Is Our Representatives Learning?
Reconnecting Science and Our Congress
SOURCE: AP
Sure, it would be nice if we could better educate members of Congress about science. But why not go further by electing more scientists in the first place—and training unelected Ph.D.s in the politics of influence?
First the good news: The number of physicists in Congress just increased dramatically. And now the bad: That increase was from 2 to 3. Still, if you plot the data, you can see the trend: As physicist Rush Holt (D-NJ) recently joked to The New York Times, “By mid-century, I think, we’ll have a functioning majority.”
In all seriousness, though, to hear Holt and his fellow congressional equation solvers —Vern Ehlers (R-MI) and the recently elected Bill Foster (D-IL)—tell it, they are strangers in a truly strange land. Ehlers, for instance, relates having to occasionally rush to the floor to prevent fellow members from killing science programs they don’t even understand—assuming, for instance, that “game theory” research involves sports, and that A.T.M. studies have something to do with banks (actually, this is a communications technology).
But is creating another technocratic agency the only way to bridge the divide between science and Congress?
Many people would probably agree that this gap between science and most of our elected representatives needs closing—but how to make that happen remains a complicated matter. The traditional solution advocated by science policy aficionados involves the institutionalization of congressional scientific advice—hence the seemingly never-ending quest to revive the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. However, as I reported several months back, even with a presumably sympathetic Democratic Congress that project has foundered—and it’s unclear that we can expect much movement on this front in the near future.
But is creating another technocratic agency the only way to bridge the divide between science and Congress? Not necessarily. Of late I have noticed mounting interest in another solution—namely, electing more scientists, regardless of party affiliation, to office. To this end, Scientists and Engineers for America has been training scientists on how to run electoral campaigns, and one such scientist who I know personally, physicist and former Holt staffer Don Engel, is currently seeking a delegate position in the Maryland State House.
Other scientists in the running for 2008 include chemical engineer Christopher Rothfuss, who is shooting for a Wyoming Senate seat, and Michelle McMurry, a biochemist running for a California House seat out of San Francisco. But I can’t help thinking: Trainings are great as far as they go, but if advocates really want to usher more scientists into politics, why not do it the good old-fashioned way?
One possibility would be for interested individuals to form a nonpartisan Science PAC, devoted to funding candidates who are either scientists themselves, or who make science a strong priority and have good records on science issues. With adequate funding, the PAC might not only select, say, five or ten members to support each election cycle; it could also target science “bad guys”—climate change deniers, officials who promote manufactured scientific controversies, anti-evolutionists, policymakers bent on environmental degradation—who deserve to be unelected and give campaign funds to their opponents. To some extent, groups like the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters already support advocates for science-based policies like these. It’s the same basic principle.
The point is that if scientists want to play politics, then they ought to actually play politics—no half measures. It doesn’t have to be done in a partisan way—a great candidate for Science PAC support would be someone in the mold of Republican physicist Vern Ehlers—but it certainly should be done in an uncompromising and unapologetic one.
At the same time, it seems to me that for the vast majority of scientists, who will of course never hold office, we need something else entirely. These researchers require training in the language of politics, its norms and expectations, so that when they do have run-ins with elected representatives—for instance, when they are called in to brief or to testify—they don’t end up poorly equipped to communicate. I already know that scientists who go through the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s congressional fellowship program learn the realities of talking with mega-busy elected officials, but that’s because they actually work in Congressional offices. Alas, only a few dozen scientists a year have this opportunity.
To broaden scientists’ familiarity with (and realism about) politics, then, the best option would seem to be providing the option of graduate level training in communication and political skills—a curriculum designed to help a scientist, who must brief an elected representative, learn how to quickly and succinctly deliver the central message. When talking to Congress, pretty much the worst thing you can do is lose everyone in charts, graphs, and uncertainties; but without the right kind of training, the inclination of many scientists could be to do just that.
None of which is to say we don’t need to revive the Office of Technology Assessment—going all the way back to 2003, I have been making very this argument in print. But at the same time, it’s not the only answer; we must simultaneously come up with many other creative ways of reconnecting the two cultures of science and politics.
Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.
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