Consortium of Social Science Associations
COSSA WASHINGTON UPDATE
Vol. 18, No. 21
Inside UPDATE...
The 106th Congress completed its first session on November 20 and headed home. Seven weeks after the start of Fiscal Year (FY) 2000, Congress and the President finally agreed on all the appropriations bills. The last five were bundled together in an omnibus bill that included funding for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services (including the National Institutes of Health (NIH)), Education, Commerce, Justice, State, Interior, Agriculture, and the District of Columbia.
Both the President and Congress claimed victory for their priorities in the FY 2000 budget. The President achieved his goal to fund the hiring of more teachers and police officers, and to repay dues in arrears to the United Nations. The Republican-led Congress claimed it passed a budget that did not "raid" the Social Security Trust Fund surplus. (This is an item of much debate, depending on whose numbers you use.) They also accomplished their aim of providing more flexibility in how education funds can be spent in the States.
For final numbers regarding FY 2000 appropriations see the chart on page 7. Some of the totals may be affected by the 0.38 percent across-the-board cut agreed to in the omnibus bill. The administration and each Department determine how to implement this cut and no agency can have its budget reduced by more than 15 percent.
The NIH led by its champion Appropriatons' Subcommittee chairs Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Representative John Porter (R-IL) kept the momentum for doubling the agency's budget within five years. The increase of $2.3 billion, brings NIH funding to $17.9 billion. According to the agreement, however, $3 billion of those funds cannot be spent until September 29, 2000. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received a 14 percent increase — to $3.2 billion, including the Public Health and Social Services Emergency funds. The Agency for Health Care Policy Research received a 19 percent increase, boosting its total to $205 million. The Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) was once again the agency for directed spending on particular items of interest to appropriators and its budget increased to $77 million. The Javits Fellowship program survived again, as part of the Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need program. It received funding for two years allowing for new awards for graduate students in the social sciences, arts, and humanities.
A number of non-budgetary items remain stalled including juvenile justice legislation, which contains a version of the reorganization of the Office of Justice Programs. In addition, the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) remain on the agenda for the second session scheduled to begin on January 24, 2000.
COSSA held its Annual Meeting on November 8. Over 75 representatives of COSSA's Members, Affiliates, and Contributors heard speakers from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), Congress, and panel discussions on information technology and youth violence.
National Institute on Drug Abuse Director Alan Leshner was the day's luncheon speaker. Leshner spoke about drug abuse and addiction, and considered many questions that social and behavioral scientists will have to address in the next several years to advance our understanding of prevention and treatment.
Leshner emphasized that drug abuse and addiction are two of the most serious and costly problems facing our society. In terms of economics, they cost the United States roughly $110 billion annually (1995 U.S. dollars, not including legal drugs like caffeine and nicotine). The cost, however, is not the main problem. Leshner noted that the pervasiveness of these problems, as well as the stigma attached to abuse and addiction, are the biggest problems. Stigma "overlays everything," emphasized Leshner.
The scientific findings of the last two decades, he said, have revolutionized our understanding of these problems. Leshner said that the social and behavioral sciences have contributed greatly to this knowledge. Stressing the importance of the knowledge NIDA has gleaned over the years from research, he noted that it is important to get this information to the field. To this end, he explained that NIDA recently published and distributed a research-based guide, "Principles of Drug Addiction Treatment." He stressed, however, that the information contained in the guide must be adapted to specific characteristics of each community.
Despite the research produced by social and behavioral scientists over the years, Leshner said that does not mean that they are off the hook. There is still a lot that we do not know. He pointed to several areas in which NIDA would like more knowledge, including more information about prevention and what works for different segments within the population. In addition, Leshner said there was a need for a greater sophistication in treatment research. He put a lot of emphasis on the need to know more about the transition from drug use to drug addiction. This, he said, will be a major focus of NIDA over the next several years.
The Annual Meeting also featured National Science Foundation Deputy Director Joe Bordogna. Stating that there "will always be a need for social and behavioral scientists" in NSF's themes of "people, ideas, and tools," Bordogna's talk focused on several broad themes: the need for a state-of-the-art infrastructure for the social sciences, the need for research partnerships among the different disciplines, a need for more resources, and a reexamination of the federal government's role in supporting the social and behavioral sciences.
At this time, he stressed that the social sciences do not have the requisite databases and state-of-the- art infrastructure to make the most effective use of the knowledge gathered by researchers. He spoke of the need to increase the use of large-scale computers in the social and behavioral sciences.
Bordogna noted a "disquieting trend" in federal funding of research and development. In 1998, public and private funding for research and development totaled $240 billion. The federal government, he said, accounted for 25 percent of the $240 billion total. This amount is much less than the government's share of research and development in the 1950s (around 90 percent), the 1970s (over 50 percent), and the 1980s (46 percent). In fact, Bordogna noted that the federal government's investment is at its lowest level since 1953.
He further stressed the importance of research partnerships, and the need for all the disciplines within the rubric of social and behavioral science to move together to address the many challenges in the next century. Echoing Presidential Science Advisor Neal Lane's clarion call, Bordogna called on all social and behavioral scientists to become "civic scientists."
In the midst of the final negotiations over the FY 2000 appropriations, Frank Cushing, clerk and staff director of the House Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on the Departments of Veterans' Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, and Independent Agencies, and William Hoagland, staff director for the Senate Budget Committee, spoke about this year's budget process and the funding picture for various government agencies. Each related his frustrations with this year's budget process.
Cushing, who has witnessed federal budget negotiations since the Carter Administration, noted that every year the road to a final budget agreement is different from the year before. This year produced particular aggravation as the President and Congress jockeyed for political advantage going into the 2000 elections.
Regarding the National Science Foundation (NSF), Cushing noted that the numbers for the research agency did not look good at the beginning of the year. The NSF, he said, was competing with other priorities, including large increases for Veteran's Medical Care system ($1.7 billion) and Section 8 Assistance Housing Program from the poor ($2 billion) and the need to stay within the budget agreement spending limits. This forced the House to level-fund NSF for next year. However, with the use of offsets and forward funding across the budget and serious negotiations with the White House, appropriators were able to increase the funding for the NSF. The current numbers look good for NSF, he concluded.
Hoagland lamented the fact that this was supposed to be an easy year for formulating the budget. He suggested the President and the GOP-led Congress had an opportunity, presented with increasing budget surpluses, to fashion an early agreement that could have satisfied each of their competing budget priorities. Instead, he said, we got another year of partisan fighting over who was going to save Social Security and other divisive issues.
Cushing and Hoagland both agreed that there were some interesting accounting methods used by the Republican leadership to rightfully claim that they had not dipped into the Social Security surplus to pay for FY 2000 budget items. Hoagland defended the amount of funds that were designated emergency spending ("agriculture and defense items"), as well as the use of advanced funding, or funding that does not count against the FY 2000 budget cap since it will not be appropriated until Fiscal Year 2001. He echoed his boss Senator Pete Domenici's (R-NM) long held belief in biennial budgeting and said advance funding is simply a step in that direction.
The census as an emergency is more of a stretch, but Hoagland said he could defend the designation since the Congressional leadership was not sure the Supreme Court would rule that federal law prohibits the use of scientific statistical sampling for purposes of congressional apportionment. This, he said, required the Census Bureau to request more funds to conduct the upcoming head-count.
TerriAnn Lowenthal, of the Census 2000 Initiative, spoke about the census as a part of a broader data system that informs public policy, planning, and the most basic understanding of our society. She said that the census should be viewed as the cornerstone of a national statistical system. Unfortunately, Lowenthal explained that this aspect has been overshadowed or drowned out by the debate surrounding the proposed used of scientific statistical sampling in the upcoming headcount.
The two sides in the sampling debate, according to Lowenthal, have called a truce at this point with each side declaring some victories. The sampling debate, she said, will heat up again right after the census is taken because there will ostensibly be two sets of numbers — the corrected (using statistical scientific sampling) and uncorrected totals. The uncorrected totals will be used to determine congressional apportionment, while the corrected totals will be used to determine allocation of federal funds and drawing of the State's congressional district lines.
Stressing the importance of the data products from the census, she said that these are the "legacy of the census." The data, she noted, can serve as a real force for change. "We need to ensure the widespread ownership, use, and understanding of census data."
Prue Adler, assistant executive director of the Association of Research Libraries, spoke about database legislation currently awaiting action by Congress. H.R. 354, also known as the Collections of Information Piracy Act, sponsored by Representative Howard Coble (R-NC) could have debilitating effects on the education and research community. The bill would prohibit the extraction or use of "all or a substantial part . . . of a collection of information gathered, organized, or maintained by another person through the investment of substantial monetary or other resources, so as to cause harm to the actual or potential market."
While the bill provides an exemption for the research, education, and non-profit community, it is a "very narrow" exemption, said Adler. The bill, she said, would hinder the traditional customs of research and education community. For instance, the exemption does not cover taking bits and pieces of information from a database. This important way in which researchers augment their information would simply not be covered by the exemption, thereby stunting the creation of new knowledge by extracting information from different databases. It would also have serious economic impacts on those attempting to use information contained in databases.
Adler noted that her organization, and many others, including COSSA, have thrown their support behind a competing and compromise bill sponsored by Representative Thomas Bliley (R-VA) and chair of the Commerce Committee. H.R. 1858 would provide more exemptions and would thus protect the traditional customs and functions of the research community. (Neither bill passed the House this year.)
Mark Frankel, director of the Scientific Freedom, Responsibility and Law Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), discussed the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) effort to amend Circular A-110 to "require all federal awarding agencies to ensure that all data produced under an award are made available to the public through the procedures established under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)." He noted that the exact day of COSSA's annual meeting marked the day in which the new rules governing access to research data came into effect. "We are in a new regime," said Frankel.
Frankel gave a brief summary of the events preceding the actual rules changes. He noted that the whole affair began in 1993 after the Harvard University School of Public Health issued the "Six Cities Study" in the New England Journal of Medicine. This study was subsequently used in 1997 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set air pollution standards for particulate matter. Efforts made by legislators to obtain the data were unsuccessful, provoking Representative Robert Aderholt (R-AL) to introduce legislation in 1997 to gain access to the data. This legislation failed, but Senator Richard Shelby successfully inserted a provision in the FY 1999 Omnibus Appropriations bill to require the OMB to amend A-110's language to ensure that all data produced under an award are made available to the public through FOIA procedures.
OMB's final language is clearly an effort to address the concerns that the scientific community had with the proposed rule's changes, stated Frankel. He explained that the research community "clearly lost the war over the use of FOIA to access research data, but we did win several battles along the way." He said that OMB's revisions to the proposed law makes it easier to live with, although we would rather not have it at all. Frankel pointed to some of the "victories," including the OMB's definition of "research" which contained several exemptions which make it more palatable to the research community. In addition, the OMB rule does not apply retroactively. Finally, he said that the OMB included a provision that allows for the collecting agency to charge a fee for obtaining the requested data.
In conclusion, Frankel told the audience that he believes the new rule will lead to litigation, especially considering that Senator Shelby intended for "all research" to be subject to a FOIA request and that OMB narrowly defined research.
Al Blumstein, COSSA President and principal investigator of the National Science Foundation- funded National Consortium on Violence Research (NCOVR), addressed youth gun violence. He noted that youth violence, particularly youth gun violence, dramatically increased between 1985 and 1993, and since that time has steadily declined. He attributed the increase in youth gun violence to the rise of crack markets in America's inner-cities.
Young African-American males led the increase in gun violence since they were often recruited to sell crack. In order to protect themselves, Blumstein noted that these youth armed themselves, which led to more increasingly violent exchanges. With the decline in popularity in crack, and with new federal laws (e.g., the Brady Bill), and local police and community efforts youth gun violence has decreased steadily since the early 1990s. Young African-American males, said Blumstein, led the decrease. In contrast, gun violence among young white males is not decreasing at the same rate of African American males. While youth gun violence is decreasing, said Blumstein, it is still higher than in earlier decades.
Alex Crosby, medical epidemiologist in the Division of Violence Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), spoke about youth interpersonal violence and some of the risk and protective factors that the CDC has identified through several longitudinal research studies. He noted that even though some of the youth violence rates (particularly youth homicide) have declined, there is "still a lot we don't know about the risk and protective factors associated with youth violence." In fact, he said that even though youth interpersonal violence rates are dropping, they are still quite high for the United States. Therefore, the CDC, stated Crosby, is very interested in sponsoring more research in this field.
Crosby discussed the four steps in the public health approach to address youth violence: 1) definition of the problem, 2) identification of the causes, 3) development and evaluation of intervention programs, and 4) implementation of intervention programs. Once a problem is defined and an intervention is successfully implemented in a particular region, that information must be spread to other areas experiencing the same or similar problems. Programs may have to be modified and adapted to a particular region, but "the word needs to spread."
He proceeded to discuss youth violence risk and protective factors at four different levels: 1) individual, 2) close interpersonal (peer or family), 3) proximal social (community), and 4) societal. Each of these levels, he explained, has different risk and protective factors for youth violence.
Ted Gest, national news editor for U.S. News & World Report and president of the Criminal Justice Journalists (CJJ) group (http://www.reporters.net/cjj), discussed news media coverage of youth violence. He addressed the standard critique that the media cover juvenile crime too much and that makes the public unduly fearful and skews public policy in favor of more punitive measures. He expressed his disagreement with the critique on two levels, while noting that he partially agreed with the criticism on a third level.
With respect to the criticism that there is too much coverage of youth violence, he said, however, that there is no real measure to prove "too much coverage." This criticism, he said, assumes that there is a correct base-level for coverage. Gest said that you must also consider the purpose of different sources of media coverage. For example, he pointed to local television coverage of crime. Local television, he said, is designed to report the news which is important to locals, and not as a source of social science critique of local events.
Gest also disagreed with the criticism that news media coverage leads to bad or skewed public policy. He said the news media has gotten a bad rap for creating support for punitive measures for juvenile criminals. He contended that there is no proven nexus between news media coverage and implementation of bad public policy. The social sciences, he asserted, lack research in this area.
He did agree with one part of the standard critique. The news media, in certain cases, do give the public an exaggerated idea of the crime rate. For example, the media may lead people to believe that violent crime is much more of a problem than it really is. But, Gest doubted that this type of skewing leads to increased public fear of crime.
President Clinton recently announced his intention to nominate Frank Holleman III to serve as Deputy Secretary of the Department of Education. Holleman is currently an attorney with the firm of Wyche, Burgess, Freeman & Paham, P.A. where he has practiced since 1997. Prior to his current position, he served from 1994 to 1997 as Chief of Staff to Secretary of Education Richard Riley. The Deputy Secretary serves as the chief operating officer of the Department and principal advisor to the Secretary on program policies and the budget. Holleman replaces Marshall "Mike" Smith who returns to Stanford University.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced a national search for an Associate Director for the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) to replace Norman Anderson, who is expected to leave in March 2000 (See UPDATE, October 11, 1999, Part Two). While a search committee is currently being formed, the agency has released an announcement (NO. OD099-7145) which closes January 31, 2000. A copy of the announcement can be found at: http://www1.od.nih.gov/ohrm/hrinfo/ses/vacancy http://www1.od.nih.gov/ohrm/hrinfo/ses/vacancy.
The Associate Director is responsible for providing leadership and direction in the development, refinement, and implementation of a trans-NIH plan to increase the scope and support of behavioral and social sciences research; developing an overall strategy for expansion and integration across NIH Institutes and Centers; developing initiatives designed to stimulate behavioral and social sciences research and integrate a biobehavioral perspective across the research areas of NIH; establishing and maintaining organizational linkages on NIH behavioral and social science issues across the Department of Health and Human Services, other Federal agencies, academic institutions, and health organizations; seeking advice and guidance from the behavioral and social sciences research community; coordinating the development of NIH policies, goals and objectives, among other duties. The Associate Director will also serve as the principal staff advisor to the NIH Director, and as NIH spokesperson on matters related to behavioral and social sciences research.
The Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (CBASSE) of the National Academy of Sciences is currently accepting applications for the position of Director of the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT).
The position became open when Miron Straf was promoted to deputy director of the CBASSE. Straf was CNSTAT director for the past 12 years.
CNSTAT, created in 1972, serves to contribute to a better understanding of important national issues by working to improve the statistical methods and information on which public policy decisions are based. For more information about the responsibilities of the position or for desired qualifications, please see the CNSTAT webpage at: http://www2.nas.edu/CNSTAT, or call NAS at 202/334-2300.
We are pleased to announce that Howard University is once again a member of the COSSA family. We look forward to working with Howard University on areas of mutual concern.
COSSA provides this information as a service and encourages readers to contact the agency for further information or application materials. Additional application guidelines and restrictions may apply.
The International Migration Program of the SSRC seeks to foster innovative research that will advance theoretical understandings of voluntary and forced international migration to the U.S., the process of settlement, and outcomes for immigrants, refugees, and native-born Americans. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the program offers Dissertation Fellowships, Postdoctoral Fellowships, and Summer Dissertation Workshops. For more information and eligibility requirements, contact the Program at SSRC, 810 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY, 10019, USA; Telephone: 212/377-2700; Email: migration@ssrc.org; or webpage: http://www.ssrc.org. Deadline: 1/12/2000 (post-mark)
This is the final edition of COSSA for 1999. We will resume publishing the newsletter on January 10th.