The National Science Foundation (NSF) has been in the news lately for using stimulus money for, well, anything but stimulating the economy.
The National Science Foundation was founded in 1950 to fund research and develop the sciences in America. It now has a budget of $6.06 billion. Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma’s Pork Report has called out the NSF multiple times for wasteful spending, and they deserve the hits they’re taking. Some of the grants they’ve given out have been questionable, like $1.2 million to evaluate the effect video game use has on the brains of seniors.
Let’s be clear—the problem isn’t that the National Science Foundation is giving away money for research. Pure research doesn’t receive as much funding from the private sector as applied research—it deserves more. And although it’s easy not to be that enthused with the stimulus, at least the NSF grants create jobs and the research conducted contributes to the national infrastructure. But when the NSF starts to fund useless programs, it rips legitimacy away from the projects that truly matter.
For example, here are two NSF projects: one received a $1.5 million grant to research the genetic makeup of rice in West Africa; the other concluded that plant diversity increases proportionally to the wealth of urban areas and cost an unknown percentage a $4.4 million grant. Looking at the projects it’s easy to quickly dismiss them as wasteful money. But one of them has true scientific value and the other fails to stack up.
The valuable program, believe it or not, is the one that studies rice. The genetic make-up of West African rice is important because this particular strand of rice is much more drought resistant than other rice varieties around the world. If we are able to compile an accurate genetic profile, it might be the key to understanding how we can make other strands of rice similarly resistant. Drought resistant rice will have a higher crop yield which means stable production levels, something incredibly important because rice is a pillar of the world’s food supply.
Additionally, project scientists note that once this rice is decoded, it will allow scientists to rapidly unravel the makeup of more complicated plants. For example, the effort to decode Asian rice took $200 million and six years, but the current project will only cost $1.5 million and take six months. Talk about increasing returns! This research costs less than one percent of the first effort and will take one-twelfth as long.
This is the type of project that the NSF should be funding—something that will contribute significantly to human knowledge, save lives, and provide a base for future (and cheaper) research.
Let’s compare that to the NSF grant to study plant diversity in urban areas. A NSF funded team conducted an extensive survey of Phoenix area ecology as part of a $4.4 million block grant to the Arizona State University. According to people who responded by email and are associated with the program it’s impossible to tell what fraction of the grant was spent on the survey, but the survey is conducted once every five years meaning the costs will continue to add up. The most noteworthy conclusion from the study is that wealthier neighborhoods have a greater number, and variety, of plants. This is what the NSF decided to highlight —it isn’t out of context—so it’s presumably the most important result of the study.
The result is blindingly obvious. It’s intuitive that a wealthier neighborhood will have more plants than a poorer one. And if there are more plants, there will probably be more variety. It took “scholars” a lot of money to confirm this.
What exactly do we gain by funding this study and what are the intellectual ramifications? It’s hard to discern much—certainly nothing as significant as the research into West African rice. The plant diversity study essentially conducts a census, seemingly because some scientists thought it would be interesting. That’s nice, but it’s hardly a compelling reason to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer funds.
When the “so what” factor can’t be easily answered, the project should undergo significant scrutiny. This is one of the problems with giving unspecified grants to institutions, because when the money is distributed at their discretion it can lead to projects of dubious utility.
Science spending is almost, if not just, as important as defense spending for the long term prosperity of our nation and as such should receive ample government funding. Our scientific prowess is a point of pride for many citizens. Try to imagine America without the moon landings. It’s difficult to conceptualize.
However, the NSF cannot become as bloated as say, the current defense spending process, jam packed with pork barrel spending and wasteful projects. The NSF needs to efficiently and appropriately distribute monies to programs that actually matter and have potential—in this case that might mean more oversight of how block grants to institutions are managed. Funding a survey that correlates neighborhood plant diversity to wealth sounds like a sociology project and doesn’t give taxpayers the requisite bang for their buck.
Correction: In the second paragraph a study was referred to that used a $400,000 federal grant to evaluate why men don’t like to use condoms. The article incorrectly identified the funding organization as the National Science Foundation, it should have been the National Institute of Health. It has been replaced with another example.
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July 24th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
As someone that works at NSF– each study is held to an extremely high level of scrutiny before grant money is given out. It’s not easy to get a grant from NSF. This includes special attention to the larger impact and the scientific integrity of the proposed study. You should’ve delved further into the process NSF goes through before bashing one of the least wasteful government agencies.
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July 24th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
OK, so the entire NSF budget is $6 billion a year. The amount of shrink-wrapped $100 bills shipped to Iraq and lost added up to $12 billion. Try to have some perspective. Where did those pallets of cash end up, and are you paying as much attention to them as you are to this?
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July 24th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Wait, Floyd, your logic is that since $6 billion wasted isn’t as much as $12 billion, I should pay less attention to the $6 billion? Genius. What if I found $13 billion wasted on some social program, would the $12 billion wasted be any less egregious? No, but your comment implies that.
In case you haven’t noticed I write for the Pork Barrel blog, focusing on money the government gives away inappropriately. I’m clearly not going to be able to cover every incident where the US government wastes money, and just because you found one I didn’t mention doesn’t detract from what I wrote. You clearly haven’t read any other articles I’ve written because if you had, you would have known I’ve been very critical of defense spending. Take a look, Pork Watch.
Lastly, the point of the article was that science is important to the future of the country, so the money the NSF is allotted should be distributed in the most effective manner possible. The $12 billion in Iraq is quite irrelevant in that case.
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July 24th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Jen,
Two points: 1. If your review process is so great why was the infamous condom study reviewed and approved? Investigating where dogs were domesticated? Paying old people to play video games? The NSF might be one of the most effective government agencies, but it shouldn’t hide behind that as a defense for the things it does inappropriately fund.
2. The program I criticized was part of a block grant to UofA. What kind of oversight does the NSF institute after the grant money is distributed? That’s just a question. The media contact at the NSF I called and emailed has never responded.
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July 24th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
A.J.,
You seem to be criticizing NSF for a research study to find out why men don’t like to use condoms. Yet the hyperlink you point to is for an NIH study on this topic.
This is not the best way to make your argument.
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July 24th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Ah, my ears are red, that will be corrected. However, that was only a small point in the overall article, don’t misconstrue it as more than that. I could have put in plenty of examples.
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July 24th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
If there are plenty of examples then make sure they were actually NSF funded. If you actually read some of the studies you’re criticizing then you must not be looking at them from a scientists point of view. The study on the origins of the domestic dog establishes a phylogenetic tree for evolutionary biologists and enables conservationists to consider how best to recover endangered wolf populations. Just because the money doesn’t go to a zippy new product that ends up in your lap, doesn’t mean the study was pointless.
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July 24th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
I extolled the NSF for half the article for funding research into the genetics of rice to combat world hunger. Is that one of those “zippy new products” you’re talking about? It’s pretty disingenuous to highlight an example I mention in the comments section and pretend like that’s the article I wrote (the condom thing I misattributed, which I’ve corrected). So far no one has disputed the Phoenix area study on which I focused my criticism. I honestly expected some debate on that.
And regarding the dog study, the things you mention aren’t available on the internet. I can’t find the study on the NSF site, which is a pain in the butt to navigate by the way. But I’ll roll with what you said. Two questions: Is it appropriate to use stimulus money on a study taking place in Qatar and other foreign countries? 2. It’s pretty easy to toss words like “phylogenetic” around, but just how important will these results be to conservationists? My bet is that knowing the phylogenetic tree for dogs isn’t go to make that much of a difference to conservationists, as much as following common sense policies and protecting the wolves’ habitats.
I have never said these studies shouldn’t be conducted, but I do think some of them should find funding by other means, which it seems the dog study did have, until it was subsequently subsidized by the NSF.
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July 27th, 2009 at 10:23 am
The Phoenix area survey is not a single study but a long-term data gathering project involving several NSF Divisions called Long Term Ecological Research. The project has 26 sites (http://www.lternet.edu/sites/), and the rapid change from rural desert to urban environment in and around Phoenix provides interesting and potentially useful opportunities for scientific research. Arizona State was selected, through a difficult merit review process, as a Long Term Ecological Research site. You can find out more about the project here: http://www.lternet.edu/sites/cap/. The findings you think are wasteful come from data that are being collected for a variety of purposes, not just for this one study. My understanding of the project is that NSF is supporting the data collection, not necessarily the analyses various scientists choose to perform on that data. As far as I can tell, the data is publicly available on the site given above, so you are welcome to perform a less wasteful analysis yourself if you like.
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July 27th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
I know about LTER, and I note that this particular study was funded by a larger grant to the University. I am also aware this study wasn’t conducted solely for this conclusion, something I never stated if you read the article. You seem very willing to put words in my mouth and assume I didn’t do any research. I did talk to people associated with the program, but since I didn’t tell them I was going to quote them, I chose not put their names and quotes in. It would have been awesome to have my call returned by the NSF media contact, but she never responded to my message and every time I called she was out of the office.
As I explicitly note in the article, the NSF decided to highlight the plant diversity/wealth correlation in a press release. If this is what the NSF is highlighting, it implies it’s the most important finding. The ASU website doesn’t have information suggesting otherwise, in fact the only thing the survey website says about the results is: “As predicted, urbanization markedly increased plant diversity with three times the number of genera in urban versus undeveloped desert patches (http://caplter.asu.edu/home/survey200/index.jsp).” Hmm, it sure sounds like the conclusion the NSF highlighted. The site doesn’t bother to mention any of its other ground breaking discoveries.
My question is, does the NSF keep track of how grants are used after they’ve been approved? It doesn’t matter how rigorous the “merit review process” is if the money is spent unwisely after approval. Additionally, this study is conducted every 5 years. If this is the main conclusion (the luxury effect), and the NSF and ASU sites lead me to believe it is, I really hope the NSF isn’t going to continue funding it. I’m sure there are better uses for NSF money.
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