Dozens of scientific societies and universities and several recent reports have implored the incoming president to act swiftly to appoint his science adviser and to elevate the position to the level that it had prior to the Bush administration.
President-elect Barack Obama appears to have heeded that advice by promising to select his science adviser “quickly,” so that the individual can “participate in early critical decisions and to signal the importance of science, technology, and innovation to the entire array of domestic and international policy goals.” Obama has also pledged to restore to the position the title of assistant to the president that supposedly confers direct access to the president.
In a 31 October letter to Obama and John McCain, 178 business, educational, and scientific organizations, including the American Institute of Physics, publisher of Physics Today, urged the incoming president to have a science adviser onboard by inauguration day. The group further calls for the adviser to have cabinet-level ranking.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association of American Universities, which organized the letter campaign, are anxious to avoid a repeat of 2001, when President Bush waited until late June to nominate his science adviser, John Marburger. Senate confirmation of Marburger’s appointment as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy didn’t occur until October of that year, well after Bush had announced his positions on two major scientific issues: embryonic stem cell research and climate change.
Reports issued by the Center for the Study of the Presidency (CSP) and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars say that the selection process for a science adviser should already be under way.
Elevated stature
This is not the first time the scientific community has sought greater stature for scientific advising in the White House hierarchy. President Bush’s deletion of the “assistant to the president” label from the title bestowed upon Marburger met with chagrin among science groups. Lacking the title, Marburger was said to have been denied the purportedly unfettered access granted to other assistants to the president, who advised on issues that included the budget, national security, the economy, and even drug-control policy. The Wilson Center and CSP papers, and a third report issued over the summer by the National Academy of Sciences, lament Marburger’s lack of cabinet rank, a privilege that has been extended to the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the US trade representative.
Science-policy wonks also have devoted much handwringing to the Bush administration’s decision to evict the science adviser’s office from the White House complex into leased office space a block down Pennsylvania Avenue. Never mind that the new quarters are an upgrade from the dingy offices that previous science advisers and their staffs had occupied on the top floor of the Old Executive Office Building (OEOB). Moving the science adviser and his top lieutenants back into the White House compound is imperative “to enable them to interact readily with other senior White House officials,” says the Wilson Center report. The NAS study concurs.
Marburger responds
Nonsense, says Marburger. “None of these questions is particularly relevant to science policymaking or the effectiveness of the office,” he says. “My conversations with former science advisers suggest that they had no more influence on administration behavior than my OSTP colleagues and I do.” With regard to relations between OSTP and OMB, he says, “they seem to have been much better” than under previous presidents.
Marburger points to a recent Nature column, written by former House Science Committee staff director David Goldston, as being reflective of his own views on the issue. Goldston asks rhetorically whether anyone could cite a single science-policy decision that was different because Marburger did not hold the assistant to the president title. “The prominence given to the recommendation about a title speaks volumes about the scientific community’s hypersensitivity to perceived slights and its excessive insecurity about its stature. But it says almost nothing about governance,” Goldston wrote.
Neal Lane, Marburger’s predecessor under Clinton, says he can understand why observers outside the White House might consider job titles and office location to be petty concerns. But the ramifications of both are more than symbolic, he says. The title “sends a signal to everybody in the White House that you have a direct line to the president, and that you have the ability to meet with him if you need to.” Those without the title are expected to communicate through their superiors to the president, he explains.
John Gibbons, Clinton’s first science adviser, says the title gave him authority to summon cabinet-level officials to meetings, clout that he used when putting together a multiagency collaboration with automakers to develop high-mileage, low-emissions concept cars. The title also helped him obtain the concurrence of multiple agencies to declassify the global positioning system.
Some science advisers have enjoyed access to the president that went well beyond what a title could bestow. D. Allan Bromley, who advised the elder George Bush, was a Bush family friend. Frank Press, science adviser to President Jimmy Carter, says he was among 50 people who had permission to call the president directly without first getting an okay from the chief of staff. In his 2007 book Beyond the White House: Waging Peace, Fighting Disease, Building Hope, Carter recounts how he was awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call from Press, who was meeting with China’s paramount leader premier Deng Xiaoping on a US proposal for a small number of Chinese students to attend US universities. When Deng asked to increase the number of students to 500, Press recalls, he felt that he should check with the boss first. The groggy president told him to tell the Chinese leader to send as many students as he wanted to.
Conflicting roles?
Goldston speculates in his column that the Bush administration may have withheld the assistant to the president title in order to ensure that Congress, to whom Marburger is accountable in his dual role as OSTP director, couldn’t compel him to provide details of the White House decision-making process. Goldston points to an episode a few years ago in which the co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) was nearly prevented from testifying before the House Science Committee because he was considered to be a confidential adviser to the president.
Press and Lane agree that the dual role of the adviser theoretically could have caused similar awkward situations with lawmakers, but they say such conflicts never arose for them. All three former advisers said the location of the science adviser’s office is important, though they differed somewhat as to why. Press, who says he had a “prized” corner office in the OEOB, says location was a largely symbolic indicator of importance. Gibbons, who sacrificed that corner office to consolidate the entire OSTP staff into one building, agrees that proximity to the West Wing sent a signal of OSTP’s importance. “I found that where you sit is where you stand,” he says. For Lane, proximity was important because “a lot happens in real time” at the White House, where meetings are often called on a moment’s notice.
