Is The Patient Still Dead ?

"Towards the end of the 1970s, I was told by one of our most competent defence secretaries that he did not regard it as his responsibility to ensure that a weapons programme submitted by the Department of Defense for the president's budget was sound and worthwhile. He saw it as the job of the White House Office of Management and Budget to sort that out, with the help of the PSAC. To me this was evidence that increased scientific and technological expertise in government departments increased rather than reduced the need for scientific competence in the White House.

Since Nixon abolished the PSAC, no president has seen fit to create an advisory committee of a similar level of commitment or energy — despite the establishment of a President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology by George Bush Snr in 1990. In 1972, Congress had founded the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA),...The unique feature of the OTA was an advisory committee for each study that included passionate proponents and opponents of the programme in question, whose points of view were evaluated, if not endorsed.

The United States has drawn particular strength from granting independent technical consultants access to government at many levels. Such individuals add knowledge, if not always wisdom. Today, that access is increasingly subject to political and ideological tests...
In a further blow, the OTA was abolished in 1995...Some likened this act to Congress shooting themselves in the brain."  --Richard Garwin

Science & politics :How the mighty have fallen                    Nature 449, 543 (4 October 2007)  

Comments

[Beau Heart]

An MIT man, Vannevar Bush understood this issue very well. During WWI, Bush was frustrated that the Navy failed to develop an anti-submarine technology. Thus as a showdown with Hitler loomed, Bush was resolved that defense technologies were too vital to the survival of our democracy to be left entirely to our elective leaders and the professionals within the armed forces. These two sets of worthies did not know the edges of the endless frontier of science and technology. Accordingly, Bush, a Republican, went to Democratic president F. D. Roosevelt and proposed that the genius harbored within the minds of our nations civilian technologists be harnessed to tackle the terrible challenges of war. The result was an extraordinary bounty of inventions: computers, radars, medicines, synthetic rubber, and far more.

Later, Eisenhower became president of, horrors, an Ivy League college where much valuable civilian work went on, during WWII. Perhaps this helped prepare Ike for valuing the perspectives of highly educated scientists. With civilian scientific advisors like Killian and Kistiakowsky, and their many colleagues, Eisenhower was able to commission valuable technologies for gathering intelligence and deterring war, in a world with nuclear weapons.

Yet Ike was keenly balanced. He famously warned of the perils of a military-industrial alliance that had political and economic incentives to commission poorly conceived military systems.

Subsequent times have seen a decline in the concept of Administrations seeking advice about technological choices from leading scientists. The advice can sometimes potentially be inconvenient for political agendas. This ironically is the reason such advice could serve society as a whole. We seem the poorer for this change. Adamant renders service to note this issue.