[309] in libertarians
Pork in the sciences...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jeff Schachter)
Thu Oct 13 12:23:33 1994
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 1994 12:21:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jeff Schachter <SCHACHTER@CMOD2.PFC.MIT.EDU>
To: libertarians@MIT.EDU, objectivism@MIT.EDU
Cc: SCHACHTER@CMOD2.PFC.MIT.EDU
A politican crusading against pork? What will they think of next...
(Note in particular the part I marked with *)
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From: SMTP%"fyi@aip.org"
Date: 12-OCT-1994 16:09:31
Description: FYI #149 - Earmarking
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 94 13:34:31 EDT
From: fyi@aip.org (AIP listserver)
Message-Id: <9410121734.AA06427@aip.org>
To: fyi-mailing@aip.org
Subject: FYI #149 - Earmarking
Brown Continues Series of Hearings on Earmarking
FYI No. 149, October 12, 1994
House science committee chairman George Brown (D-CA) continued his
fight against academic earmarking with two more in a series of
hearings. On September 22, the committee heard from
representatives of institutions receiving earmarked funds in the FY
1992 DOD appropriations bill; on October 6 Deputy Secretary of
Defense John Deutch and DOE officials testified that while they
opposed earmarking, they attempted to follow "congressional
intent."
Earmarking occurs when a Member of Congress designates a specific
project or institution for funding, circumventing a competitive,
peer-reviewed funding process. The university witnesses concurred
with Brown when he stated that "earmarking is not necessarily a
dirty word;" it is due in part to "the failure of Congress
to...establish a process for funding academic infrastructure."
Vociferously defending the practice, Boston University president
John Silber said that "if there was a program through which we
could find funding for [research] infrastructure," the university
would do so, but in the absence of such a program, "either the
country stagnates or we do what we need to do." Sister Mary Reap
of Marywood College (PA), which received money to study military
family life and women's issues, remarked that there were no
peer-review funds available for research on those issues. Billy
Covington of Sam Houston State University (TX) explained that his
institution had proposed interdisciplinary environmental studies at
a time when "funding agencies weren't geared for interdisciplinary
programs."
Silber called earmarking and peer-review "apples and oranges:"
while peer-review has always been the accepted way to competitively
select investigators for individual research grants, there is no
comparable program for infrastructure. "If Congress wants to put
a blind eye to the facilities problem" and do nothing to authorize
such a program, he said, institutions will find another way to get
facilities funding.
* Brown began the October 6 hearing by stating that "the whole
* [earmarking] process is basically immoral and runs contrary to the
* principles on which this country is based." As an example he noted
that the majority of academic earmarks in the annual DOD bills go
to the 12th congressional district of Pennsylvania, for which the
representative is John Murtha, chairman of the House Appropriations
Subcommittee on Defense. Deutch maintained that earmarking is
primarily a congressional problem. Brown took Deutch to task for
DOD's not providing the House science committee with all requested
documents on the department's budget. He also took "slight
umbrage" at Deutch's effort to "put it all on Congress."
DOE officials testified that it was their policy to try to follow
any earmarks received in statutory (bill) or report language,
although they worked with the recipient institution to make the
grants as relevant to DOE's mission as possible. Brown commented
that DOE "is one of the most abused departments with respect to
earmarking... You've been a real patsy for Members of Congress who
want to do earmarks." When DOE chief financial officer Joseph
Vivona noted that academic earmarks within DOE had declined in the
past three years, Ranking Minority Member Robert Walker (R-PA)
acknowledged that it was "in large part due to the courage of
George Brown," who recognized that "earmarks were destroying the
science base of the country."
###############
Public Information Division
American Institute of Physics
Contact: Audrey T. Leath
fyi@aip.org
(301)209-3094
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