http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/r...t-nsf-peer
EXCERPT: Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX) has repeatedly criticized the peer-review process at the National Science Foundation (NSF) [...] since becoming chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives’s science committee in 2013. It was no surprise, then, that during a hearing yesterday on NSF’s 2019 budget request he railed against a handful of grants from NSF’s $6 billion research portfolio as a waste of taxpayer dollars.
What was surprising is that the agency’s friends—both the NSF officials who testified and Democratic legislators who have staunchly defended the agency’s grantmaking practices—appear to have accepted Smith’s premise that NSF has lost sight of its obligation to fund research “in the national interest” and agree that Congress needs to keep NSF on a short leash.
[...] NSF Director France Córdova later tried to appease Smith after he ridiculed a $450,000 grant exploring the interaction of culture and language [...] Starting this month, Córdova noted, the online description of every NSF award includes a sentence that the research “reflects NSF’s statutory mission.” The language, she told Smith, “is meant to be a pause for every division director to ask whether the research fulfills national needs.”
Smith was not satisfied. “I just looked at your justification of light blue,” he said about the 2012 grant to researchers at The Ohio State University in Columbus, “and if there’s anything in it about national interest, let me know. I did not see it.”
Smith has long argued that NSF should be spending more money on computing and the physical sciences, fields in which other countries are threatening U.S. global leadership and that have direct applications to military and economic security. The social and behavioral sciences can’t make that claim, he says...
MORE: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/r...t-nsf-peer
EXCERPT: Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX) has repeatedly criticized the peer-review process at the National Science Foundation (NSF) [...] since becoming chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives’s science committee in 2013. It was no surprise, then, that during a hearing yesterday on NSF’s 2019 budget request he railed against a handful of grants from NSF’s $6 billion research portfolio as a waste of taxpayer dollars.
What was surprising is that the agency’s friends—both the NSF officials who testified and Democratic legislators who have staunchly defended the agency’s grantmaking practices—appear to have accepted Smith’s premise that NSF has lost sight of its obligation to fund research “in the national interest” and agree that Congress needs to keep NSF on a short leash.
[...] NSF Director France Córdova later tried to appease Smith after he ridiculed a $450,000 grant exploring the interaction of culture and language [...] Starting this month, Córdova noted, the online description of every NSF award includes a sentence that the research “reflects NSF’s statutory mission.” The language, she told Smith, “is meant to be a pause for every division director to ask whether the research fulfills national needs.”
Smith was not satisfied. “I just looked at your justification of light blue,” he said about the 2012 grant to researchers at The Ohio State University in Columbus, “and if there’s anything in it about national interest, let me know. I did not see it.”
Smith has long argued that NSF should be spending more money on computing and the physical sciences, fields in which other countries are threatening U.S. global leadership and that have direct applications to military and economic security. The social and behavioral sciences can’t make that claim, he says...
MORE: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/r...t-nsf-peer