Congress is in charge of the federal budget. That is a
constitutional reality. However, since members of Congress are
elected and elections are, well, political, the federal budget
is a political artifact. And this is often bad news for science.
It all started with William Proxmire. I still run into people
now and then who extol Proxmire’s virtues when it comes to
making government more responsible, but they are not remembering
correctly. What Proxmire did was this: His staff would comb
through federally funded science project grants looking for
names of projects that could be made to look silly or wasteful,
regardless of the actual value of the project, and thus
circumvent the already in place process of grant review and
funding. He’d take these grant titles to the floor of the Senate
and make fun of the scientists. This was one of the first major
steps in the degradation of respect for science that now plague
us and that has become a clear and present danger for the health
of our society and our planet.  A