists to conclude that (1) global warming was a reality; (2) climate change was a consequence; (3) green-house gases (among them, most problematically, carbon dioxide) were the cause; and (4) human activity was a major, if not the dominant, contributor. For policymakers, it should have been a slam dunk: contain greenhouse gas production and save the planet. The story of what actually unfolded illustrates what happens when science gets too far ahead of the lay public, and when a science and technology issue becomes etched into partisan belief systems.

Climate change is a very complicated business. But the essentials of global warming are not difficult to understand, even for someone with little technical background. Unfortunately, scientists emphasized the complexity of the matter and dismissed the ability of non-scientists to grasp the essentials. Their attitude reflected an arrogance that all too often is a rite of passage to membership in the scientific priesthood. And the fallout had extraordinary consequences for sound policy.

Climate change became synonymous with party affiliation. If you were a Republican, you probably viewed it with skepticism. If you were a Democrat, you probably saw it as an ominous threat. It wasn’t always so. In 1989, as the release of once-confidential memos revealed, Republican President George H.W. Bush received and took seriously the advice he was receiving on the issue. On February 9, 1989, shortly after Bush assumed office, Frederick M. Bernthal, the Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, wrote the following to Under-Secretary-Designate for Economic Affairs Richard T. McCormack:⁴²

Scroll forward 20 years, which is an eternity in politics, and you would be hard pressed to find more than several dozen Republican office holders who completely bought into the proposition that human activity was the major source of Earth’s changing climate.⁴³ Some of the skeptics expressed nuanced views, but a number unabashedly called it a scientific hoax. Where they hailed from had a lot to do with the intensity of their doubts.⁴⁴ The most skeptical represented heavily Republican states and districts, where more than 70% of GOP voters rejected the scientific consensus.

By contrast, Barack Obama saw climate change as an existential threat to the United States and the world. He made that clear when he selected his science adviser, John Holdren. A Harvard physicist, Holdren had cut his policy teeth on environment, energy, and nuclear non-proliferation issues. But climate change had become almost a singular focus for him.

Profiting from large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, Obama had an opportunity that few other modern occupants of the White House enjoyed. He could shape the legislative agenda to his liking—at least at the outset—and climate change was high on his to-do list. However, shoring up the banking industry following the 2008 financial collapse and stanching the consequent economic bleeding had to come first. Afterward, he could turn his attention to other matters. He knew well that he had, at best, 18 months to achieve any legislative success before the mid-term elections intruded on the congressional calendar. And considering how slowly the Senate moved, that was about the time it would take to get one big thing done.

With the Copenhagen IPCC conference scheduled for December, climate change was a prime contender. But in January 2007, several weeks before he announced his candidacy, Obama had publicly committed to passing universal health care by the end of his first term. As Politico reported some years later, that promise was little more than an impromptu “check-the-box, news-cycle expedient.”⁴⁵ But the setting where he delivered the pledge was not a smoke-filled room. It was the Families USA health care conference, one of the largest in the country. He simply couldn’t walk back his commitment, even if he had wanted to.

Two years later, when it came time to choose his one big thing, Obama believed he had no choice. He had to deliver on health care. Climate change would have to wait. But participating in the Copenhagen conference without having anything tangible to point to on greenhouse gas emissions was a nonstarter. Getting legislation through the Senate with health care hanging in the balance, he knew would be almost impossible. But if he pushed hard enough, he was optimistic the House, with its rules prohibiting extended debate, might just be able to do both. That became the Administration’s strategy, and it led to a number of unforeseen consequences.

Ultimately, Obama delivered on his health care promise, signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) on March 23, 2010, 14 months into his first term. The legislation had followed a tortuous course through Congress, and when the House and Senate finally passed it, they did so without a single Republican vote.⁴⁶

While the ACA was caught up in policy debates and political wrangling, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009,⁴⁷ as the climate change legislation was officially known, was moving swiftly through the House of Representatives. Championed by Henry Waxman, the new chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Ed Markey, the chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, the bill made it to the House floor just 6 weeks after it had been introduced. The final vote, which came on June 26, 2009, reflected the ever-widening partisan divide on climate change. Democrats voted overwhelmingly (211-44) in favor of the Waxman-Markey bill, while Republicans voted even more overwhelmingly (8-168) against it. Over the course of two decades, climate change had moved from a serious policy issue with broad concern expressed on both sides of the aisle, to a brash party-defining label, having more to do with tribalism than sound science.

Nonetheless, Obama pocketed the House victory and trumpeted it in Copenhagen as evidence of how seriously his administration considered the issue. He had hoped Congress would return to it following the 2010 midterm elections, but that was not to be.

It’s worth pausing for a brief look at the science behind climate change.⁴⁸ Setting aside the complexities that make specific predictions difficult, the outlines of the science are actually quite easy to understand.

Sunlight comes in an array of visible colors, as light passing through a glass prism reveals. Violet lies at the shorter “wavelength” end of the spectrum, and red, at the longer end. The other colors, following the sequence in a rainbow, appear between. But sunlight also contains “radiation” that is not visible: ultraviolet, which has wavelengths shorter than violet, and infrared, which has wavelengths longer than red.

To understand the origin of the light, it is necessary to recognize that every hot object emits radiation, and the hotter the object is, the more the shorter wavelengths contribute. A warm cooktop, with barely any light visible, for example, emits radiation mostly in the infrared. We don’t see the radiation, but we feel it—as heat. As the cooktop gets hotter, it begins to become visible, first emitting red light, and then as its temperature steadily increases, shifting toward orange. The temperature of an object actually determines the exact wavelength at which the intensity reaches its maximum value. The relationship is known as Wien’s Law.⁴⁹

With a blistering surface temperature of about 5800 K—corresponding to almost 9950° F—the Sun produces light with a maximum intensity in the green part of the spectrum. After traveling 93 million miles, the sunlight eventually reaches the Earth’s atmosphere, where it interacts with atoms and molecules in the air. Those constituents prevent most of the ultraviolet, and a fraction of the infrared wavelengths from reaching the Earth’s surface. Ozone absorbs the most harmful ultraviolet rays, and other molecules, known as greenhouse gases, absorb a portion of the infrared rays.

The visible light fares better, but it doesn’t get a free pass to the Earth’s surface. Clouds reflect some of it, and atmospheric molecules scatter much of the rest. Shorter wavelengths scatter more than longer ones, making the sky appear blue, and sunsets, red. The light that does make it through the atmosphere heats the Earth’s surface, helping to make our planet habitable.

The sunlight’s tale doesn’t end there. The Earth’s surface reemits radiation, but mostly in the infrared, because its temperature is about 288 K (59° F), 20 times lower than the Sun’s. Some of the emitted infrared radiation escapes into space, but greenhouse gases absorb the rest, trapping heat and raising the overall temperature of our planet.

How hot the Earth becomes depends on which greenhouse molecules are present, and how many there are. Venus, for example, which has a very dense atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide—a greenhouse gas—is the hottest planet in the Solar System, even though it is not the closest to the Sun. And if the Earth’s atmosphere didn’t contain any greenhouse gases, the average temperature would be 255 K (0° F).

Not all greenhouse gases are equally potent, and not all of them are equally problematic. For example, water vapor and methane absorb infrared radiation extremely well. But neither stays in the atmosphere very long. By contrast, carbon dioxide doesn’t absorb infrared radiation as readily, but once it enters the atmosphere, it stays there for centuries.

A few more facts complete the climate science chronicle. (1) We know that burning fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—is the principal contributor to atmospheric carbon dioxide, which reached more than 410 parts per million in 2018, the highest level in almost a million years, the span of accessible data. (2) We know that the Earth was a much warmer planet 65 million years ago, because dinosaurs roaming the continents were cold-blooded. (3) We know that plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air, and through photosynthesis, convert it into carbon. (4) We know that coal, oil, and natural gas are the result of carbon sequestered when plants died and became buried. (5) Finally, we know that if we continue to burn the sequestered carbon, we will ultimately return the Earth to the conditions that existed 65 million years ago. How fast we get there will depend on the strategies we pursue.

In short, we can choose our policies but not our science. We can limit fossil fuel emissions by relying more on wind, solar, and nuclear energy, and becoming more energy efficient. Or we can opt to continue emitting carbon dioxide at a high rate and learn to live with the consequences. Altering our behavior is a choice; altering climate science is not.

The Waxman-Markey bill was based on a policy choice: Restricting carbon dioxide emissions. To achieve the goal, it incorporated a policy prescription: A Cap and Trade mechanism, which environmentalists favored, rather than a straight carbon tax or a carbon fee combined with a rebate—a “fee-bate”—which most economists advocated. The carbon Cap and Trade policy, on which we’ll elaborate in this section, followed the successful approach used to reduce emission of sulfur dioxide (SO₂) from coal-fired utility plants, especially in the Ohio Valley, which was the principal cause of harmful acid rain in the Northeast.

The SO₂ plan began with an inventory of current emissions to establish a baseline for the total. It then awarded each power plant an allowance for the first year, reflecting the plant’s fraction of the existing total. Finally, it established annual percentage decreases for the total, reducing each plant’s allowance by the same percentage. If a plant exceeded expectations—by switching to natural gas, for example, or capturing SO₂ in the smokestack before it escaped—it could sell (trade) its unneeded allowance to a plant that was unable to meet the required reduction.⁵⁰

Environmentalists favored the Cap and Trade approach because the cap controls total emissions in a completely predictable fashion. The trade mechanism allows the free market to set a price for pollutants and treat them like any other commodity, in principal optimizing the cost of achieving the required reductions. For SO₂, Cap and Trade worked well. The limited sources of the pollutant made the inventory simple, and monitoring plant compliance relatively easy. Emissions declined, and acid rain abated.

The Waxman-Markey bill hoped to replicate the approach for carbon dioxide (CO₂). But regulating CO₂ through a Cap and Trade policy would be considerably more difficult. The sources of the emissions were numerous and disparate. Power plants, for example, which can be tracked easily, accounted for only 40% of CO₂ emissions in 2009.⁵¹ Transportation, which is far more distributed and difficult to monitor, accounted for 34%, while residential housing, commerce and industry, also difficult to inventory, were responsible for 26%. In addition, many American companies either produced products overseas, or used components fabricated in other countries. Folding CO₂ emissions into such a global system would add another layer of complexity.

Many economists saw another major problem with Cap and Trade. It was difficult to predict the implementation costs at the outset, and until the allowance trading market stabilized, the cost uncertainties could have a deleterious impact on the overall economy. A tax or fee-bate system,⁵² they believed, was simpler to implement, with much greater economic predictability. It had two flaws, however. While the costs to the economy were far more predictable, the reduction in emissions was far less certain. In addition, slapping a tax or a fee on energy, even with a rebate to mitigate its impact, might prove politically unrealizable. With the European Union having already adopted Cap and Trade to regulate CO₂ in 2005, Obama lent his support to the Waxman-Markey legislation.

The 2010 mid-term election was a disaster for Obama’s presidency. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) had bailed out Wall Street, but in the minds of many voters, it had left Main Street behind. That perception, and the Administration’s inability to explain the benefits of the Affordable Care Act, proved to be albatrosses around the necks of Democrats. When the votes were tallied that November, Republicans had racked up major victories. Having wondered only 2 years earlier whether they could ever regain the majority in either chamber of Congress, they rode an electoral wave led by Tea Party populists and picked up sixty-three House seats, the largest gain by a party in 70 years. Any hope Obama had for achieving climate change legislation had effectively vanished, especially because Republicans had taken control of many state legislatures and governorships. Those victories would allow them to gerrymander districts and solidify their control of the House for the next decade.

Obama still had some options to exercise on climate change and energy policy. The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act⁵³ had set the course for significant improvements in vehicle efficiency. It increased the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards from 27.5 miles per gallon, then in existence, to a minimum of 35 miles per gallon for passenger vehicles in 2020. It also required CAFE standards for passenger and nonpassenger vehicles manufactured between 2021 and 2030 to be the maximum feasible. To that end, it directed the Secretary of Transportation to ask the National Academy of Sciences for an evaluation of the standards for passenger vehicles and trucks and report its findings to Congress. In other words, it gave Obama wide latitude to require major improvements in vehicle efficiency.⁵⁴ The only drawback was that any new standard above 35 miles per gallon for cars was not legislatively binding. A subsequent president could roll it back—and the next one did, or at least tried to.

Obama took advantage of the wide berth he was given, and on July 29, 2011, his White House announced a new standard:⁵⁵ 54.4 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks by 2025. The report that accompanied the announcement, “Driving Efficiency: Cutting Costs for Families at the Pump and Slashing Dependence on Oil,”⁵⁶ explained the rationale and provided a historical context. It’s worth noting that nowhere in the title do the words “climate change” or “global warming” appear. By that time, it was clear to anyone paying attention to the political landscape that such words would have been toxic to the voters who had installed the new House majority. Saving families money and patriotically achieving energy independence would play much better in the American heartland. The Obama communications shop didn’t always get it right, but in this instance, it properly recognized that framing a message is as important as the message itself.

Obama won re-election handily in 2012, but Democrats were only able to add two seats to their Senate voting majority (55-45),⁵⁷ far from the two-thirds needed to ratify a treaty, or even the three-fifths needed to terminate debate. With Republicans still maintaining a hefty (234-201) majority in the House, Obama knew he would have little chance to advance his agenda legislatively. The 2014 midterm election made matters worse for him. Democrats lost even more ground in the House (247-188), and Republicans gained control of the Senate (54-46), largely as a result of the unpopularity and botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act. The deck was stacked against Obama, but he still had a few cards to play. For 3 years, as hyper-partisanship froze Washington, he used executive orders and regulatory authority to achieve his policy objectives.

As Obama entered his last year in the White House, he was acutely aware that as diminished as his second-term legislative influence had been, it was about to shrink even more. He was on the threshold of becoming a lame duck president. But an international convocation in late 2015 gave him one last shot at making a significant mark on climate change.

The venue was in Le Bourget, outside Paris at the 21st Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). Representatives of the participating nations began hammering out an agreement in November, and by the middle of the next month, they had reached a consensus. On December 12, all 196 nations signed onto the accord.⁵⁸

The participants had settled on a single objective: To keep the average global temperature from reaching 2° C (3.6° F) above preindustrial levels, and to strive to keep the increase to 1.5° C (2.7° F). Well aware of the failure of previous negotiations in Kyoto (1997), Bali (2007), and Copenhagen (2009) to secure binding action on CO₂ reductions, the Paris negotiators abandoned the idea of forcing signatories to set binding targets by certain dates. Instead, they settled on a protocol that was more palatable, especially to industrialized nations. Article 4 spelled out the new approach. The following excerpt highlights the major elements:

1. 1. In order to achieve the long-term temperature goal…, Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, recognizing that peaking will take longer for developing country Parties, and to undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century, on the basis of equity, and in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty.
2. 2. Each Party shall prepare, communicate and maintain successive nationally determined contributions that it intends to achieve. Parties shall pursue domestic mitigation measures, with the aim of achieving the objectives of such contributions.
3. 3. Each Party's successive nationally determined contribution will represent a progression beyond the Party's then current nationally determined contribution and reflect its highest possible ambition, reflecting its common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of different national circumstances.
4. 4. Developed country Parties should continue taking the lead by undertaking economy-wide absolute emission reduction targets. Developing country Parties should continue enhancing their mitigation efforts, and are encouraged to move over time towards economy-wide emission reduction or limitation targets in the light of different national circumstances.
5. 5. Support shall be provided to developing country Parties…, recognizing that enhanced support for developing country Parties will allow for higher ambition in their actions.
6. 6. The least developed countries and small island developing States may prepare and communicate strategies, plans and actions for low greenhouse gas emissions development reflecting their special circumstances.
7. 7. Mitigation co-benefits resulting from Parties' adaptation actions and/or economic diversification plans can contribute to mitigation outcomes under this Article.
8. 8. In communicating their nationally determined contributions, all Parties shall provide the information necessary for clarity, transparency and understanding…
9. 9. Each Party shall communicate a nationally determined contribution every 5 years…
10. 10. The Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Agreement shall consider common time frames for nationally determined contributions…
11. 11. A Party may at any time adjust its existing nationally determined contribution with a view to enhancing its level of ambition…
12. 12. Nationally determined contributions communicated by Parties shall be recorded in a public registry maintained by the secretariat.
13. 13. Parties shall account for their nationally determined contributions…
14. 14. In the context of their nationally determined contributions, when recognizing and implementing mitigation actions with respect to anthropogenic emissions and removals, Parties should take into account, as appropriate, existing methods and guidance under the Convention…
15. 15. Parties shall take into consideration in the implementation of this Agreement the concerns of Parties with economies most affected by the impacts of response measures, particularly developing country Parties.
16. 16. Parties…shall notify the secretariat of the terms of that agreement, including the emission level allocated to each Party within the relevant time period, when they communicate their nationally determined contributions. The secretariat shall in turn inform the Parties and signatories to the Convention of the terms of that agreement.
17. 17. Each party to such an agreement shall be responsible for its emission level as set out in the agreement referred to in paragraph 16 of this Article in accordance with paragraphs 13 and 14 of this Article…
18. 18. If Parties acting jointly do so in the framework of, and together with, a regional economic integration organization which is itself a Party to this Agreement, each member State of that regional economic integration organization individually, and together with the regional economic integration organization, shall be responsible for its emission level as set out in the agreement communicated under paragraph 16 of this Article in accordance with paragraphs 13 and 14 of this Article…
19. 19. All Parties should strive to formulate and communicate long-term low greenhouse gas emission development strategies,…taking into account their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of different national circumstances.

By eliminating binding targets, signatories hoped that critics of previous accords would be mollified. Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz, who joined Secretary of State John Kerry in leading the United States delegation, wasn’t as sanguine. He knew the Administration had to frame the climate agreement with an eye toward the American political climate. Otherwise, congressional Republicans were bound to find fault with it. Instead of emphasizing the threat of climate change, he stressed the importance and benefits of innovation. He made that clear when he addressed the Paris participants:⁵⁹ “At the risk of—using a Brazilian analogy—being a one-note samba, innovation is one of the foundations for increased ambition as one re-examines targets in the years ahead.”

After he returned home, he convened a meeting at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Independence Avenue headquarters—known as much for its Brutalist style of architecture as its extensive bureaucracy—and repeated the message to a group of forty policy wonks, lobbyists, and high-level bureaucrats. The Paris Agreement was all about energy innovation, he said, in which the United States had the talent and scientific infrastructure needed to lead the world. “Mission Innovation” was going to be the DOE’s signature message when he testified in the coming weeks on Capitol Hill.

Moniz combined all the attributes of a successful Beltway science and technology policymaker. He was smart but not arrogant; persuasive but not antagonistic; well-versed in history but not intimidated by precedent; forward-looking but not starry-eyed. He was also extremely knowledgeable and analytical; outgoing and engaging; and above all, very politically aware. If anyone could market science and technology policy, it was Ernie.

A few weeks after the meeting at the DOE Forrestal building, he testified on the Administration’s budget request before several House and Senate committees. He sold Mission Innovation⁶⁰ as “essential for economic growth enabled by affordable and reliable energy, for energy security, for U.S. competitiveness, and for a transition to a low carbon energy future.”⁶¹ He mentioned climate change and the president’s Climate Action Plan on several occasions, but embedded the references in a much broader agenda. He also championed the use of nuclear power, a priority of many conservatives.⁶²

For the most part, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle responded cordially, if not favorably. But in the end, the appropriations outcome reflected the predictably reflexive position of budgetary hawks. As the American Institute of Physics Federal Science Budget Tracker reported at the time,⁶³ “The Department of Energy and its science programs stand out as winners in the budget request, as the department would play a central role in President Obama's proposal to double clean-energy R&D over 5 years as part of the Mission Innovation initiative. However, key appropriators have largely dismissed this proposal, instead choosing to cut or flat fund renewable energy, reverse cuts to fossil energy, and increase spending on nuclear energy, the Office of Science, and ARPA-E.”

The United States signed the Paris Agreement. But not even Ernie Moniz’s astute marketing strategy could overcome the political obstacles on Capitol Hill. Opposing climate change was a badge of courage for most Republicans, and spending money—however it was disguised—on something they didn’t believe in, was simply a non-starter. Once again, politics trumped science, science policy, and the science of science policy. It was ever thus, and it will be ever thus. On that note, so ended the Obama years.