Strengthening COSSA for the Challenges Ahead: 

Is the Past Prologue? 

remarks by

COSSA Executive Director Howard J. Silver

COSSA Annual Meeting

November 3, 2003

COSSA members, colleagues, friends.  Thank you for giving me this opportunity to talk to you today about Strengthening COSSA for the Challenges Ahead.  When I came to COSSA in mid-November 1983, the social and behavioral sciences were still struggling with the attacks on it by the Reagan administration.  The severe cuts proposed for these sciences had been mitigated, but not completely eliminated.  Across the government “social science” became, if not dirty words, words to avoid.  Some of the conservatives who ran the Reagan revolution believed that we were all a bunch of liberals who only wanted government money to study how to spend more government money on programs that did not work.  Twenty years later some agencies have never fully recovered from that assault – research at the Departments of Labor, HUD,  Health and Human Services (excluding NIH), and others.  On the other hand, NIH and NSF have prospered and the social and behavioral sciences have joined in that prosperity – a rising tide has lifted all boats – not necessarily to equal levels, but uplifted nonetheless.

When I was hired to be the Staff Associate for Government Relations, then Executive Director, Roberta Miller told me she wanted a pair of young legs to run around Capitol Hill on behalf of COSSA.  Twenty years later I understand her sentiments completely.  COSSA is now served by an excellent staff, who are politically savvy and who understand how to operate in Washington on behalf of an often disparate research community that has maintained its commitment to COSSA because of an understanding that Ben Franklin was right in that “we must all hang together or assuredly we will all hang separately.”

In 1983 COSSA consisted on ten members, 24 affiliates, and 28 contributors.  Today, COSSA has 15 members, 27 affiliates, and 66 contributors.  In addition to the support from the dues paid by these members, COSSA has been able to attract funding for the past 9 years from both the Ford and Kellogg Foundations to present briefings on Capitol Hill bringing the results of social/behavior research to policymakers and practitioners.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose

Twenty years brings about many changes, but as Alphonse Karr pointed out:  the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Having recently perused old copies of the COSSA newsletter it is interesting to see that headlines from the early 1980s have come around again, particularly with regard to the politicization of science.  A few examples:

Purge of ‘Carterites’ on at Science Agency – 1982  

Bumpers bill to protect Advisory Committee from Politics – 1983

HHS Agency ignoring peer review recommendations – 1984

New OJJDP head has no background in Juvenile Justice – 1982

U.S. Denials of Visas Limits Scientific Communication – 1984  

With regard to the Federal budget, of course we have gone from deficits to a brief shining moment of surpluses, and now back into deficits.  As a consequence, domestic discretionary spending, which includes funding for science, is under severe constraints again.  In addition, Congress still resorts to Continuing Resolutions as lawmakers demonstrate again and again that they cannot complete the appropriations process by the October 1 start of the federal fiscal year.

Policymakers still question peer review.  Although in recent years, there has been a push to infuse throughout the federal government the process of awarding competitive grants through peer review (e.g at Agriculture, Justice, and Education); this does not stop the questioning.  As former Louisiana Senator Russell Long once said in a post-midnight Senate debate in the mid-1980s, “Who Are These Peers?”  Members of Congress, especially appropriators, believe strongly that it is their job, to quote Long again, “to cut the melon” that is the federal budget and decide how taxpayer money is spent.  We see it again this year in the Senate appropriations committee decisions regarding NIJ, where $50 million was allocated, and $51 million was earmarked.

With regard to scientific expertise, policymakers believe the notion that a social scientist can be found for every side of any issue.  This sometimes extends to the natural and physical sciences as well as evidenced by the debate over the Strategic Defense Initiative and the Superconducting Super Collider in the 1980s and the contemporary arguments over global warming.  And with Harry Truman’s search for the one-handed economist continuing unabated, politicians also believe that often the two sides can come from the same person.  Thus, the accusations of the politicization of science, as the practice of seeking research in the support of your policy goals still remains a vital part of the landscape.  The phrase “sound science” has become part of the lexicon of DC policy debates, but the “sound” often becomes a cacophony of competing claims.

Two other factors affect how the social and behavioral sciences are perceived.   First, our achievements are still taken for granted.  In 1982 in one of the many ironies of that time, President Reagan cited data from the National Election Study, while his administration was cutting funding for that survey and other social/behavioral research.  Social and behavioral expertise is utilized by Congress and the Executive Branch every day, but it is often unrecognized and, perhaps more importantly insufficiently funded.  Concepts from economics, sociology, political science, and other of our sciences are used all the time by politicians, but the disconnect from the research antecedents remain powerful. 

Second, our legitimacy as sciences is still questioned.  We make easy targets.  Whether it is former Senator William Proxmire and his Golden Fleece awards in the 1980s, Senator Robert Byrd trying to cut NSF economic grants because of some pique in the early 1990s, or the brouhaha over a NSF political science grant investigating candidate recruitment for Congress in the late 1990s, the research is open to attack.  Of course, we see it again in the current assault on sexual behavior research supported by NIH.  It is clear that some people do not think that certain social/behavioral research should be regarded as legitimate inquiry.

What Has Changed in the Past Twenty Years

During the past two decades we have experienced significant changes in the political milieu.  Of course, September 11 supposedly “changed everything.”  The seeming in perpetuity, war on terrorism has changed policy as well as the structure of the federal government.  The social/behavioral sciences continue to seek a foothold in the policy responses to 9/11and the research agenda established as part of that response.  It is encouraging that the new Department of Homeland Security has included risk-based economic modeling as part of its initial group of funded research centers and is quite interested in upgrading its risk communication efforts.  We need to persist in our argument that the terrorism problem cannot be overcome solely through the development of new gadgets by technology.  Terrorists are people, and terrorism is behavior, and social/behavioral research can help us to understand this problem.  

Returning to the political environment, the Executive Branch clearly has gone from 12 years of Republican rule to 8 years of Democrats and now the Republicans are back in charge.  Most dramatically, with the historic congressional election of 1994, we have gone from an era of Democratic hegemony in the House to, given gerrymandering and the safety of districts, an era of Republican hegemony.  The gerrymandering and safe seats have also led to a more partisan and polarized House. 

One of the interesting offshoots of the GOP takeover has been the setting of term limits for committee chairs and leadership.  This has provided discontinuities of leadership in particular policy areas, but has paradoxically also strengthened the centralized leadership, particularly in the House.

The Senate has been somewhat more volatile politically and more moderating.  Senators still maintain their individual power bases.  But we learn from contemporary accounts that even this institution has changed considerably and that comity has diminished.  The influx of former House members who helped stir that body’s 1994 revolution has abetted this situation.

The Congress has greatly expanded its interest in providing special projects to its constituents.  This includes the phenomenon of academic earmarking, which according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, passed $2 billion in grants in FY 2003.  An example:

in 1983 the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) had a budget of about $12 million; in FY 2003 its budget was almost $173 million, with about $150 million for special projects. 

Another interesting change is the decline in the number of social/behavioral scientists in the Congress.  In 1994, there were five Ph.D. political scientists in the House, today there is one, plus another with a degree in International Relations.  Two out of the three economists in the Congress in 1994 are gone.  Although there are four psychologists and three history Ph.D.s in the House, there are also six medical doctors, three dentists, two physicists, and an optometrist.  There are no social/behavioral scientists in the Senate; there were three in 1994.  Today, the Senate Majority Leader is a medical doctor and two Senators are veterinarians.  This is not to say that non-social/behavioral scientists are unfriendly to our mission, but it helps to have friends from who share the background.

As we all know, the communications revolution has also altered the way we do business.  Following the anthrax situation in 2001, regular mail to Capitol Hill and some Executive Branch agencies now faces considerable delays.  In a fast-moving policy world, email and faxes have become the norm.  As we also all know, email can be good and bad.  Instantaneous communication is great.  Discussing strategies and sending erroneous information across the electronic world has considerable danger.  In addition, the Web with its blogs, instant news availability, and access to historical data bases, has provided a new and different avenue for policy players to operate and agendas to be set.

The dissemination of information has also changed in the past twenty years.  The proliferation of policy shops that produce and sometimes filter research has exacerbated the “research in support of policy goals” I talked about earlier.  Twenty years ago Heritage had just made a splash with its Mandate for Change written for the new Reagan administration.  The CATO Institute was viewed as a fringe organization.  Today, they are powerful players in a policy world controlled by conservatives.  Brookings, the American Enterprise Institute, the Progressive Policy Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Institute for International Economics, and many others with narrower agendas, such as COSSA’s neighbors, the Center for Immigration Studies, are all promulgating policy advice based on studies, reports, and research-based documents.

As an offshoot of some of this, the past twenty years have also seen the emergence of conservative social scientists as an important force in the defense of social/behavioral science research.  The old saw that we are a bunch of liberal researchers has been belied by economists, Nobelists and the National Bureau of Economic Research led by Reagan Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Martin Feldstein, who have been willing to support COSSA’s efforts to enhance funding and with regard to former House Science Committee Chairman Robert Walker’s attempt to abolish the SBE Directorate at NSF, plead our case.  Political scientists like recent Medal of Freedom winner James Q Wilson and others have also been willing to step up to the plate on COSSA’s behalf.  Of course, the social/behavioral sciences and academia in general are still overwhelming liberal in their political leanings, but we are no longer viewed as monolithic.

Finally, thanks to COSSA and its allies, the past twenty years have seen three structural changes in key science agencies that have enhanced the standing of social/behavioral science in the nation’s research and development agenda.  Social scientists have gained formalized seats at the table at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

The creation of the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Directorate at NSF in 1991 followed a campaign that began its final successful run with a conversation I had with then National Science Board Chairman James Duderstadt in his University of Michigan president’s office in 1988.  It gained momentum with strong public support from the late Herbert Simon at a Congressional hearing in 1989.  And then through a Task Force process, where Stephen Anderson, Nancy Cantor, Joan Huber, Charles Plott, Risa Palm, and Peter Rogerson played vital roles in convincing Mary Clutter, then head of the Biological, Behavioral and Social Sciences Directorate, and eventually NSF Director Walter Massey, that our sciences deserved a social/behavioral scientist, not a biologist, to represent us at the highest levels of the Foundation.  This has culminated in the strong support by the current NSF Director Rita Colwell for a priority area in our sciences called Human and Social Dynamics.  

The establishment of the Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research (OBSSR) at NIH came from convincing Congress in the reauthorization of NIH in 1993 that the connection of Health and Behavior was a strong one.  This had been demonstrated by an Institute of Medicine report and other studies.  Although it took almost two years to get off the ground, the Office has had an important impact on the agenda at NIH and OBSSR’s last director, Raynard Kington, has become the Deputy Director to Dr. Zerhouni.

The position of Assistant Director for the Social/Behavioral (and now Educational Sciences) at OSTP was established by George H.W. Bush’s Science Adviser Allan Bromley.  As President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1981, Bromley spoke out in support of the social/behavioral sciences and against their decimation by the Reagan administration.  Pierre Perrolle was detailed from NSF to become the position’s first occupant.  Perrolle and most of his successors have been asked to focus their efforts on the education agenda of the administration they served, but it has been important to have the social/behavioral perspective in-house.

All three positions are currently in flux as each has a search for a new person to take over the reins from Norman Bradburn at SBE, Raynard Kington at OBSSR, and Jim Griffin at OSTP.  As in all searches, we need your help in identifying good candidates who can serve the cause well.

How COSSA Works

The Consortium has always identified itself as a bridge between the academic research community and the Washington policymaking community.  To that end we have endeavored to bring researchers in contact with policymakers through briefings on Capitol Hill, as witnesses before Congressional committees and Executive Branch Task Forces (including testimony by COSSA staff from time-to-time), and in informal settings.  We have also tried to inform policymakers of important research results from our sciences.

As a group whose mission is to enhance federal funding for the social/behavioral sciences our focus has been on four key spending committees where most of the federal support for the research is allocated:  Agriculture and Rural Development; Commerce, Justice, State; Labor, Health and Human Services; and VA, HUD and Independent Agencies. 

We also find that each year there are non-spending issues that focus our attention.  In the past few years these have included:  data access and quality, human subjects protection,

the independence and integrity of the research and statistics agencies in the Departments, and defending peer review.

In doing our work, with a small staff of four, it is necessary to work well with others.  We have relied on grass roots help from our Member associations.  We have coordinated activities with the Higher Education groups in Washington, with individual universities, with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and with the National Academies and the National Research Council.  In some cases, we have worked directly with individual social/behavioral scientists who have significant connections to policymakers.

Most importantly we have joined and, in some cases led, coalitions that have included groups from the other sciences, higher education, and even the industrial world.  Most of you know that I have been an important actor in the Coalition for National Science Funding from its beginnings in 1988, serving as its chair from 1994-2000.   Angela Sharpe on the COSSA staff has co-chaired the Coalition for the Advancement of Health Through Behavioral and Social Science Research (CAHT-BSSR) since its founding several years ago.  She is also organizing a new coalition to cope with attacks on sexual behavior research supported by NIH.  This work in coalitions has paid dividends when Chairman Walker attacked SBE and more recently in the current situation at NIH.  In both cases, COSSA has received strong support from non-social/behavioral science groups.

Of course, the key to any successful advocacy operation is the building of relationships with the people you are trying to persuade and COSSA has done plenty of that.  Unfortunately, people leave jobs, administrations come and go, friends in Congress retire   (Steve Horn), are defeated (Doug Walgren and Tom Sawyer), and sometimes die (George Brown).  New friends and champions need to be found.

We still use the COSSA Washington UPDATE to report on important federal activity both to inform social/behavioral scientists as well as people in Congress and the Executive Branch who receive it, about our interests in the current maelstrom of policymaking.  We also try to connect with constituents at meetings and through visits to campuses.  On my first full day at COSSA, the staff took a trip to William and Mary to explain our mission.  Budgetary and time constraints have made these more difficult lately.

The Future

As we look to the future, the stresses on the body politic are enormous.  Terrorism and homeland security, the war in Iraq, deficits, jobs, and the economy, the future of Medicare and Social Security in the face of rapidly approaching baby boomer retirements, changing demographics of the nation’s population, particularly in the schools, all confront policymakers with difficult dilemmas.  Science policy, at least support of basic research, still elicits general bipartisan support, and most of the time is outside the often bitter partisan disputes on Capitol Hill.  In this regard, the social and behavioral sciences are usually swept along without much fuss.

One science policy area where our disciplines will play a significant role is in the debates over the ethical and social implications of further advances in knowledge.  Congress has recognized that the tremendous promises of nanotechnology must be tempered with a concern over what might be wrought.  The warnings of Bill Joy, Michael Crichton, and others have renewed attention on researching and thinking about the consequences of unbridled science.  The Nanotechology legislation that might pass the Congress this session takes cognizance of the importance of these issues.

In the short-term the upcoming presidential and congressional elections may change things, then again, as Jeff Greenfield is fond of saying, they may not.  Many of you may have read reports that a group of unofficial advisers to the Republicans, led by Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, have this grand plan to reduce the scope of the federal government by squeezing federal revenue through continuous tax cutting.  If achieved, a stripped down federal government would have to decide where support for science fits.

Within the science agencies, there is a current fashion for thinking big.  Large grants through multidisciplinary centers are in their plans.  For the past few years our leaders at the science agencies have asked social/behavioral scientists to think in terms of large, interdisciplinary projects.  The efforts to have an SBE project win a NSF Science and Technology Center grant have become a significant pursuit.  The NIH Road Map that Dr. Zerhouni spoke of earlier today also envisions large long-term projects.  Our scientists need to step up and develop studies that will allow them to compete for these awards.

For COSSA challenges remain.  We are always seeking to expand our universe of supporters.  We are grateful for the support of people on campuses who often take the lead in bringing new universities to COSSA’s family of contributors.  As higher education faces issues of how to organize knowledge on campus, the future of disciplines seems to be always on the agenda.  In his book Consilience Edward O. Wilson suggests that the social sciences will move into the biological sciences on one end – psychology and physical anthropology – and into the humanities on the other – political science, cultural anthropology, sociology.  Economics is left dangling.  How far will interdisciplinary thinking and the breaking down of those stovepipes that are the disciplinary departments go?  If this is the future of higher education, what implications are these for COSSA down the road?

As I mentioned earlier, rebuilding relationships with new Members of Congress, new Congressional staff, and new key players in the Executive Branch is also a challenge that must be met.  Providing information to these folks through congressional briefings has been part of COSSA’s modus operandi.  However, we have noted a drop-off in attendance by Congressional staff.  Are they not interested?  Are they overworked?  Are the topics not relevant to their agendas?  This is something we hope to find out next year as an evaluation is built into the Kellogg Foundation grant that funds our congressional briefings.  It has been interesting to see these sessions emulated by other groups, including COSSA’s members.  So, the consensus seems to be that the briefings have value.

We know that it is difficult to play in the contemporary political arena, where the power of persuasion exists through your ability to convince people with your arguments, not your resources.  It is also difficult when you know that the major area of your activity does not affect the majority of your constituents.  We are well aware that only a small percentage of social/behavioral scientists are seeking federal grants.  We have noticed however, that when threatened our constituents react and are willing to be heard.  For routine monitoring and advocating, they have and, hopefully always will have, COSSA.

Edward O. Wilson has also said that:  “People expect from the social sciences…the knowledge to understand their lives and control their future.  They want the power to predict…what will happen if society selects one course of action over another.”  We may not be there yet, but there is hope, with new research tools and increased funding for our research, that someday soon we will be.

Thank you for listening.